Summer speaking

Lots of Supreme Court Justices speaking this summer in really nice places. The latest are Justices Roberts and Kagan.

Justice Roberts has a rule about not speaking while on vacation, but he broke it and spoke in Maine:

"When judges or justices speak in court, there's a good chance we will disappoint half of the people who appear before us. When we speak in public, we have a good chance of disappointing everyone," Roberts said. "Despite that clear and present danger, I was happy to accept your kind invitation to visit this afternoon."

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Roberts said that while he appreciates the efficiency of the information age, he worries that modern methods of legal research could make it easier to confuse the collection of information with the acquisition of knowledge.

"I hope that the generations that follow will get a chance to experience learning in the enriching environment of a real library and not just a virtual one – a library where you feel connected to knowledge in a very tangible way and also connected to those working alongside you in a similar pursuit for knowledge," he said, "even if they're representing an adversary or even if they're working for a judge who will decide your case."


And Justice Kagan spoke in Aspen:

“I think this comes as a surprise to many people when I talk about my experiences on the court, and to me as well,” Kagan said during a conversation in the Greenwald Pavilion at the Aspen Institute. “You know you read the court's decisions, and often there's some pretty sharp give-and-take: people accusing other justices on the other side [of the issue] of a wide variety of terrible conduct.”

“The truth is, it is an incredibly collegial and warm institution, with good friendships throughout the court and across whatever people think of as ideological divides, and that was the nicest feature of joining the court, was feeling that,” she said. “And how well and respectfully the members of the institution operate together.”

BREAKING -- Kathy Williams confirmed! Yes!

Wow, lots of great news today in the District. First, as discussed below, