Episodios
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Except ATM machines have limits.
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When ProPublica first reported that Clarence Thomas had taken half a million in gifts, it turns out they had only scratched the surface. New financial disclosures and some number-crunching from Fix the Court show that Thomas has taken over $5 million in gifts and likely gifts. Meanwhile, Ketanji Brown Jackson got roughly Beyonce tickets with a roughly $4000 face value. Meanwhile, there's a summer associate taking a horse and carriage to work and Columbia Law Review is finally back online after its board nuked the website over an article about Palestinian rights. -
The Trump conviction excuse tour is not going well for his attorneys.
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Donald Trump is now a convicted felon and everyone wants to know why his attorneys phoned in the defense. They... don't have good answers. At all. Continuing the Trump beat, Judge Aileen Cannon continued to display a delicate mix of cynical obstinance and outright incompetence, slow-playing a motion to keep Trump from publicly lying about the FBI and then asking for briefing on how the Supreme Court's CFPB case impacts the prosecution -- which it only could have if the Supreme Court came out the other way. And students no longer care about the USNWR rankings... but maybe there's a better measure of prestige. -
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An appeal to common sense is denied.
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You might have thought flying a flag upside after January 6 would be the only "Sam Alito w/10 flag" story of the week, but you'd be wrong. The justice followed it up with another flag tied to the riots and got appropriately roasted over it all by Elena Kagan. Biglaw always paid well, but with partners crossing the $20 million compensation barrier, the structure of Biglaw inevitably shifts to accommodate the new normal. And a law school deals with the most avoidable cheating scandal ever. -
Now, this is a story all about how Sam Alito's wife got flipped-turned upside down.
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Sam Alito flew his flag upside down in the aftermath of the insurrection. He doesn't deny that, but he blames his wife for it. Dames, amirite? Aside from the obvious ethical issues implicated by having a Supreme Court justice visibly light in the "defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" department, why is Alito so objectively bad at responding to his scandals? Next thing you know, he'll be blaming her for the Dobbs leak too. Meanwhile the California bar exam is running into bankruptcy and rather than address the problem, the State Bar is just gonna kick the can further down the road. And Elon Musk's lawyers again earn their reputation as the gang that can't shoot straight, managing to Streisand Effect a dispute with a Delaware law expert by threatening to fire a Biglaw firm if the professor filed his brief. -
Trump's attorneys seems as asleep at the switch as their client.
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Having called Stormy Daniels a liar repeatedly in its opening, the Trump defense team was then shocked and appalled that the prosecution elicited testimony to rehabilitate her credibility. The hits didn't stop there as they attempted to get out of the mess they'd landed in by sex shaming someone whose sexuality is their whole business. Trump lawyers do a lot better when the judge is running their defense. Meanwhile, an organization moved to preemptively pare down Trump's SCOTUS shortlist to the least qualified, worst behaved candidates and its been a very Ponzi-rific week for one Biglaw firm. -
Donald Trump, Drake, And James Ho... punchlines write themselves.
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Donald Trump's trial shenanigans continue. Is he going to violate the gag order again? It seems inevitable but... our prediction might shock you! But even if his unfiltered "Truthing" is behind him, there are so many other ways to show contempt of court. And a busy week in Morningside Heights as Columbia Law School students ask school to cancel exams in light of campus unrest, or at a minimum convert its optional pass/fail model to mandatory pass/fail to avoid placing a stigma on worried students. Then conservative judges announced a boycott of Columbia until their demands for "viewpoint diversity" are met. Also, small talk becomes big diss track talk as we devote a whole segment to Drake and Kendrick going to war and the legal implications. -
The New York courtroom where Donald Trump is on trial is apparently unpleasant. Is that the former president's doing? The world may never know. Also, the fact that the racists are coming for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson isn't surprising -- but who gave them the green light? And, a judge learns a valuable lesson about hot mics and why you should always assume someone is listening.
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Let's see if it pays off as well as a billionaire covering up an affair.
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Donald Trump's hush money trial kicks off after a week of Trump alienating everyone involved in the process by refusing to respect basic decorum and attempting to skirt the gag order by arguing that RTs aren't endorsements. The Am Law 100 is also out and we talk through some of the key takeaways and Judge Ho tried to defend his take on forum shopping and it's... not good. -
We continue breaking down the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings and the chaos that its new methodology introduced. And we know exactly who to blame for breaking these rankings. Elon Musk recently went in for a deposition defended by Quinn Emanuel's Alex Spiro and earned a motion for sanctions. And a Berkeley Law protest goes viral, but all the "free speech" talk misses the mark.
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Haphazard ranking serves as a reminder that service hasn't quite found the right formula after law schools started withdrawing their data.
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The full U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are out and they are... something. Duke is tied with Harvard? NYU nearly drops out of the top 10? Are we just hurling darts at a dartboard here? In a sense, yes. At least ever since law schools started withdrawing their cooperation. Meanwhile, a Biglaw firm tried to promote healthy sleep despite being the primary reason associates don't sleep and Trump's bond in the NY civil fraud case looks a little suspect. -
Breaking down the action-packed final week of March.
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Special guest Liz Dye joins us to talk about the week that was. First, we delve into the abortion pill oral argument where even most of the conservatives scoffed at the right-wing effort to let an Amarillo courthouse second-guess the FDA on science. Almost as though the Chief Justice just tried to crack down on that practice. But along the way Neil Gorsuch showed off his (lack of) research skills and Alito and Thomas sought to revive the legal legacy of a chronic self-pleasurer. Then we check out the end of the showdown between Ron DeSantis and Disney that looks like a major victory for DeSantis until you, ya know, actually read the settlement agreement. Finally, Trump's got another gag order and went straight to work setting up the inevitable contempt hearing over it. -
Conservative justices can't stop telling on themselves when it comes to forum shopping.
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Joe Biden says he got a standing ovation for trying to BS his way through a law school cold call. We call BS on that. Also Cooley Law School finds itself at the bottom of the heap when it comes to bar passage rates again. At some point, the ABA has to step in... right? Finally, the nation's judges did something about politicized forum shopping and right-wingers can't stop help but crying about how they miss their cheat code. -
Parental leave and a bumbling Supreme Court highlight the week.
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Are law firms going to get stingy with parental leave? While most firms report solid revenue, sparking resentment over a few weeks of leave seems like a weird strategy, but DLA Piper recently cut back on the leave available to non-birthing parents. It's a first as far as Above the Law can tell, but will it be the last? Also, the Supreme Court screwed up its metadata, committing an error that would get junior associates fired. And finally, Joe Biden offered the Court some tough talk... by quoting them. -
Bond... unaffordable cash bond.
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Donald Trump needed to put up some cash before E. Jean Carroll can begin executed the judgment she has against him. Instead, Trump tried to argue that he was simply too rich to put up a bond. The argument was not persuasive, but it did get Above the Law mentioned on Stephen Colbert. We also discuss the Supreme Court taking up the Trump immunity case even though there's not a chance they'll endorse his theory. And when should we just let bygones be bygones with a lawyer's bigoted past? A law professor says everyone is way too hard on Thomas's new clerk just because she got fired from a past right-wing organization after racist messages came to light. -
Another firm begins cracking down on office attendance through punishment. Law firms want lawyers back in the office, but if they don't want associates spending that office time fielding calls from recruiters, it's time to consider incentives that treat lawyers like professionals. A Bush judge questioned Trump's manhood and Amy Wax fights back against the slap on the wrist Penn prepared to give her.
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The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are living children for the purposes of Alabama law. And while there are a lot of serious implications for the future of family fertility efforts, let's take a second to consider how much this absolutely breaks the state's rule against perpetuities. An attorney in the YSL case faces gang charges herself. She's made some... marketing decisions. Hogan Lovells must ponder whether invoking the wrath of ancient Roman poltergeists are worth a prime office location. Has anyone considered just working from home?
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Even-keeled professionalism may pay off over time, but being a mercurial lunatic always pays off now.
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Former Trump aide Stephen Miller used Super Bowl week to launch a stunt employment discrimination complaint against the NFL. The rule in question is the subject of a much better legal challenge that it doesn't do ENOUGH to address anti-Black discrimination, but nothing about Miller's legal moves have much connection to reality -- up to and including the fact that he IS NOT A LAWYER. The Supreme Court heard oral argument in the insurrection case and Chief John Roberts hasn't shown his complete ignorance of basic facts about American elections since Shelby County. Finally, Judge Aileen Cannon receives motion to reconsider, the boldest litigation move of all since it requires counsel so confident in their eventual success that they're willing to call the trial judge a moron. -
We're reaching peak Alina saturation.
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Last week may have officially been "Legalweek" but it was bad lawyer week at Above the Law, where Alina Habba dominated traffic with her ongoing futility. Her rapid retreat from the very phony "it's actually bias that so many prominent lawyers all worked at Paul Weiss" motion after being informed of the very real sanctions that could result. Robbie Kaplan, one of the Paul Weiss alumni in question, also shared her story of Donald Trump pulling out the half-clever schoolyard insults. We also discuss a firm that announced it would lay off 1/3 of the first years... but not say which ones! And we talk a little about Legalweek and how AI isn't quite ready for primetime... even as lawyers keep getting in trouble for trying. -
Sometimes you can't actually fake being smart.
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Alina Habba may soon be replaced in the Trump legal team constellation, but we'll always have memories of her crackerjack legal analysis and the stupid swimsuit debate. There are four justices who don't seem to care about the Supremacy Clause. And Davis Polk faced -- and successfully beat -- a discrimination suit. -
'The only rules are there are no rules' apparently doesn't fly in Judge Kaplan's courtroom.
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We don't even talk about Alina Habba's weird swimsuit thing on the show because it broke after we wrapped recording (next week, I guess!), but we have more than enough material discussing Trump's lawyer bumble through basic courtroom procedure and lodge motions for bad court thingies in the proud tradition of the Simpsons' greatest character. We also discuss a racial discrimination lawsuit against Troutman Pepper and whether "the partner is always a jerk" is a defense. And it looks like the federal courts have opened an investigation into Clarence Thomas... which will probably go nowhere. - Mostrar más