A helping hand
11/5/12
By Peter Rudegeair
From matching employees' charitable donations to hosting pro
bono seminars on how to file a claim, law firms began rolling
out their superstorm Sandy relief efforts on Monday.
Morrison & Foerster's charitable foundation said in a press
release that it would commit $100,000 to Sandy relief, with a
$50,000 donation to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City
and another $50,000 to the United Way Hurricane Sandy Recovery
Fund. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison said it would
match donations employees made to the American Red Cross's
Disaster Relief Fund up to a cumulative $250,000, according to a
press release. White & Case will tally up employees' donations
to any organization working on Sandy relief and match the
contributions in a donation split equally between the American
Red Cross and the Salvation Army, according to Jo Maitland
Weiss, head of social responsibility for the firm. White & Case
attorneys will also host training for lawyers working with the
Legal Aid Society to help New Yorkers hit by Sandy with legal
matters like filing a FEMA claim.
Party restaurant sued
11/5/12
By Dan Brillman
The management of restaurant chain Señor Frog's faces a
lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for
alleged sexual harassment of its employees, the Wall Street
Journal reports. The complaint, filed in Honolulu federal court,
claims that the harassment "occurred on a daily basis" and
involved managers demanding sex from female employees, groping
them and making offensive comments.
"This was a company that seemed to disregard the rights of
the women who worked there," Amrita Mallik, a senior attorney
for the commission told the Journal. The suit claims that the
behavior went all the way to the top, and that employees were
told to sleep with executives, including CEO David Krouham.
Altres, Inc, hired to handle the Hawaii restaurant's payroll
and administrative tasks, is also named as a defendant. The suit
says that Altres was responsible for "'employment-related laws'
as (applied) to Workforce Employees," and that the company
"allowed harassment to continue unchecked," despite at least
four complaints. Plaintiffs seek punitive and compensatory
damages, policy changes and staff training.
Senor Frog's is a Mexican chain of alcohol-fueled party
restaurants usually found at resorts that expanded to the United
States in 2005. That same year, Krouham let Forbes in on his
company philosophy: "You go to Señor Frog's when you're on
vacation, if you want to get crazy and nobody knows you."
Heads-up for ex-sovereigns
11/5/12
By Suhrith Parthasarathy
A federal appeals court has denied immunity to a former
prime minister of Somalia who has been sued under the Alien Tort
Statute for alleged crimes committed under regime, reports The Volokh Conspiracy.
Mohamed Ali Samantar, Somali prime minister from 1987 to
1990, fled his homeland in 1991 and settled in the United
States in 1997. In 2004, a group of Somalis living in the United
States filed a civil lawsuit against Samantar in district court
in Virginia. The case has bounced around since then, with the
district court dismissing the case on grounds that Samantar was
entitled to immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act,
the 4th Circuit holding the act did not apply to foreign
officials and the U.S. Supreme Court remanding the case to
district court on grounds that Samantar may be entitled to
immunity under federal common law.
In round two, Samantar argued that he was entitled to
head-of-state immunity since he was the prime minister when some
of the alleged wrongdoing took place, and that his actions were
taken in the course of "official duties". On Nov. 2 the 4th
Circuit weighed in again, writes William S. Dodge in Opinio Juris, and this time it held that foreign officials are not
entitled to immunity for actions in the course of "official
duties" if there is a violation of the so-called jus cogens
norms (serious violations of international law, which include
acts of torture).
Tale of two law degrees
11/5/12
By Peter Rudegeair
The new $77,000-a-year JD program at the law school at the
University of California, Irvine, and a $52,750-a-year
"hyper-practical" degree from the University of the District of
Columbia that trains students for public service law represent
two very different approaches to legal education in the United
States, according to a feature in The Washington Post Magazine.
UC Irvine, the second-most-expensive law school in the
country after UC Berkeley, says it wants its grads to be "at the
highest level of the profession," in the words of Dean Erwin
Chemerinsky. The University of the District of Columbia, by
contrast, doesn't "invite people to come here suggesting (they
will) get jobs in big firms," according to Dean Shelley
Broderick, but instead offers a no-frills program for students
who know they want to work exclusively in public interest law.
What the schools have in common: trying to avoid the
middle-of-the-road approach that burdens graduates with excess
debt but doesn't secure full-time work. The phenomenon has been
written about extensively but is underscored again by data from
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The agency had forecast
that 73,600 new lawyer positions would be created between 2010
and 2020, but by 2012 already 132,757 law school graduates had
hit the job market. Twenty percent of George Washington
University's 2011 law school grads, for example, are employed as
lawyers only because GWU pays them $15 an hour to do volunteer
work. The average debt of a GWU graduate is $127,360. "It is
hard to describe the misery we are generating," a University of
Colorado Law School professor told the Post. "It is not
defensible to charge people $200,000 for a degree which is worse
than worthless. We have a systemic catastrophe on our hands."
Glamour girl
11/5/12
By Peter Rudegeair
Flip through the pages in this month's Glamour, stop just
before you hit the spread of covergirl Selena Gomez, and you'll
find an appreciation of...Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg.
How's that? Well, Ginsberg has been selected by the magazine
as one of Glamour's Women of the Year in 2012, and its Lifetime
Achievement Winner. The glossy recalls some of Ginsburg's early
tribulations, from an episode where an eminent male justice
declined to hire her because she was a woman to the time she had
to hide her second pregnancy to avoid discrimination in the
workplace. "When I graduated from law school in 1959," Ginsburg
told Glamour, "there were no antidiscrimination laws. Employers
were up-front that they did not want a woman."
Throughout her career, Ginsburg worked hard to dismantle
that social order, says Glamour, from her days as a trial
lawyer, where argued in favor of equal rights for women with
regards to military housing, Social Security death benefits, the
drinking age and jury service through her years as a Supreme
Court Justice. Justice Elena Kagan summed up Ginsburg's
accomplishments for the magazine this way: "More than any other
person, she can take credit for making the law of this country
work for women. She is a transformational figureand for me, an
inspiration."
Summary Judgments for November 2
Summary Judgments for November 1
Summary Judgments for October 31
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