Kimba Wood is cool

Check out this motion and Judge Wood's awesome response.

Courtesy of the WSJ Law Blog:

The Manhattan lawyer recently asked New York federal judge Kimba Wood to grant him a day’s reprieve in a criminal trial to attend the bris of his grandson. Epstein’s daughter has not yet given birth — so he doesn’t yet know the sex of the baby. But Epstein wanted to give Judge Wood ample notice to consider his request, given that his daughter’s due date is Dec. 3, smack in the middle of the scheduled trial.
So Epstein was stuck in the slightly awkward position of asking Judge Wood for a day off if, in fact, the baby turns out to be a boy. If it’s a girl, well, no bris, no day off needed.

Wrote Epstein...:

Should the child be a girl, not much will happen in the way of public
celebration. Some may even be disappointed, but will do their best to conceal
this by saying, “as long as it’s a healthy baby.” . . . However, should the baby
be a boy, then hoo hah! Hordes of friends and family will arrive . . . for
the joyous celebration . . . known as the bris. . . . My presence at the bris is
not strictly commanded, although my absence will never be forgotten by those
that matter.

Judge Wood, in a note written at the bottom of the letter, granted the request. But she did Epstein one better. Wrote Wood:

Mr. Epstein will be permitted to attend the bris, in the joyous event that
a son is born. But the Court would like to balance the scales. If a daughter is
born, there will be a public celebration in Court, with readings from poetry
celebrating girls and women.

Federal JNC to interview all 16 applicants (updated)

I have it on good authority that all 16 applicants will be interviewed on November 30. I wonder if we can get Dore to live blog the interviews.

UPDATE -- Confirmed. See here. The 16 interviews start and end with Magistrates (Seltzer & O'Sullivan). Only a 40 minute lunch!

One commenter told me: "There are more JNC members than applicants!"

Unlike Justice Breyer, Justice Scalia is a techie

I posted last week about how Justice Breyer didn't really understand text messaging or Facebook. Well, Justice Scalia is different -- he even has an iPad and an iPod! From ABT:

By this point, the conversation started to shift into the home stretch, so Jan Crawford turned to fun stuff and lighter fare. She asked Justice Scalia: Do you have an iPod?
One might have expected Scalia, whose jurisprudence often involves traveling back in time to when particular constitutional provisions were enacted, to declare that he listens to all his music on a Victrola — but no. As it turns out, he does have an iPod!
This response seemed to catch Crawford by surprise. She asked him if he uploads the music himself; he said that he does, and that his playlist consists mostly of classical music and opera.
(It’s amusing to imagine Justice Scalia, one of the greatest legal minds in our nation, loading up his own iPod like a mere mortal. Couldn’t he ask a staffer to do it, or maybe one of his many grandchildren? But then again, if Justice Elena Kagan can fetch her own pizza, then Justice Scalia can load his own iPod.)
As it turns out, Scalia is more tech-savvy than one might have expected from a 74-year-old. He composes his opinions on a computer (unlike Chief Justice Roberts, who writes in longhand). In fact, said Scalia, “I can hardly write in longhand anymore” — which he’s reminded of whenever he has to write a handwritten condolence note.
When he has to take materials home for work, he uses a thumb drive, or accesses the Court computer system remotely. And perhaps most excitingly, as I previously reported on Twitter, Scalia has an iPad! He uses it for working at home; staff members load the parties’ briefs on to it.

I wonder whether the SDFLA judges are more like Breyer or Scalia. I know many of them email from their phones (I actually saw one judge recently in her car emailing as she was driving), but do they Facebook, Twitter, read the blogs, etc?

There's lots more fun stuff at ABT on Scalia, so go check it out.

Wesley Snipes surrenders

The judge said it was time: "The defendant Snipes had a fair trial; he has had a full, fair and thorough review of his conviction and sentence. ... The time has come for the judgment to be enforced," the judge wrote in his 16-page decision.

From Bop.gov: 1. WESLEY TRENT SNIPES 43355-018 48-Black-M UNKNOWN IN TRANSIT

Baby steps

The 9th Circuit will air the Prop 8 case on TV!

