Archive for the ‘Legal Profession’ Category
Yolanda Young, “What Eric Holder’s Tenure at Covington & Burling Says About Blacks and BigLaw”
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009Blaw Review at “On Being A Black Lawyer”
Monday, January 19th, 2009The Murders of Mexican Lawyers Linked to Murders of Women?
Monday, January 12th, 2009Two unidentified gunmen executed Mario Escobedo Salazar and his son Edgar Escobedo Anaya, also a lawyer, in their Juarez office on Tuesday, January 6.
The double homicide comes nearly seven years after Chihuahua State Judicial Police killed Escobedo Salazar’s other son, Mario Escobedo Anaya, during a chase. The police originally stated that Mario Escobedo Anaya died when his vehicle crashed during the chase. It was later revealed that he died of a gunshot wound to the head fired by state police.
Prior to Mario Escobedo Anaya’s 2002 execution, he, his father, and a third lawyer, the late Sergio Dante Almaraz Mora, represented the two Juarez public transportation bus drivers accused of murdering eight women whose bodies were found dumped in an area of Juarez known as “the Cotton Field.” Escobedo Salazar’s recent execution means that the entire defense team is now dead; all were executed. One of the bus drivers also died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. …
… Another Defense Lawyer Executed
In December 2005, Dante Almaraz wrote a letter to the editor of El Norte, accusing former Chihuahua governor Patricio Martinez’s appointments to the state attorney general’s office of trying to destroy his professional reputation, and, more alarmingly, of forming groups “so scary that they even assassinate their own commanders.” Almaraz told El Norte and other local media that he had received threats due to his defense of the two bus drivers.
The threats against Almaraz where so severe and credible that in 2003 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended that the local government provide him with protection and guards. The government provided the recommended protection, but did not find it necessary to assign bodyguards to Almaraz permanently.
Even though Almaraz’s surviving client was exonerated in July 2005, the lawyer refused to allow the injustice to go quietly into the dark. In October 2005, Almaraz appeared in a French documentary about the Juarez femicides, where he stated: “I am convinced that these young ladies were murdered by people involved in drug trafficking, with connections to the mafias, but tolerated by the state government. I place the terrible responsibility on the shoulders of the President of the Republic [at that time Vicente Fox] and the ex-governor [of Chihuahua] Patricio Martinez. They know perfectly well who the people are who committed the murders.”
On January 25, 2006, multiple unidentified armed gunmen executed Almaraz while he waited in his truck at a traffic light in downtown Juarez.
Read the full post here.
“Fashion Advice for Lawyers”
Saturday, January 10th, 2009
Rebecca Bratspies has some here!
Many women thought the normative right to wear pants to work had been thoroughly embedded in the culture well over thirty years ago. This might be a situation in which collective action by all women could benefit all women. If everybody made a commitment to wear pants to work at least once a week (and not just on “casual fridays”), it would further instantiate the practice.
–Ann Bartow
A Global First: Openly Gay Appointee to a Nation’s Highest Court
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009In a genuinely pathbreaking act, South African President Mothlanthe has appointed Edwin Cameron, a justice on the Supreme Court of Appeal, as a judge of the Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa. Judge Cameron becomes the first openly gay man or woman ever appointed to a nation’s highest court. HT to Robert Wintemute, who noted in an e/mail that Justice Michael Kirby of Australia has served as an openly gay member of that country’s highest court, but was not out when he was appointed.
A former Rhodes Scholar who became a human rights lawyer, Judge Cameron is the co-author of several books, including Witness to AIDS, a memoir about his experiences as a person living with AIDS, and Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. During his time on the Court of Appeal, he has been a leader in developing that nation’s civil rights and liberties jurisprudence.
Last summer, Judge Cameron addressed the International AIDS Conference in Mexico, arguing that homosexual sexual conduct should be decriminalized throughout the world, as a necessary step in fighting AIDS. (video here) He is the co-author (with Scott Burris – Temple Law) of a scholarly paper elaborating that argument.
This is an extraordinary moment, one of those historic firsts that actually matter. By contrast, the U.S. has only one openly lesbian federal judge – the wonderful Debbie Batts in the Southern District of New York. But – There are no openly gay or lesbian federal judges at the appellate level anywhere in the U.S.
Four years from now, I hope that number will be much higher.
