"In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school."

"Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won’t have the bodies we need to meet the payroll."

"Welcome to New York, pal — now go to jail."

"An Italian tourist spent his second night in the city behind bars after staff at an upscale East Side steakhouse called cops when he claimed he left his wallet at a friend’s place."

Graziano Graziussi, a 43-year-old lawyer from Naples, is a regular at Smith & Wollensky....

“I was going to leave my iPhone,” he said. “I suggested they bring a bus boy with me... It would have been an easy trip.”

One police veteran told the Daily News he wasn’t surprised to hear that the restaurant wouldn’t take the phone as collateral.

“How do they know that iPhone was his? It could have come from anywhere,” the cop said.

The restaurant is getting some horrible press, but I'm sure people rip off restaurants all the time with the old forgot-my-wallet routine. If you let the guy leave, 9 times out of 10, you never see him again. I made up that statistic for rhetorical purposes. What do you think the statistic is? How much money do you think restaurants lose every year? They'll have to compensate by charging more to the people who do pay. But now they're stuck with the bad PR, because they called the cops on a photogenic lawyer, which means: 1. Focused outrage, 2. Ability to contact and talk to the press, 3. Big newspaper willing to run the story.

***

Readers of this blog might be thinking: Smith & Wollensky, where were we just talking about Smith & Wollensky? Was it in "The Great Gatsby"? It sounds like the name of the place that's been around long enough to have figured in "Gatsby," which takes place in 1922, but it opened in 1977. It adopted an old-fashioned image way back then. It was founded by Alan Stillman, the man who invented T.G.I. Friday's.

According to Stillman, there was never a Mr. Smith or a Mr. Wollensky involved. He opened the Manhattan phone book twice and randomly pulled out two names, Smith and Wollensky. The announcements for the opening, however, carried the names Charlie Smith and Ralph Wollensky. Stillman later admitted that Charlie and Ralph were the names of his dogs.

What's the deal with Stillman and Friday's? T.G.I. Friday's started back in 1965. Stillman — Wikipedia says — was a "bachelor perfume salesman [who] lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women."

At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties, or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail-party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.

So he kind of invented the singles bar?

With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother, Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it T.G.I. Friday's after the expression "Thank God! It's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University....

Aw. I'm rooting for this guy, who made his mom happy, by facilitating a million fucks, some of which were his. Ah! Here's a whole interview with him, complete with photos:

NCR: Did your strategy work? Did you meet good-looking girls?

Stillman: Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me! I was lucky enough to do it for three years — he only did it to make a movie. Even today, the advantage of being the guy behind the bar is huge. Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it.

Ha ha. But, Althouse, get back to where you were going: that time we were talking about Smith & Wollensky on this blog. Yes. It was 9 days ago, and the story was about some job applicant who was presented in the press as a young guy who used what I called "the old honesty-modesty routine." Posting, I accepted the media cue that he was a gutsy, charming underdog, but — using Smith & Wollensky as my clue — I got suspicious in the comments:

A key line in the letter, as reprinted in the Daily Mail is: "I met you the summer before last at Smith & Wollensky's in New York when I was touring the east coast with my uncle, ***** ******"

Why put the name of your uncle in the letter unless it's intended to influence the hiring? Perhaps this person's seemingly refreshing attitude is just the cheeky confidence of a young person from a privileged background.

Would a guy working his way up from a working-class background ever write a letter like this?

Which guy most nearly won your heart?
	Graziano Graziussi
	Alan Stillman
	The guy that wrote the cover letter
pollcode.com free polls

Aggressive prosecution #2: Internet activist driven to suicide.

The Wall Street Journal delves into the prosecution of Aaron Swartz:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time....

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial....

He knew what he was doing was criminal, and he was a very intelligent man who chose to do it anyway and conceived of what he was doing as actively virtuous. Wouldn't a public trial serve his purposes in critiquing the laws he opposed and arguing for the liberation of the data files he tried to set free? (I'm picturing Swartz as a bit like those animal rights activists who steal into a mink farm and open all the cages. They believe that they are serving a call of morality higher than the interests embodied in the law they willingly violate.) It's civil disobedience, which — in classic form — demands that you take the law's punishment. That's part of the acted-out argument that the law is immoral.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," [his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman] said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

His crime was about making more information freely public, and yet he cringed at publicity about his own plight, even where his plight was something he invited into his life and believed in as an especially good thing to do. Why the shame? Why not expose yourself as a martyr to laws you oppose?

Swartz's girlfriend and family released a statement saying: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy.... It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Understandably, they want to infuse their loss with meaning. But did the prosecutors go wrong?

The Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office declined to comment Sunday, saying it wanted to respect the family's privacy. But in a news release from July 2011, when the charges in the case were announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar."...

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

But he knowingly and willingly committed numerous felonies, did he not? I'm not hearing the lawyer say that Swartz didn't do what the prosecutors said he did. The argument was that the law ought to be different. If you break the laws as a way to make that argument, how is the prosecutor supposed to respond? Your argument is to the public and to the legislators.

To say he didn't want to be a felon is to express a wish about the past. And it's a wish that wasn't even true. Swartz wanted to be a felon who eludes prosecution. Who gets that wish in a system of law? The intelligent, educated, nice-looking, good guy with lovely friends and family? The person who credibly threatens self-murder? The activist capable of articulating why the crime he committed should not be a crime? 

Aggressive prosecution #1: California businessman commercially growing medical marijuana.

Adam Nagourney, in the NYT, gives very sympathetic treatment to Matthew R. Davies — "a round-faced 34-year-old father of two young girls" with "graduate-level business skills" who "paid California sales tax and filed for state and local business permits" and got the advice of many lawyers as he set up an enterprise that plainly and overtly is a felony under federal law. Davies told the NYT:

“We thought, this is an industry in its infancy, it’s a heavy cash business, it’s basically being used by people who use it to cloak illegal activity. Nobody was doing it the right way. We thought we could make a model of how this should be done.”

Cloak illegal activity? It is illegal activity. Federal law is real. Haven't you heard?!

The right way? Cloaking is the right way when you're committing crimes. With your business education, somehow you were all: Hey, what a smart idea I have — being completely out in the open about breaking the law. Why hasn't anybody else thought of this?

And I love the way the NYT suddenly has a pro-business orientation. Davies deserves special grace under the law because he's using the structure of business and because he's excited about making big profits! Compare that to all the articles anguishing over Citizens United and how terrible it is to respect free speech rights when the speech comes from a place that is structured as a business.

“Mr. Davies was not a seriously ill user of marijuana nor was he a medical caregiver — he was the major player in a very significant commercial operation that sought to make large profits from the cultivation and sale of marijuana,” [said a letter from United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, Benjamin B. Wagner, a 2009 Obama appointee.] Mr. Wagner said that prosecuting such people “remains a core priority of the department.”...

“It’s mind-boggling that there were hundreds of attorneys advising their clients that it was O.K. to do this, only to be bushwhacked by a federal system that most people in California are not even paying attention to,” said William J. Portanova, a former federal drug prosecutor and a lawyer for one of Mr. Davies’s co-defendants. “It’s tragic.”

Yes, and it is mind-boggling that those who argue for the broad interpretation of federal power and who scoff at the idea of the 10th Amendment and reserving powers to the state somehow can't grasp the meaning of their general propositions when they encounter an issue where they prefer the state policy to the federal policy. The NYT and other drivers of elite opinion ought to have to face up to the reality of what their legal propositions entail.

And quite aside from the problem of the allocation of power at the federal and the state levels, how about some consistency about equal justice under the law? Let the law — as written — apply the same way to everyone, whether they have a round face and 2 young daughters or not, whether they've gone to grad school or not, whether they have big visions of massive profits or they are living hand to mouth. If the law is wrong, change the law — for everybody. Don't cry over the people you think are nice — like David Gregory and Aaron Swartz. Nonphotogenic and low-class people deserve equal treatment, and cutting breaks for the ones who pull your heart strings is not justice.

"The attorney who said he would sue the state of Connecticut for $100 million after the Newtown school shooting is withdrawing his potential lawsuit..."

"... at least for now."

Irving Pinsky, who said Saturday he was filing the suit as a way to improve school safety, told the Connecticut Post that he’s received new information about security at Sandy Hook Elementary School and wants to review it....

"We all know its going to happen again," Pinsky said last week. "Society has to take action."

Oh, Irving. Lawyers and their motives. What have you added to our thinking on the subject?

Prof. Bainbridge rails against the "a left-liberal political agenda" of law school clinics.