According to SCOTUSBlog:

The Ninth Circuit Court agreed on Wednesday to allow live and delayed broadcasting of the Dec. 6 oral argument on the constitutionality of Proposition 8 — California’s ban on same-sex marriage. In a brief order, the Court cleared live broadcasting by C-SPAN, the cable network. It also gave permission to a San Francisco station, KGO-TV, an ABC affiliate, to provide coverage.

It's something at least. HT: BL

Judge Camp is going to plead guilty today. I'll post the plea agreement as soon as it's public. The Times Herald reports:

Senior U.S. District Judge Jack Camp is scheduled to enter a plea of guilty today in federal court on two misdemeanor counts and one count of aiding and abetting another’s drug possession, according to Newnan attorney Michael Kam, one of the attorneys representing Camp.

What do you think is a fair sentence?

"It's quite clear, we don't have a Facebook page."

That was Justice Breyer at a speech yesterday. More:

If I'm applying the First Amendment, I have to apply it to a world where there's an Internet, and there's Facebook, and there are movies like ... 'The Social Network,' which I couldn't even understand," he said.
Oy.

It doesn't get better:

Although Breyer was making a point about judicial philosophy, he also touched on the court's sometimes limited grasp of technological developments. For example, Chief Justice John Roberts in a public employee privacy case before the court earlier this year tried to figure out the role of a text-messaging service in enabling an exchange between two people.

"I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing," Roberts said. Responded Justice Antonin Scalia: "You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?"

And in a recent case dealing with a California law regulating the sale or rental of violent video games to children, Justice Anthony Kennedy pressed a skeptical state lawyer on whether the v-chip blocking device, rather than a state law, could be used to keep children away from the games.

"V-chips won't work?" Kennedy asked, before the lawyer politely explained they are limited to television programming.
I do agree with Breyer here:

Breyer said he disagrees with those who argue that originalism is "a good system because it will keep the subjective impulses of the judge under control."

"If you want to have history solve everything, let's get nine historians and not nine judges," Breyer said. "And you'll discover that the nine historians are fighting about the various points on which these cases turn anyway."

Adam Liptak from the NY Times has an interesting article today about how vague Supreme Court opinions are and how lower courts are struggling trying to figure them out. Here's a passage from the article dealing with the text messaging case:

In the privacy case that infuriated Justice Scalia and mystified Judge Hull, City of Ontario v. Quon, the Supreme Court ruled that a California police department had not violated the constitutional privacy rights of a member of a SWAT team when it audited the text messages on a pager the city had issued him.

Justice Kennedy took the unusual step of accepting three important points in the case only for the sake of argument, and he spent much of his opinion explaining that the court had taken pains to decide as little as possible.

“Cellphone and text message communications are so pervasive that some persons may consider them to be essential means or necessary instruments for self-expression, even self-identification,” Justice Kennedy went on. “On the other hand, the ubiquity of those devices has made them generally affordable, so one could counter that employees who need cellphones or similar devices for personal matters can purchase and pay for their own.”

Given that, he said, the case should be decided on grounds so narrow that the decision would have almost no precedential effect. “The judiciary risks error by elaborating too fully on the Fourth Amendment implications of emerging technology before its role in society has become clear,” he wrote.

In his concurrence, Justice Scalia decried this approach.

“Applying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies may sometimes be difficult, but when it is necessary to decide a case, we have no choice,” he wrote. “The-times-they-are-a-changin’ is a feeble excuse for disregard of duty.”

Many scholars say there is an important place in Supreme Court jurisprudence for incremental rulings, purposeful ambiguity and the delegation of discretion to lower court judges.

“If the goal is to clear up any conflict in the lower court opinions, then you may want a clearer opinion,” Professor Spriggs said. “But a real bright line may create some injustices in the system.”

We're # 2!!

From the New Times: "MIA Ranked Second Most Hellish Airport in U.S. for Second Year Running". We were bested by Newark. Newark!

I actually like the new D terminal, despite the really long walks. The train 3 floors up isn't really convenient. But at least there are some restaurants along the way.

Howard Stern & Billy Joel

Okay, I know this is way off topic, but I couldn't get out of my car this morning, listening to Howard Stern interview Billy Joel. It was fantastic hearing him play his music in the studio and explaining how the song was written, etc. Here's one of his best to get your Tuesday morning started:




Okay, one more: