The BLOB-in-Law

Top Am Law 100 firm got some good news this week when two of 2011's biggest deals--Capital One's $9 billion acquisition of ING's U.S. banking unit and Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility--were approved by regulators.

Bell v. Village of Streamwood, 806 F. Supp. 2d 1052 (N.D. Ill. 2011): Before the Court is Plaintiffs' motion to compel Ryan Ruthenberg's deposition testimony. The motion raises a question of first impression regarding whether an employee-union representative privilege should be adopted as a mat...

With revenue growth near 12 percent and profits per partner growth of close to 14 percent last year, Latham & Watkins blew past its previous high-water mark for revenue, and roughly matched its pre-recession record for profitability, according to reporting by The American Lawyer.

Supplementally to the essay Sherif Girgis and I did for Public Discourse responding to Bob Hockett's thoughtful questions about how we ought to be analyzing the HHS mandate from the moral point of view, Sherif has offered a comment on...

Less than a week after saying it was reevaluating the planned sale of its Pringles snack unit to Diamond Foods amid an accounting scandal at that company, Procter & Gamble announced Wednesday that it would sell the unit to household goods maker whose offerings include Pop-Tarts and Keebler cookies.

Thanks so much to everyone participating in the LTAAA symposium: what a terrific discussion.  Given my work on Technological Due Process, I could not help but think about troubled public benefits system in Colorado known as CBMS.  Ever since 2004, the system has been riddled with delays, faulty law embedded in code, and system crashes.  As the Denver Post reports, the state has a $44 million contract with Deloitte consultants to overhaul the system–its initial installation cost $223 million with other private contractors.  CBMS is a mess, with thousands of overpayments, underpayments, delayed benefits, faulty notices, and erroneous eligibility determinations.  And worse.  In the summer of 2009, 9-year-old Zumante Lucero died after a pharmacy — depending upon the CBMS system — wouldn’t fill his asthma prescription [...]

Though it posted new records in net income, revenue per lawyer, and profits per partner, Bingham McCutchen saw its 15-year topline growth streak end in 2011 as gross revenue fell .5 percent to $868.5 million, according to reporting by The American Lawyer.

Who’s Afraid of Cupcake Feminism? image source www.cupcakedelights.com Over at the on-line music publication The Quietus, UK-based writer Meryl Trussler reacts to what she perceives as a “counter-campaign” to make feminism palatable to the mainstream media (at worst) or “cool again” (at best): This move is not deliberate … Continue reading → Feminist Law Professors

In an extremely forward-looking and thought-provoking book, Samir Chopra and Lawrence F. White rekindle important legal questions with respect to autonomous artificial agents or bots.  It was a pleasure to engage with the questions that the authors raise in A Legal Theory for Autonomists Artificial Agents, and the book is a valuable scholarly contribution.  In particular, because of my own research interests, Chapter 2 Artificial Agents and Contracts was of special interest to me. In Chapter 2, the authors apply the agency theory that they advocate in Chapter 1 to the context of contracts.  They challenge the view that bots are “mere tools” used for extension of the self by contracting parties.[1]    In doing so, they assert differences between “closed” and “open”[2] systems and various theoretical [...]

Julie Greenberg’s “Intersexuality and the Law: Why Sex Matters” NYU Press has published a new book by Julie Greenberg (Thomas Jefferson School of Law).  Here‘s the publisher’s description: The term “intersex” evokes diverse images, typically of people who are both male and female or neither male nor female. Neither … Continue reading → Feminist Law Professors

Why do women lack powerful male sponsors at work? One reason is that senior men fear that rumors of a sexual relationship might result.

The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of "up to 10 years imprisonment." Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an "unlimited fine under UK law." SOCA also showed users their own IP address and warned that "the above information can be used to identify you and your location," adding that "SOCA has the capability to monitor and investigate you, and can inform your Internet service provider of these infringements." Read the comments on this post

Intellectual property fans everywhere!  Let’s try this one on for size.  Who, if anyone, owns this phrase?

A reporter called me the other day on the Apple-Proview trademark kerfuffle. She kept wanting me to give her a quote on what foreign companies should take away from this dispute and I kept parrying with her, unable to give her just one. I kept finding myself saying "it's probably more complicated than that." Let me back up a bit. As many of you no doubt know, Apple is in a massive trademark fight with a Shenzhen-based company called Proview. Near as I can tell, the facts are as follows: Proview-Shenzhen registered the iPad trade-name before Apple had ever manufactured an iPad. Proview-Taiwan (a Taiwanese company that is not the same company as Proview-Shenzhen) entered into an agreement with Apple (or, more accurately, a company acting on Apple's behalf) to sell its Asian iPad trademarks to Apple. Apple claims that agreement with Proview-Taiwan included the PRC iPad trademark, but Proview is claiming otherwise. Apple sued Proview (I think Proview-Taiwan, but I am not sure) in Hong...

The controversy that erupted when it was discovered that the social network Path was accessing and uploading iPhone users' contact databases without permission has served to publicize the fact that many other iOS apps are accessing user data in a similar fashion. Concerns over user privacy have prompted US Congressmen to press Apple on the issue, but developers tell Ars that the problem could largely be fixed by Apple itself. Path used an API provided by Apple that allows developers to access all the data in a user's contact list, including name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and more. Path used this information to automatically connect users with their friends already using its iOS app. Unfortunately, Path was accessing that information without first asking the user for permission, a specific no-no according to Apple's developer guidelines. Worse still, Path was storing this information on its servers without encryption, which presents an additional level of unnecessary...

Montana’s attorney general, urging the Supreme Court to take its time before barring states from regulating big-money campaign spending, argued Wednesday that the Court has left states with an option to police political finances when local conditions justify it.   At issue in a pending case is the fate of a century-old Montana law that imposes [...]

By Dennis Crouch Tomorrow, I'll be speaking at Professor Rantanen's home institution – the University of Iowa College of Law. Our session runs from 3:30 to 5:00 pm and will include additional commentary from Professor Rantanen and patent attorneys Jay...

In a new filing (PDF) this afternoon, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon expressed his displeasure with a decision by defendants in a defamation lawsuit to appeal his denial of their motion to dismiss. At issue is former U.S. Department of...

A Bronx woman admitted on the stand Wednesday to lying about her legal and criminal background in order to serve as a juror in a high-profile tax-shelter fraud trial last year.

According to Government Technology, a network of public and private surveillance cameras increasingly monitors our daily lives.  Chicago’s Police Department’s network, called “Operation Virtual Shield,” directs video feeds from roughly 10,000 privately-owned cameras and roughly 10,000 public-sector cameras to law enforcement personnel.  That includes more than 4,500 cameras in Chicago public schools, 3,000 cameras in public housing, and 1,000 camera at O’Hare Airport.  Atlanta’s Video Integration Center similarly uses feeds from the private sector, soon possibly including feeds from the CNN Center. Pre-existing agreements –memoranda of understanding — facilitate the arrangement.  And what luck for law enforcement, according to Chicago’s managing deputy director of public safety: “If the police wanted the video and the private facility owner didn’t want to hand it over, there’d have [...]

Paul Caron has posted his annual list of Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors, a very useful guide for those hoping...

In my first post on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, I discussed some of the different kinds of complex systems law deals with. I’d like to continue by considering some of the different ways law deals with them. Chopra and White focus on personhood: treating the entity as a single coherent “thing.” The success of this approach depends not just on the entity’s being amenable to reason, reward, and punishment, but also on it actually cohering as an entity. Officers’ control over corporations is directed to producing just such a coherence, which is a good reason that personhood seems to fit. But other complex systems aren’t so amenable to being treated as a single entity. You can’t [...]

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a practice management and client development system (see article below), an online marketing service for local listings, a wireless mobile scanner, a business intelligence service for law firms, and a free iPad magazine. Don't...

Here are a few items that would deserve more attention if I had time today: Texas may run out of one of the drugs in its execution "cocktail" in June.The Texas Rangers are investigating whether Harris County DA Pat Lykos improperly had grand jurors investigated when they probed the BAT van fiasco. See coverage of the DA's race in San Angelo.And coverage of the DA's race in Austin.Bail bondsman convicted of bribing South Texas judge. TDCJ entered a contract with a Huntsville hospital for certain prisoner care, but Grits doubts they can scale up to solve the problem that way.See an excellent feature on eyewitness identification and how mind tricks can put innocent people behind bars.Already way overleveraged, Corrections Corporation of America has sent a letter to 48 states including Texas offering to buy their old prison units Celebrating Valentine's Day when your loved one is in jail.

ABA TECHSHOW is my best learning experience every year. No other legal technology conference has so many of the Who's Who of legal technologists because of the number of presentations that are offered. The Early Bird deadline is February 17,...

Some of us on this blog have rooting interests that lie far from where The Schuylkill and The Delaware meet. They’re up past the New Jersey Turnpike, all the way to New York City. For us, ever since the echoes of the Giants’ raucous ride through the Canyon of Heroes faded, it’s been all about the Knicks and Linsanity! And after watching the Linsane 3-pointer to win the game last night, we must admit that we expected it to be difficult to sit down calmly, think, and then write a post about medical device decisions. But that’s what we’re here for, and it gave us another thing to occupy our time while we wait for Linsanity to tip off once again tonight. Fortunately, the case we’d like to discuss, Tierney v. AGA Medical Corp., No. 4:11CV3098 (D. Neb), has two recent opinions that contain so many things that we like that discussing it isn’t difficult at all. It has preemption. It has Twiqbal-like pleadings standards. It has enforcement of the rules. And it displays the type of judicial...

As mentioned in this prior post, today was the first day for two big full-day public hearings before the US Sentencing Commission in DC. Today was "for the Commission to gather testimony from invited witnesses regarding the issue of penalties...

Robert Morse, Director of Data Research for U.S. News & World Report, announced today that the 2013 law school rankings will be published online on March 13, 2012. The 2013 edition of Best Graduate Schools will be available for sale on newstands on April 3, 2012. 2012 rankings 2011 rankings...

Meet Emma Burton of Olathe, Kan., my new favorite kindergarten student. Emma "fought the law" of her kindergarten class in order to stay true to her school -- Kansas State. As recounted on the Bug Bytes blog written by her mom, Julie, Emma's class recently participated in Kansas Week, where they learned about the state animal, tree, bird, and so on. Although Kansas has several state schools, including the University of Kansas and Kansas State, Emma's teacher decided for whatever reason that the class must use crayons to color in a picture of the University of Kansas' Jayhawk mascot. Five-year-old Emma, a die-hard Kansas State fan, however, was not having any of that. Emma's mom says that when she went to school to pick Emma up, kids ran up to her and told her Emma was crying. She found Emma being escorted by the teacher, who was also holding piece of paper with an uncolored-in Jayhawk. The teacher told Emma's mom, Julie, that: Emma would not color this Jayhawk today with the rest of...