Free Republic

Three GW law professors have endorsed Republican candidate Fred Thompson's campaign for the presidency, joining the Lawyers for Fred coalition. Professors John Fitzgerald Duffy, Orin Kerr and Michael Abramowicz are members of the Law Professors Committee within the coalition. "Sen. Thompson is proud of his experience working as a federal prosecutor," said Darrel Ng, a spokesperson for the Friends of Fred Thompson campaign. "That's why he decided to form something like that (coalition), because of his background." Ng said that having endorsement groups for presidential candidates is an important part of the campaign process. "In campaigns you try to find...

African-American Enrollment in Law Schools Declines by: Emmanuel Opati, October 03, 2007 There is increasing concern about enrollment decline of African-American male students in higher education and specifically Law Schools. Speaking in Washington, D.C at the Congressional Black Caucus forum last week, Chris Brown, General Motors (GM) Vice President General Counsel for North America, said there is need for diversity in the legal profession both in schools and law firms. He said diversity is part and parcel of GM policy. “General Motors was the first corporation to have a minority supplies program and a minority dealer program”, he added. At...

HEMPSTEAD,NY--A disbarred lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists will be teaching at an upcoming law school ethics conference. Lynne Stewart, who was found guilty of conspiring with terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, will be speaking October 16 at Hofstra Law School’s “Legal Ethics: Lawyering on the Edge,” in Hempstead, New York. The speaking engagement comes only a year after Stewart was sentenced to twenty-eight months in prison on charges of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. Prosecutors alleged that Stewart had passed on messages to Abdel Rahman’s radical Muslim followers, authorizing a resumption of terrorist operations against the Egyptian government....

Durham, N.C. (AP) -- In the wake of the now-debunked rape case against three lacrosse players, Duke University will establish a center devoted to justice and training lawyers to fight wrongful convictions, president Richard Brodhead said Wednesday. Duke will invest $1.25 million over the next five years for the project at the law school, which will also expand its Wrongful Convictions Clinic and Innocence Project. The clinic and the Innocence Project investigate claims of innocence by the state's convicted felons and raise awareness of problems in the criminal justice system.

Have racial preferences reduced the number of black lawyers? Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not. Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit...

Louisiana College will announce Thursday that it is establishing the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law on its Pineville campus. LC President Joe Aguillard will announce details of the law school during a press conference Thursday at noon in the Granberry Conference Center. "Founding a law school is a monumental undertaking but one that we are working on diligently," said Aguillard in a press release. "Opening a conservative, Christian law school will fill a niche in the state of Louisiana, and also the nation." The release stated that the goal of the school would be "to train and equip young...

When Domino's Pizza founder and billionaire Tom Monaghan set up Ave Maria School of Law, he claimed it was because all other Catholic law schools were liberal, and he wanted a conservative one. So, given that, what the heck is conservative about helping illegal aliens? That's the latest project of Ave Maria School of Law, which makes it . . . just like all the other liberal Catholic law schools. Question for our many conservative Catholic readers who are against illegal immigration: Is there any Catholic belief whatsoever that requires aiding and abetting illegal aliens? More from "People Making News"...

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS'S UNANIMOUS opinion for the Supreme Court in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Individual Rights, upholding the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment against challenge by a coalition of law schools and law faculties, decisively resolved the essential legal issues presented by the case. The 8-0 decision (Justice Alito did not participate) made matters crystal clear: Congress, without infringing law schools' and law professors' First Amendment rights of speech and association, may condition federal funding to universities on law schools' granting access to military recruiters equal to that provided other employers. The Solomon Amendment leaves law schools...

The Supreme Court has decided Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Solomon Amendment case, and has reversed the Third Circuit and upheld the statute in a 21-page opinion by Chief Justice Roberts. The vote was 8-0, with Justice Alito not participating. From the conclusion of the opinion:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Jan. 20, 2006 - Kathleen Sullivan may have been dean of the prestigious Stanford Law School, but she flunked the test many of her former students have passed, the State Bar exam. The California Supreme Court has removed Sullivan from a biotech company's legal team in a $500 million-dollar licensing dispute. It seems last year Sullivan failed the state's three-day test to become licensed to practice law in California. But Sullivan is licensed in New York and Massachusetts. She has also argued four cases before the U-S Supreme Court.

