I happened to see on Yahoo Answers a question I had always wondered about myself – why are there three ducks on the seal of the University of Houston Law Center? So I did a little research. According to the Law Center website:
The Law Center seal includes three martlets above an opened text inscribed with “LEX,” the Latin word for law. Martlets, symbolizing peace and deliverance, also appear in the University of Houston seal – which in turn is drawn from the coat of arms of General Sam Houston who claimed descent
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My apologies, to anyone who may still read this thing, for my intentional neglect. I went on a self-imposed blog hiatus as I underwent the semiannual hazing ritual for all new lawyers known as the bar exam.
For recent law graduates, life divides neatly into equal halves. There is everything that has come before the bar exam (B.B.) and then there is post bar exam (A.B., annos barexamini). The bar exam has the unique ability to obliterate all your other interests, achievements, dreams or aspirations, at least temporarily. They are like 8mm home…
Senator Robert Byrd passed away last night. While I knew of the good Senator’s remarkable longevity in public service, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he displayed equal stick-to-it-iveness in obtaining a law degree as a night student at American University’s Washington College of Law in D.C. He began in 1952, recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He finished over ten years later, as a Senator, in 1963.
President Kennedy, who received an honorary degree that day, began the commencement address before the crowd at American University:
President Anderson, members of
For the client who likes to overshare on the go, the good People of Resource got a chance to show off their Pocket Nondisclosure Agreement Notepad at Atlanta’s Yall & Us design fair.
There’s an analogy for law students in here somewhere, but I’m going to wait until after taking the bar before doing any existential self-analysis.
Law school exam season is upon us. One more to go for me. This spoof from LSU’s Assault and Flattery will either give you a little hope or extinguish it entirely.
The Eighth Amendment of our Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Aside from the jurisprudential gloss the phrase has acquired over time, it’s an odd one. Sure, let’s prohibit needlessly cruel punishments but only if they’re unusual? Why carve out constitutional protection for time-honored methods of torture but prevent innovations in cruelty? Rob Cottingham provides an excellent example:
If you’ve sat through enough of these, there’s no doubt that powerpoint can meet the cruelty prong and yet it’s the sheer ‘usualness’ of it, the part that makes it so intolerable when yet another deer-in-the-headlights presenter nervously recites…
Lessig’s powerpoint is truly a marvel; his take on the consequences of Citizens United is both accessible and insightful.
07 April 2010: The Hugo Black Lecture at Wesleyan. This talk addresses Citizens United and the relevant speech interests that should justify campaign finance regulation. But given the Court’s judgment, these justifications must await constitutional revision.
A case that came through the University of Houston Law Center’s Immigration Clinic, Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, will be argued tomorrow in the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m told that several of the clinic students who worked on the case were able to make it up to the Court to watch a culmination of their efforts. The work in the clinics was headed up by Geoff Hoffman, a faculty supervisor in the University of Houston Immigration Clinic who serves as co-counsel, with oral argument to be handled by Sri Srinivasan, a veteran before the court who argued before the…
Adobe set the graphics world abuzz a few days ago with a sneak peek video of their new Content-Aware Fill to be released in the new version of Adobe Photoshop next month, CS5.
via John Nack
This is not earth-shattering news in the sense that it makes possible what was previously impossible, but because it makes quick, easy and effective was was previously slow, painful and easy to screw up. Anyone with a copy of Photoshop, some time on their hands and a good eye for image manipulation could doctor an image in a way that would…
There a lots of reasons why a law school should not be in the business of sponsoring ballparks, particularly right after they raise tuition. Thomas Cooley Law School in Michigan justified its decision to buy the naming rights to Oldsmobile Park in Lansing, Michigan for $1.5 million as sound marketing. Are the students who chose your law school because they saw your name at the last Lansing Lugnuts game, really the ones you’re after? Assuming for the sake of argument that it’s a brilliant ploy, I wonder if Cooley considered the stadium curse in their marketing calculations?…
Emily Bazelon’s in Slate, How Should Facebook and MySpace Handle Cyberbullying? provides some fascinating insight on how social media companies view their role in responding to cyberbullying and how their reactions are affected by current law regarding privacy and immunity across state, national and international jurisdictional lines that has the potential to be a rat’s nest of contradictory standards.
The approaches taken by social giants Facebook and MySpace differ on how proactive they are willing to be in policing the sites:
MySpace uses an algorithm to patrol for users who are lying about their age and says it deletes