He's on the appointments committee at his school and says "most of the clinical professors whose work we have reviewed this semester have pursued a model of inculcating left-liberal political values in students and deploying those students to advance left-liberal political causes."

Only most? Not all? Who were the ones who didn't? What are the forces that cause the applicants for this type of legal academic work to lean left? The "regular" professors tend to lean left as well, so it's only a question of degree, but clinical lawprof work tends to pay a lot less and to involve less pleasurable tasks than classic lawprof work.

Bainbridge's law school is UCLA. Here's a list of their clinics, including some that don't seem too lefty, like the Business Deals Clinic and Mergers & Acquisitions. But, realistically, you can see why someone with expertise practicing law in business deals mergers & acquisitions — the kind that would impress a law school appointments committee — has an incentive to stay in practice and not to shift into clinical teaching. The standard lawprof job has its obvious rewards, but why clinical teaching?

The system is founded on the reward the accrues to those with the left-liberal political agenda that Bainbridge rails against. It's baked into the cake.

Did Chief Justice John Roberts "lose his cool"?

I keep reading about this incident, invariably with the focus on the Chief's demeanor, causing me to suspect that the press is covering for the Obama administration again:

The chief justice accused the solicitor general’s office of being less than candid, by suggesting (as he read the government’s brief) that the secretary of labor in the Bush administration had changed her mind “upon further reflection” when that was not the reason at all. Instead, he corrected, it was “a new secretary now under a new administration” who had done so.

The chief justice scolded, “Don’t say the secretary is now of the view. It’s not the same person. You cite the prior secretary by name, and then you say, the secretary is now of the view. I found that a little disingenuous.”

You can listen to the interchange here, beginning at 29:00. Roberts sharply criticizes the government's lawyer, Joseph R. Palmore, for something that — it seems rather obvious — deserves criticism. I don't hear Roberts becoming inappropriately emotional, which is what "losing his cool" means.

Now, if you want to say Roberts is a hypocrite because his writing is equally disingenuous or worse, that's another matter. It's what Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic is doing in an item titled "The Nerve of John Roberts":

A little disingenuous. This from a judge who disappeared the scope of the Commerce Clause in the Affordable Care Act case.

Disappeared the scope? That's Cohen's way of referring to the identification of some limit on the scope of the commerce power, so that it didn't reach a private citizen's failure to purchase insurance. Congress has power under the Commerce Clause to regulate nearly everything else, which to Cohen's eye is no power at all. Unless it's everything, it's nothing. Disappeared!

This from a judge who gutted decades of First Amendment precedent in the Citizens United case after reaching out, unilaterally, to expand the scope of that campaign finance case.....

Yes, yes, roll out your list of Supreme Court decisions you wish went the other way. That's not in the same category as deceptively stating the facts of a case, which is simply not acceptable in lawyers' briefs. The Solicitor General's office disserved us. The Chief Justice called the lawyer on a deception and — with restraint — said he "found it a little disingenuous."

What I find disingenuous is the criticism of the Chief Justice. And after all he did for you upholding Obamacare! (He used the tax power instead of the commerce power).

But no thanks will be forthcoming. Pressure must be kept up. This is a big term for the Supreme Court — gay marriage (probably), affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act — and Roberts's vote may be required to reach what the media know are the right results. Roberts needs to know that any love for him is purely contingent. He's being watched.

"What else will these thousands of students who have been discouraged from attending law school do?"

"Where will they find a more fulfilling career? They’re not all going to be doctors or investment bankers, nor should they. Looking purely at the economics, in 2011, the median starting salary for practicing lawyers was $61,500; the mean salary for all practicing lawyers was $130,490, compared with $176,550 for corporate chief executives, $189,210 for internists and $79,300 for architects. This average includes many lawyers who graduated into really bad job markets. And the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports projected growth in lawyers’ jobs from 2010 to 2020 at 10 percent, 'about as fast as the average for all occupations.'"

A law dean — Lawrence E. Mitchell of Case Western — argues that "Law School Is Worth the Money"... because what else are you going to do with the money you don't have your life?

"The California man behind an anti-Muslim film that led to violence in many parts of the Middle East was sentenced Wednesday to a year in federal prison..."

"... for probation violations in an unrelated matter, then issued a provocative statement through his attorney."

The statement, delivered through his lawyer was: "President Obama may have gotten Osama bin Laden, but he didn't kill the ideology." The lawyer professed not to understand the statement. That is, the man had a lawyer, and the lawyer held him at a distance. How hard is it to understand the statement? But it's dangerous to have such a statement sticking to you, and the lawyer acted accordingly.

"You have to be a terrible monster to write."

"Someone might have told you something they shouldn’t have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can’t do it then writing isn’t for you. You’ve no right to be here. If there is any way I can help you get into law school then I will. Your morality will be more useful in a courtroom."

Professor Jacobson drops a "bombshell" on Elizabeth Warren.

And I'm only quoting the word "bombshell" because it's from someone who's been defending Warren from Jacobson's attack: "With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak."

"If you don't think becoming a lawyer is the correct life choice for anyone ever, you have probably snorted, laughed..."

"... and said the following things to a lawyer-in-training: that I will become a professional liar, that I will have to sleep my way into a partnership or a good job or a higher salary because I am a woman, that I will have to wear suits 24/7, that my life won't really be like the show Suits even though I pray to the Jew god for that daily (but who doesn't want to work with Harvey Specter?!!), that I will hate my life and become an alcoholic and/or kill myself one day, and that I will make six-figures or be forced to work as volunteer in public interest law."

Some scribbling I read at XOJane because Above the Law said: "A tipster writes: 'PLEASE address this trash pile of an article… I’m begging you.' Well, here you go."

Grand gesticulations over things small and large.

At Drudge just now now (click to enlarge):



In the right column, we've got Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day swearing and gesticulating over his show time getting cut down to 1 minute.

In the middle column, it's Senate candidate/lawprof Elizabeth Warren:

DOES ELIZABETH WARREN HAVE A LAW LICENSE PROBLEM?

If you keep scrolling, beyond my screen grab, there's also:

... On defensive again over heritage claim

And a picture of a stink bug...



... "Feds brace for historic stink bug outbreak..."

How's your optimismalso? (Is that like machismo?)

So I got distracted reading Charles Lane's book review in the Washington Post of Brian Z. Tamanaha's "Failing Law Schools." It begins like this:

In “Broadway Danny Rose,” Woody Allen plays a theatrical agent forever looking on the bright side of his clients’ sorry careers. Don’t worry, he tells a washed-up lounge singer, “you’re the kinda guy that will always make a beautiful dollar in this business.”

For the past generation or so, Danny Rose’s optimismalso applied to anyone with a law degree. Lawyering might be disappointingly tedious, but at least it was remunerative enough to justify investing thousands of dollars in tuition....

Optimismalso? Presumably, that's pronounced op-TEASE-mall-so op-ti-MEESE-mal-so. How's you optimismalso as you approach the fall semester?

Optimismalso, n.

Etymology: <classical Latin optimus best  + -ismo -ism suffix.

The quality of being showily optimistic; pollyannaishness; strutting over-confidence.

The lawyer's optimismalso entertained the jurors, who proceeded to convict his obviously guilty client.

The admissions committee laughed at the unnecessary optimismalso in the personal statement from the applicant with LSAT score 2 points above the target median.

At 1L orientation, the new students worried about the dean's display of optimismalso.

The opposite of optimismalso is peptobismolso.

"Did you hear the one about prosecutors going on strike? No? Me either, until now."

"A county DA’s office in the San Francisco suburbs announced this week they are considering striking to protest new, unpopular labor contract."

"Sometimes attorneys are desperate to find a way out of the legal profession."

"Sometimes that desperation will lead them down a strange road to an entirely new career — and not just a new career, but a new way of life."

ADDED: From the comments at the link: "That Boy George, come-hither look seals the deal."

"Wearing Brave Face, Obama Braces for Health Care Ruling."

NYT headline. Article by Jodi Kantor:

Former advisers are emphasizing the many aspects of the bill that are not connected to the mandate, like the subsidies to buy insurance. Some aides even argue privately that losing the mandate could be a political boon, because it would rob Republicans of their core complaint against the law.

Yeah, that's what I've been saying. Plus, Obama would get a new issue: The Supreme Court has too many conservative activists and needs re-balancing; a Democrat should make the next appointment(s). And if the decision goes the other way, Romney will have the corresponding arguments: 1. We need a President who will sign the repeal of Obamacare, and 2. The Supreme Court has too many liberals who don't respect the Constitution and we need a conservative President to re-balance it.

Back to Kantor:

Before he became president, critics said that Mr. Obama’s greatest achievement was his own rise, that he played it safe — sometimes voting “present” in the Illinois State Senate — rather than taking risks for what he really believed....

In the White House, many of his top advisers, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, counseled Mr. Obama against a sweeping health care overhaul. By summer 2009, with the country still stunned by economic crisis and Republicans falsely raising the specter of death panels, some aides practically begged the president to scale back, take interim steps and move on to other issues.

Mr. Obama did not relent...

As the brutal fight continued, the president sacrificed more and more in its name: an overhaul of energy and environmental laws, greater focus on economic issues, some of his own popularity and that of House Democrats, who eventually lost their hard-won majority....

Well, if he loses the Supreme Court case, he's got to pick himself up and look like he's ready to keep fighting. Both candidates will say they're the one to redo health care reform, and Obama is going to need to say he's the one we ought to trust. He can't be a sadsack about how hard he worked and now it's all lost. He can't be all: I could have listened to Rahm and Joe... I could have coasted a voted 'present'...

As he awaits the decision, Mr. Obama has no more knowledge of or influence on it than any of the other lawyers handicapping the odds in Washington bars and boardrooms.
The former law professor turned president is scathing about the argument that the mandate violates the Constitution, saying it has no merit whatsoever. 

Yeah, yeah, that is meaningless to me. (And I'm a law professor.) It's not that he unshakably knows the real constitutional law answer because he's a scholar. He's a partisan who's taken a position and he's saying things about the law in the advocate mode. Scathing... no merit whatsoever... That's just banal lawyer talk. It's a difficult question, and it can be answered, with eloquence and internal coherence, either way.

Have you ever noticed that I — a law professor, not a policy partisan — have never opined on the constitutionality of Obamacare. Glenn Loury pushed me to give an answer on Bloggingheads, and here's how I responded:



The commenters over there are so hostile to to me that one actually wishes that I would "go HIV positive or Full Metal Influenza." Challenged, he offers a longer list of diseases. A more normal person writes: "I can't believe what I'm hearing. Glenn asked Ann whether she thinks the Affordable Health Care Act is constitutional and she basically offers no opinion. She hasn't even blogged on the issue! Isn't she suppose to be a constitutional law professor?" The answer is yes, and that's precisely the point. I study the Court. I don't take the lawyer role and perform the theater of acting like there's a true answer and I know it. The Court will say what the law is. I'm about having a discussion of the topic.

ADDED: If I had to be a judge, I could do it. I can say without bullshitting what judicial nominees always say at the confirmation hearings: I can't tell you what I'd decide until I'm in the real situation of having responsibility for deciding a case. They might be bullshitting, but it's honestly the way I feel. I have too much respect for the process to register a vote for one side or the other in a difficult case. That said, some cases are easy. This one is not.

After his lawyer said he'd "probably die of a heart attack" if he were a acquitted...

... Jerry Sandusky is convicted on 45 counts of child sex abuse.

"The problem is that the cost of a law degree is now vastly out of proportion to the economic opportunities obtained by the majority of graduates."

Writes lawprof Brian Z. Tamanaha, in a NYT op-ed:

... How did we get into this mess? And how do we get out?...

First, consider the loan system....

Then there’s the problem of the American Bar Association-imposed accreditation standards.... [B]y imposing a “one size fits all” template, these standards ensure that there is little differentiation among law schools — no lower-cost options and no range of choices comparable to what exists at the undergraduate level among community colleges, teaching colleges and research universities.

One solution to this problem is to strip away the accreditation requirements that mandate expenditures to support faculty scholarship — for example, deleting the requirement that the bulk of professors be in tenure-track positions, removing limits on teaching loads, not requiring paid research leaves for professors, not requiring substantial library collections and so forth....  Law students would then be able to choose the type of legal education they desired and could afford.

Tamanaha has a book: "Failing Law Schools."

"Yeah, that’s just who I want helping me out with my legal problems. A guy who technically isn’t even a lawyer yet..."

"... and has absolutely no experience. Experts believe there has been a huge disconnect between the learnings in the classroom and what goes on after passing the bar."

Says The Weakonomics blogger who just had to find the right picture to illustrate his musings.

(Man, I have been working on that Federal Courts take-home exam, with my legal pad, my Pelikan fountain pen, my "Annie Hall" glasses, my self-cut bangs, and my lactating breasts since 1981!)