To understand how politically one-sided law schools are, look no further than the law school “clinic.” These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and political advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the nuts and bolts of law practice, while providing crucial legal representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism—almost never of a conservative cast. If you wonder why law school profs invariably deem conservative...

Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal "mainstream" during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the "mainstream" means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school "clinic." These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years.

Some of America's top conservative leaders, present and former government officials and legal scholars marked the fifth anniversary of Ave Maria Law School, the faith-based Ann Arbor, Mich. school critics predicted would never make it. . .[guests included] Theodore Olsen and Kenneth Starr, both former solicitors general; and former Supreme Court nominee, Judge Robert Bork who teaches law at the school. Also in attendance were Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; Janice Rogers Brown, federal Court of Appeals judge for the Washington, D.C. Circuit; former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, a former Deputy Assistant...

Should Ave Maria be part of a "Catholic Jonestown"? Last Saturday, members of the alumni association of the Ave Maria School of Law met in Ann Arbor, Mich. They had learned, in the weeks before, that one of the school's most beloved professors was being kicked off the board of trustees and that the school might relocate to rural Florida. They weren't happy about it. In fact, they were angry. And little wonder. Why, after all, quibble with success? In September, only five years after the school's founding, the American Bar Association granted full accreditation to Ave Maria, whose mission...

I was very impressed that Sam Alito had hired a clerk from Ave Maria Law School, which only recently opened. What a big feather in the law school's cap to have graduated someone who clerked for a future Supreme Court justice! So, I went to check just how well Ave Maria is being ranked as a law school. Surprisingly, it has (by my measure, which I detail following) already surpassed Georgetown University and has University of Notre Dame in its sites, as it strives to become the top Catholic law school in the country... as it remains the nation's most...

Law school incidents don’t garner much coverage in this undergrad newspaper, but, given the situation I found last Friday, October 7th, I believe this incident should be an exception. First, some background. At Columbia Law, the Career Services Office offers second and third year law students the opportunity to interview with prospective employers on campus. Columbia posts interview dates online, and students sign up online; generally, employers have limited time frames (one day, maybe two), and slots fill up quickly. Employers take these interviews seriously. Additionally, Columbia is currently locked in a Supreme Court case over the Solomon Amendment. The...

The left has a lock on journalism and law schools. Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying “cronyism” and calling for “mainstream” values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers? David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite journalism and law schools. By checking all the party registrations he could find, he concluded that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools,...

I read over at Howard Bashman's How Appealing that 160 law professors have sent a letter to the Senate requesting that Roberts be rejected for the Supreme Court. (You can find the link here, but many people are downloading it and you may have to try a few times.) In reading the proposed reasons for denying Roberts a seat I was quite taken aback by the political rather than legal reasons offered. As a libertarian, it always depresses me when those in my chosen field, (law), make politics the norm in the legal forum. This post is not from a...

PROFESSORS at the best law schools are generally assumed to be overwhelmingly liberal, and now a new study lends proof. But whether the ideological imbalance matters - to the academic environment students encounter, to the kinds of lawyers the schools produce and to the stock of ideas the professors generate - depends on whom you ask. The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors...

7th Circuit orders SIU to reinstate CLS chapter's registered status CHICAGO - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit today ordered the Southern Illinois University School of Law to reinstate the registered status of the Christian Legal Society student organization while the appeal the chapter filed moves forward. Attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund and the Christian Legal Society represent the CLS chapter. "The 7th Circuit recognized that First Amendment rights apply to everyone," said CLS Chief Litigation Counsel Steven H. Aden. "We wanted the students in the CLS chapter to have their constitutional rights respected as this...