Define 'in-state'

11/13/12

By Caitlin Tremblay

The University of North Carolina system is being sued over how to define "in-state resident" and who qualifies for cheap in-state tuition.

U.S. Army vet Hayleigh Perez, who was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, before being deployed to Iraq, has filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming she should be treated as an in-state student, reports the Huffington Post.

While living in Fort Bragg, Perez says she kept an apartment there and, after a 15-month tour in Iraq, returned to the area. She and her new husband bought a house in nearby Raeford. She was relocated to Texas in 2009, but the couple continued to pay North Carolina property taxes, she says.

After returning to North Carolina in December 2011, Perez decided to pursue a master's degree. She was accepted at two UNC schools, Fayetteville State University (which considered her an in-state student) and UNC-Pembroke (which did not). Perez preferred Pembroke's classes and schedules, but the GI Bill wouldn't cover the extra $4,603.50 per semester that the school would have charged her. Pembroke wouldn't budge, and now Perez has sued.

The News Observer tried to tackle the question of why one school would consider Perez in-state and the other wouldn't, but even the UNC representative couldn't give a solid answer. The newspaper points out that the state's general statutes don't say anything about post-9/11 veterans.

It's the economy, stupid

11/13/12

By Erin Geiger Smith

Over the last year, there's been a lot of news about law schools being sued for fudging their employment numbers by graduates having trouble finding, well, employment. Yesterday, Joe Palazzolo at the Law Blog provided an update on the fate of two such lawsuits -- a Chicago judge spiked them.

Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Mikva threw out cases filed against the John Marshall Law School and Chicago-Kent College of Law, issuing just a one-page order. In court, however, she was a little more loquacious, according to lawyers who passed the info on to the law blog. Mikva said she followed the reasoning of her colleague Judge Neil Cohen, who rejected similar suits in September. Cohen found that it wasn't the law schools' fault that their alums joined the work force at the height of a recession that "seriously affected employment in the legal profession."

The dismissals confirm what several experts told Reuters in February. In order for the suits to succeed, plaintiffs faced a very high bar, said Brian Leiter, a professor at University of Chicago College of Law. Graduates would most likely have to prove, for example, that they wouldn't have gone to law school at all if it weren't for the fudged data. What's more, their battle for class certification would be an uphill one because individual questions, not common ones, would be central to such cases.

But University of California at Berkeley's Mark Gergen said some of the claims might have merit if plaintiffs could prove the schools posted employment numbers they knew to be wrong or misleading. Those sorts of questions could come into play in a suit filed against San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Last month, a former career-services employee said she was told to mark certain graduates as employed, even if they no longer were.

Defending the Electoral College

11/13/12

By Suhrith Parthasarathy

Critics of the Electoral College, take note: 7th Circuit Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner has little patience for your arguments.

In the run-up to the presidential election, and in the days since then, some pundits have been engaging in the quadrennial exercise of Electoral College bashing. Among other sins, the college violates the "one man, one vote" principle established in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims, opponents say.

While Posner acknowledges that the Electoral College might not be the most democratic institution, he argues in Slate that it brings a degree of certainty to the process. If elections were to be determined by the popular vote only, Posner writes, elections would be won and lost by such small margins that lawyers would have to oversee vote recounts in state after state. The "result would be debilitating uncertainty, delay, and conflict," he says. The other prime reason the judge gives for keeping the Electoral College is that we avoid "run-off elections." Even if no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast, the system ensures that there's a winner, he says.

Bye-bye, BlackBerry

11/13/12

By Erin Geiger Smith

Remember when law firms gave you one choice for your mobile emailing device, and that choice was a BlackBerry?

While it might seem like that's still true, things are changing. Nearly 90 percent of AmLaw 200 firms surveyed said they expect to see fewer BlackBerry users in the next 12 months, according to a new technology survey by The American Lawyer. At Williams Mullen, for example, the number of BlackBerry users in the past few years has dropped from 500 to 40, according to the firm's chief information officer. Instead, firms increasingly are shifting to iPhones or Android phones.

The tech shifts also applies to computers and tablets: A quarter of respondents said they plan to issue attorneys with both a desktop and a laptop on their next round of technology updates, and 12 percent will issue a laptop and a tablet.

In all, 83 chief technology officers or other similarly titled tech types participated in the survey, which also checked in on the salaries of IT personnel. Thirty-six percent of the CIOs said they made between $300,000 and $399,999; in a similar survey conducted last year, only a quarter of CIOs reported earning salaries that high.

You've got mail, and they know

11/13/12

By Dan Brillman

The affair that caused CIA Director General David Petraeus to resign has been front-page news for days. The latest development: a series of reportedly harassing emails that caused the FBI to follow a trail to the general and his alleged mistress (and biographer), Paula Broadwell.

No doubt there are many more layers to the affair still to be revealed, but let's focus on a particular legal one: How much leeway does the federal government have in looking through private emails? More than you think, ABC News reports.

The Stored Communications Act allows a "government entity" to access personal email accounts with only a court order or subpoena if the message is older than 180 days. Emails newer than that can be obtained with a warrant, for which probable cause is necessary (government emails are a different story, but as Wired reports, both the alleged harassment and sexually explicit emails were found on anonymous Gmail accounts).

It's unknown whether Petraeus waived his right to private emails when he assumed command of the CIA, something which ABC says is sometimes done when taking on high-security positions.

Catherine Crump of the American Civil Liberties Union told ABC that until all the details of the investigation are revealed, it's difficult to determine how legal the email perusing was. But she was quick to point out another scary truth. "If there is a lesson here, it is about how incredibly difficult it is for anyone to do anything anonymously," she said.

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