Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) violated congressional ethics rules and federal law in the handling of his personal finances and his fundraising for a university institute, a subcommittee of Rangel’s colleagues charged today. Two members of the House ethics subcommittee, for… Read More...

Donna Coleman Gregg has been named director of the Institute for Communications Law Studies at Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. Gregg, a former senior policy adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and… Read More...

By Brian Malcom When the iPad was first released, syncing documents was cumbersome.  The user was required to place documents on the device using wi-fi transfers.  Now, you can use the sync cable included with the iPad to transfer documents from your computer directly to your iPad.  This allows for faster and more reliable transfers.  This is especially important with large documents, such as PDFs or PDF packages for document review. After the tweak to the document Read More...

The Institute of International Shipping and Trade Law (Swansea University School of Law) hosts its 2010 Annual International Colloquium, New Uses Of The Sea: International Shipping In The Twenty-First Century, Sept. 9-10, 2010. Read More...

The Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest seeks articles for a fall symposium on alternative court systems. Articles could address issues related to Family Court, Drug Court, Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, Benefits, Effects on Recidivism, and all other relevant topics. Submission is rolling, but deadline is August 10, 2010. Articles will be published Fall 2010. Authors may be invited to speak at the symposium at the University of Richmond. Submission guidelines are here. The Read More...

“TTT, I am highlighting Joan Wexler and her in$TTiTTuTTion this week on my blog. I was tipped to this PDF by a commenter on my site. Here is Brooklyn Law School’s IRS Tax Form 990, i.e. Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, for 2007. http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2008/237/227/2008-237227990-050fa431-9.pdf Go to page 18 of Crooklyn’s IRS Form 990 to see Joan Wexler’s salary and compensation for 2007. As a dean who devoted 50 hours per week to her Read More...

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1689 has just been posted by Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon – School of Law. It appears in the Law and History Review (August 2010). Here’s the abstract:This article examines the ways in which enslaved litigants engaged with the ecclesiastical courts in 17th century colonial Lima. The article Read More...

Just posted on the Gilder Lehrman website is the lecture Reconstruction and Citizenship, originally delivered on June 12, 2007, by Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. According to Gilder Lehrman, Professor Foner “explains how the legal status of former slaves after the Civil War helped to define citizenship in the United States. He looks at the struggle Read More...

For those of you who are done with the July 2010 bar exam, congratulations! For those of you who still have another day left, our condolences — and good luck. No administration of the bar is complete without some sort of mishap. The latest tale of woe comes from California. The state that some have called “ungovernable” also seems to have difficulty administering the bar exam. Find out about goings-on in the Not-So-Golden State, and compare notes on the bar exam experience Read More...

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The latest edition of The Paralegal Voice, “Today’s Paralegals: Career Advice, Ethics Tips & More,” co-hosted by Lynne DeVenny and me, is now available at Legal Talk Network. In this episode we welcome attorney, mediator and management consultant, Nancy Byerly Jones, as she draws from her extensive legal experience to share career advice for paralegals. A passionate advocate for the paralegal profession, Nancy talks about the biggest challenges facing paralegals today, how the Read More...

When Marlin Moore signed for a package, he didn’t use his real name. For that moment, he was a guy named “Kevin Jones.” The authorities had earlier intercepted the package—drugs, of course—and set up a controlled delivery to find out… Read More...

Lawmakers today gave final approval to a bill that would reduce the long-standing disparity between federal sentences for crack and powder cocaine distribution. The vote in the U.S. House of Representatives follows a debate that has raged since the 1980s…. Read More...

The Association of American Geographers will hold its annual meeting April 12-16, 2011, in Seattle. The call for papers has not been posted yet, but there is a notice that abstracts will be accepted beginning August 10, 2010.  (If you’re wondering why legal scholars would care about a meeting of geographers, take a look at past programs. Topics include crime modeling, immigration, indigenous peoples, land use, and trafficking.) mw Read More...

The American Sociological Association will hold its 2011 annual meeting Aug. 13-16, in Chicago. The theme will be Social Conflict: Multiple Dimensions and Arenas.  The call for papers has not yet been posted.  (The deadline for the 2010 meeting was Jan. 15, 2010.) Read More...

We do not seem to have previously noted the existence of this on-line project of the Harvard Law School Library. As the website explains:As part of its holdings of legal art and visual materials, the Harvard Law School Library owns a collection of over 4000 portrait images of lawyers, jurists, political figures, and legal thinkers dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. Read More...

Is Tax Law Culturally Specific? Lessons from the History of Income Tax Law in Mandatory Palestine has just been posted by Assaf Likhovski, Tel Aviv University – School of Law. It is forthcoming in Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Here’s the abstract: Tax law is a technical area of law which does not seem to be culturally specific. It is thus seen as easily transferable between different Read More...

A few people emailed me in the past weeks, greatly concerned that I hadn't been posting and that my last post was about some radical diet.  Don't worry folks: I haven't joined a cult or anything.  The explanation is much more mundane. A few months ago we bought a new house and so I've been embroiled with gathering stuff from the condo, disposing of things, and getting the new house set up. And there have been many other things that have kept me super-busy.  So Read More...

It’s about time a group of summer associates grew a backbone and showed some personality. At Akin Gump, a group of summers decided to “ice” some of the full time associates at the firm. In case you’ve been living under a rock, BrosIcingBros is was a website devoted to friends forcing friends to chug a gawd-awful Smirnoff Ice. It’s a pretty simple concept, if someone presents you with a Smirnoff Ice, you have to drink it — unless you happen to be carrying Read More...

The courtroom lends itself to dramatization. A trial has a natural story arc: The adversarial system makes for a clear conflict between characters. There’s a natural end point when both sides rest their cases and the verdict comes down. Plus, lawyers are such loveable characters. And so there are many great movies and TV shows about lawyers. (Along with some not so great ones.) They can amuse, inspire, terrify, or convince you to go to law school. The ABA Journal has made a list of the Read More...