Nan Hunter - Cross-posted at hunter of justice
Part-Time Lawyers Overwhelmingly Female
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008From the National Law Journal (here):
Working part-time is an option few attorneys take, and the vast majority of those who do are women.
According to figures compiled by the National Association for Law Placement, 5.6 percent of U.S. attorneys work part-time, and about 74 percent of them are women. That represents only a slight increase from the previous year, when 5.4 percent of attorneys worked part-time and 75 percent were women.
Unfortunately, “part-time” is still code for “mommy-track.” Until successful men start working “part-time” (and in some firms, 40 hours a week is “part-time”) women who do so (more likely than not) will be viewed as less ambitious than their full-time counterparts. Too many lawyers define success by reference to the model male worker, who had/has limited responsibilities for child-rearing and household management.
Yes, there are many success stories to contradict my view, but we haven’t come far enough yet.
-Bridget Crawford
New coverage of the study which shows that “mothers” earn less than other lawyers.
Sunday, December 28th, 2008“In a study of over 700 graduates of the University of Michigan Law School who graduated between 1970 and 1996 my statistical tests indicated that fathers earn 15 to 20 percent more than lawyers without children (a ‘daddy bonus’) and that mothers earn 10 to 15 percent less than childless lawyers (a ‘mommy penalty’),” Neil Buchanan, the study’s author and an associate professor of law at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., told The Lawyers Weekly.
While the “daddy bonus” has been identified in previous studies, Buchanan’s is the first to show the existence of a “mommy penalty.” He believes there are three possible reasons for this phenomenon. It may be that employers view fathers as better or more reliable workers. It may be that men wait to have children until their salaries are high enough to support dependents. Or it may be that men shirk household duties by spending more hours in the office, raising their income.
“The explanations for the ‘mommy penalty’ usually revolve around the idea that mothers – even mothers with advanced legal training and high powered careers – are the ones who actually spend the most time taking care of their children,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan posted about his survey here back in October. The full study is accessible here.
Women at the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer law firm have reportedly been advised to wear high heels with skirts rather than trousers to “embrace their femininity.”
Sunday, December 28th, 2008According to the WSJ Law Blog, anyway, which cites to the Daily Mail, so take that for what it is worth. Via Ms. JD.
10 Things You May Not Have Learned In Law School
Monday, December 15th, 2008“10 things I didn’t learn in law school” is here, at A Public Defender. Don’t miss the Kingsfield clip at the end! Via Law Ingenue.
Sue Magazine
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
One of the feature articles in the first issue is titled: Where are the Female Litigation Blawgers? Avoiding the omnipresent Bully Boys of the Blawgosphere, probably. The Sue Magazine homepage is here.
–Ann Bartow
Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye’s Legacy
Monday, December 1st, 2008The first part of a series at the New York Law Journal celebrating C.J. Kaye’s career is accessible here.
“Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, was accused in a complaint by a retired court executive of breaking into a judicial computer security system in 2001 to restore access to pornographic Web sites.”
Thursday, November 27th, 2008Detailed account by Cynthia Cotts at Bloomberg News here. Below is an excerpt:
Ralph Mecham, who headed the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington for 21 years until retiring in 2006, made the allegations in a Nov. 24 complaint to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. That court is already considering a separate complaint against the chief judge over sexually explicit images on his Web site.
Mecham said U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist became “enraged” because a committee of federal judges disobeyed his recommendation to discipline Kozinski after he disabled computer filter software meant to block sexually explicit Web sites, according to the complaint.
“Tell Kozinski to watch pornography at home and not in his own court,” Rehnquist told Mecham, according to his complaint. Mecham said he wants Kozinski to resign or be impeached by Congress because he allegedly destroyed government property and bragged about it.
Mecham didn’t provide a recording or transcript of the remarks he said were made by Rehnquist, who died in 2005. Mecham supplied a copy of his complaint to Bloomberg.
Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008From the Program’s homepage:
Lawyers need to be knowledgeable participants in the cultural and social debates such films provoke about the significance of our roles in the creation and maintenance of a just, democratic society. To fulfill this role, we need to have the critical tools to analyze what the makers of such documentaries are literally and figuratively telling their audiences about what it is that the law and lawyers do. At the same time, the law impacts the stories professional filmmakers tell. No documentary filmmaker today can ignore the creative rights of others based on copyright law, the restrictions on content imposed by the torts of defamation and invasion of privacy, or the obligations to subjects that are grounded in the legal norms of fraud and informed consent. As a result, lawyers who understand both the law and the creative process are now an integral part of documentary film production.
Video from the Program’s two Roundtable conferences is available here. As to the most recent Roundtable, Feminist Law Prof Regina Austin notes:
Dr. Gretchen Berland of the Yale Medical School has really given a great deal of thought to what cameras can do to enable professionals to learn more about their patients’ or clients’ lives and Michigan Professor Carol Jacobsen is a very committed video artist/activist who is dedicated to improving the lives of women prisoners. Of course, 3L Michael Wong’s film “Shmul Kaplan” tells the story not only of a survivor of Nazi and Soviet repression of Jews, but also of a class action lawsuit that aided thousands of asylum seekers and refuges in need of SSI benefits.
New Blog: On Being A Black Lawyer
Friday, November 21st, 2008Text of post adapted from a promotional e-mail:
Yolanda Young has launched the blog www.onbeingablacklawyer.com. You might remember her as the former Covington & Burling staff attorney who chronicled her experience as a minority attorney there in The Huffington Post piece, Law Firm Segregation Reminiscent of Jim Crow.
Young was surprised and disheartened by the intensely negative comments that followed on blogs like Above The Law. There was, however, a silver lining. Young discovered a large number of attorneys who were sympathetic to her position but didn’t want to post their comments on websites that were generally hostile to minorities. This group instead sent Young personal emails. Young realized there was a real need for a place where African American attorneys and law students could gather to network, disseminate information and poke fun.
Visit OBABL: www.onbeingablacklawyer.com
Women and Intellectual Property law, a dialogue
Friday, November 14th, 2008An account of a fabulous round table discussion I took part in last week in Toronto, sponsored by Osgood Hall Law School (more precisely IP Osgoode, the Institute For Feminist Legal Studies, and Putting Theory To Practice (An International Speakers Series At Osgoode Hall Law School) is available here, for anyone who is interested.
–Ann Bartow
“As More Male Lawyers Use Flextime, its Acceptance Increases”
Friday, November 14th, 2008That’s this title of this article in the ABA Journal, below is an excerpt:
More men are using flextime, even though it started as an accommodation for working mothers, according to Jennifer Halliday, the head of human resources at Arent Fox. She told the American Lawyer that younger male lawyers are bold about using flextime, and that may have helped increase the acceptability of the benefit.
It references this somewhat longer article in the American Lawyer.
–Josie Brown
Feminist Law Profs Among New ALI Members
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008The ALI has announced the names (here) of its newly-elected members, including Feminist Law Profs Ann Bartow (South Carolina), Miriam Cherry (McGeorge), Tony Infanti (Pitt), Margaret Russell (Santa Clara) and Margaret Taylor (Wake Forest). Congratulations!
-Bridget Crawford
Remember When Kozinski Called For The Investigation Into His Porn Site? Looks Like Something Fishy Is Going Down.
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008San Francisco Court Puts Kozinski Complaint on Hold (Update1)
By Cynthia Cotts
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — An ethics committee of the federal appeals court in San Francisco issued an order to stop an investigation of a lawyer’s complaint alleging misconduct by Alex Kozinski, the court’s chief judge.
Cyrus Sanai, a Los Angeles attorney, accused Kozinski of putting pornography on a public Web site and revived allegations that the judge broke into a computer security system in 2001 and disabled porn-detecting software.
The ethics committee, officially the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council, on Nov. 3 directed that Sanai’s complaint be put on hold because “no exceptional circumstances” exist to warrant a transfer to a Philadelphia committee looking into an earlier complaint about Kozinski’s sexually explicit Web postings.
“It’s appalling,” Sanai said yesterday in an interview. “It is a transparent effort to shield Judge Kozinski and the other subjects of the complaint from meaningful investigation.”
Cathy Catterson, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco court, didn’t respond to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment.
Robert Heim, a lawyer at Philadelphia-based Dechert who is heading the investigation of Kozinski’s Web postings, didn’t respond to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment.
About a dozen of the images Sanai found on Kozinski’s Web site featured naked women, some in sexual activities. In footage supplied to Bloomberg by Sanai, one woman performs fellatio bent over backward, and scores of Asian women ride male partners in synchronized group sex.
Humorous Intent
The images were intended to be humorous, according to a friend of the judge.
Sanai filed two previous complaints against Kozinski.
The allegations that Kozinski breached court security were raised by Ralph Mecham, former head of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington, in a 2007 letter to a federal committee on judicial ethics.
In June, after the Los Angeles Times reported that Kozinski kept sexually explicit material on a Web site called Alex.Kozinski.com, the judge asked his court to investigate. The San Francisco ethics committee transferred the matter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who assigned the investigation to Anthony Scirica, the chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia court hired the Philadelphia-based law firms Dechert and Morgan Lewis & Bockius to conduct the inquiry.
At the time, all parties said any related complaints should be investigated in Philadelphia.
Transfer of Complaints
The San Francisco ethics committee informed Roberts in June that “any pending complaints, or new complaints that may be filed, relating to this matter are included in this request for transfer,” according to court papers.
Roberts directed Scirica’s court to rule on “any pending or new complaints relating to the same subject matter” as the June complaint.
The Nov. 3 order raises more questions than it answers, according to Arthur Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who specializes in federal judicial ethics.
“Reading the order, there is a strong inference that the Judicial Council made this decision on its own and did not consult the Third Circuit,” Hellman said.
Mecham, the retired court administrator, expressed surprise that the San Francisco committee didn’t forward Sanai’s complaint to Philadelphia.
“I think that’s a direct violation of the chief justice’s directions,” Mecham said yesterday in an interview.
Emphasis added by me. So much for the thorough investigation that I never expected to see happen anyway.
–Ann Bartow
The “Opt Out Revolution” 5 Years Later
Sunday, October 26th, 2008On Friday, October 24, 2008, Lisa Belkin was the keynote speaker at a conference at Pace Law School on “Women and the Law: How Far We’ve Come and Where We Need to Go.” I was a fan of Belkin’s “Life’s Work” column for the New York Times (she now blogs for the Times at Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting). Today marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of Belkin’s “Opt Out Revolution” article:
[I]t’s not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.
I say this with the full understanding that there are ambitious, achieving women out there who are the emotional and professional equals of any man, and that there are also women who stayed the course, climbed the work ladder without pause and were thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. I also say this knowing that to suggest that women work differently than men — that they leave more easily and find other parts of life more fulfilling — is a dangerous and loaded statement.
And lastly, I am very aware that, for the moment, this is true mostly of elite, successful women who can afford real choice — who have partners with substantial salaries and health insurance — making it easy to dismiss them as exceptions. To that I would argue that these are the very women who were supposed to be the professional equals of men right now, so the fact that so many are choosing otherwise is explosive.
As these women look up at the ”top,” they are increasingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get there. Women today have the equal right to make the same bargain that men have made for centuries — to take time from their family in pursuit of success. Instead, women are redefining success. And in doing so, they are redefining work.
Time was when a woman’s definition of success was said to be her apple-pie recipe. Or her husband’s promotion. Or her well-turned-out children. Next, being successful required becoming a man. Remember those awful padded-shoulder suits and floppy ties? Success was about the male definition of money and power.
There is nothing wrong with money or power. But they come at a high price. And lately when women talk about success they use words like satisfaction, balance and sanity. * * *
The workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. * * *
Women started this conversation about life and work — a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too — the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.
Looked at that way, this is not the failure of a revolution, but the start of a new one. It is about a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all.
Belkin’s article still provokes strong responses five years later. It is true that the article looked at a tiny slice of elite, economically privileged white women. It is true that there are parts of the story that aren’t told (remember it’s only one Magazine article, I tell myself). My own reactions to the article are mixed: I know some stay-at-home JD/MBA moms, so I recognize part of the world Belkin describes. But my own sense is that she overstates the lived experience of workplace change. 46% of those E&Y employees were men, but how long was the average male leave compared with the average female leave? Did the men taking leave play golf every day for two weeks (as my former law firm colleague did)? How were the male leave-takers treated when they came back to work? What were their on-going parenting responsibilities? A year later, when someone had to get home at 6:00 p.m. to relieve the babysitter, my guess is that it wasn’t the male E&Y employees 46% of the time.
Yes, workplaces have changed. Yes, change happens in subtle ways. I am persuaded by Alison Stein’s account in “Women Lawyers Blog for Workplace Equality” (blogged here). But workplaces haven’t changed enough. Real equality still eludes us — all of us who don’t resemble the undiscriminated-against ideal male worker with a stay-at-home wife — on so many levels.
It was not that long ago (um, ok, yes it was) when the older girls in my grade school were singing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.” I remember thinking women wouldn’t “need” that song in the future. I remember thinking we wouldn’t need cars, either. We’d all have George Jetson-like space vehicles that were powered by air (courtesy of my childhood imagination). I assumed the 21st century would be so different from life as we knew it then. But we’re here and it’s not.
I don’t sing Helen Reddy any more, and whether I drive or take the train, my transport still emits carbon multi-oxides that can’t be good for anyone.
But still we hope.
-Bridget Crawford
Lawyers’ Salaries: Mommy Penalties, Daddy Bonuses, and Pure Gender Effects
Monday, October 20th, 2008Even among highly educated professionals, there is a persistent difference in the salaries of men and women. Untangling the reasons for that difference is quite difficult, and it involves as a threshold matter trying to figure out whether there are factors other than gender that explain why women earn less than men. Some studies have suggested that the difference in salaries is not in the first instance about the gender of the worker but about the worker’s status as a parent or non-parent. Some empirical research, for example, has found that men with children earn more than everyone else in their fields but that there are no detectable differences among women with children, women without children, and men without children.
I recently finished a draft of a paper (available here) in which I looked at the results of two surveys of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the classes of 1970 through 1996. These surveys were developed by Richard Lempert, David Chambers, and Terry Adams, who used the data from the first survey to study the effects of race on lawyers’ careers in their fascinating article: “Michigan’s Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School,” 25 L. & Soc. Inquiry 395 (2000). Professor Lempert and his co-authors administered a follow-up survey that gathered information about gender and parental status; and they allowed me to use their data for the empirical analysis summarized in my draft paper.
Most of my paper is focused on technical matters of survey techniques and econometric analysis. For those who find such matters tedious or worse, the most direct discussion of the statistical results is in the introduction and conclusion and on pp. 30-32. My tentative results confirm the “daddy bonus” that others’ have found in other studies, with the range of estimates suggesting a 15-20% salary advantage for fathers. Unlike previous studies, however, I also find a strong suggestion that women with children endure a “mommy penalty,” earning perhaps 10-15% less than the childless (and thus 25-35% less than fathers). I also find some weaker statistical support for the hypothesis that childless women earn less than childless men, with my estimates suggesting an 8-9% difference disfavoring women.
The wonderful thing about empirical research is that every interesting set of results demands further study. Can my results regarding the salary losses for mothers and childless women be confirmed by further research? Although I also look at differences such as part-time status, the ages of children, and whether the children are living with the lawyer-parent, what other evidence should be taken into account in future studies?
Perhaps a more intriguing question is why the salary disadvantages against women and in favor of men largely show up through parental status. (Parenting itself still tends to be characterized by massive differences in gender roles, of course. Even if all of the difference in salaries between men and women were mostly about differences in child-rearing, therefore, this would simply relocate the question of how sexism continues to affect women and men differently.) Because this draft is mostly a technical discussion of empirical results, I speculate only briefly on the reasons for the daddy bonus, offering three possibilities: fathers feel the need to work harder to bring home more bread for the family, men wait to become fathers until their salaries are high enough to support a growing family, and (my cynical favorite) fathers shirk childcare responsibilities by hiding in the office and incidentally raising their salaries.
Fortunately, the surveys from which I drew my data are now being superseded by an even larger study of Michigan law graduates, with more detailed questions and more respondents from more graduating classes. This will allow researchers to use “panel data” techniques and other sophisticated methods of searching for statistical relationships.
Because I plan to be one of those researchers, I would be especially interested in readers’ suggestions (either on the Comment board or via email: nbuchanan@law.gwu.edu) regarding both how to improve and refine the regressions and how to explain the results. The best way to analyze empirical issues is to analyze data from as many angles as possible, so I will be very appreciative of any constructive suggestions.
-Neil H. Buchanan
[Cross-posted from Dorf on Law (here) with permission. - ed.]