BabbleFest

Why Did Obama’s DOJ Botch Roman Polanski’s Extradition?

The Weingarten angle is tantalizing; did Holder’s pal broker a Washington deal to keep Polanski free? Did Holder agree — he does have a history of killing prosecutions, doesn’t he? — in order to keep faith with Obama’s supporters and donors among the Hollywood Left?

Legal incompetence or corrupt backroom deal?

We suggest you go read the article and decide for yourself.

According to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the answer right now is “maybe”:

In Monday’s ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered immigration judges to reconsider whether Guatemalan women constitute a “particular social group” that may be persecuted. Courts have granted such status to women who fear genital mutilation and victims of domestic abuse, but two lower courts had said Guatemalan women was too broad a category.

Lawyers for Lesly Yajayra Perdomo — a Medicaid account executive for a health care company in Reno, Nevada — argued that a high murder rate for women in her native Guatemala means that deporting her would constitute “a death sentence.”

By this logic, don’t we end up with pretty much any high crime rate as grounds for political asylum? When did the “political” in “political asylum” cease to have any meaning?

We can now expect a flood of applications for political asylum from third-world countries with high crime rates.

The original article is here.

After decades churning out lawyers like sausages, the law school industry has hit the point of diminishing returns. Between the horrific economic conditions and the vast herds of lawyers and law school graduates roaming the American landscape, freshly-minted lawyers are having trouble finding jobs. So law schools have begun acting to protect their graduates’ financial prospects. As well as preserve their own reputations and rankings.

Next month Loyola Law School in Los Angeles will  retroactively inflate its grades by adding  0.333 to every grade recorded in recent years. Loyola is not alone in artificially inflating grades to make its students look better.

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.

The schools have not limited their efforts to artificially inflating grades. They have come up with a number of clever ploys to inflate placement rates as well. Some schools have moved on-campus interviews up from traditional fall dates to summer, before the school year starts, to give their students a head start in the interview and hiring season. Some schools are even resorting to subsidizing employment for grads, paying students to take volunteer jobs and paying law firms to hire their graduates:

Others, like Duke and the University of Texas at Austin, offer stipends for students to take unpaid public interest internships. Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law even recently began paying profit-making law firms to hire its students.

Back in the ’50’s, when record labels and disc jockeys did pretty much the same thing, it was called “payola”, became a scandal, and heads rolled.

Some really, really big name schools have avoided grade inflation by the simple expedient of avoiding grades completely:

Harvard and Stanford, two of the top-ranked law schools, recently eliminated traditional grading altogether. Like Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, they now use a modified pass/fail system, reducing the pressure that law schools are notorious for. This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview.

While it is possible to view law school students and recent grads as innocent victims of the economic system, it seems unlikely that the hard times at law schools will generate a whole lot of public sympathy. In fact, one might note a certain poetic justice in the idea that law schools, long dominated by left-leaning professors spouting social-equality theories in the guise of legal principles, are being forced to create a sort of welfare society for their own institutions.

The full N.Y. Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/business/22law.html

Early favorite for legal outrage of the day:

Illegal immigrants sue Arizona rancher for holding them at gunpoint – on HIS OWN RANCH – until the Border Patrol arrived to take them into custody, claiming he violated their civil rights.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/09/16-illegals-sue-arizona-rancher/

But another strong contender emerges:

Justice Department finally explains dismissing Black Panther voter intimidation case: “well, we just don’t think it was a good case”, or something or other.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/16/justice-official-black-panther/

This explains a lot!

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.

This is an actual quote from the job listing, available here:

http://www.justice.gov/oarm/jobs/attorneyvotingoarm2010..htm

 This language appears in the third paragraph under “Other Information.”

“Taxation without representation is tyranny!”

Everybody knows that. It was the reason for the American Revolution, the rallying cry of Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and the other revolutionists.

But a Virginia Judge has ruled that a non-elected “transportation board” has the legal authority to impose taxes:

An Arlington judge yesterday ruled that starting in January an unelected regional body can levy on Northern Virginia residents a slew of new taxes and fees to pay for local transportation upgrades.

The ruling by Circuit Court Judge Benjamin N.A. Kendrick would allow the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, composed of 14 voting members, to raise about $300 million a year through higher taxes on home sales, car safety inspections and auto repairs to fund regional road and rail projects.

“Northern Virginia Transportation Authority is an independent political subdivision similar to other entities such as water and sewer authorities, sanitary districts, and industrial development authorities,” Judge Kendrick said. “It is not a local government with an elected governing body.”

The Virginia Constitution and Declaration of rights, authored primarily by George Mason (NOT Thomas Jefferson) specifically states that Virginia’s citizens “cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for public uses without their own consent or that of their representatives so elected”. (continue reading…)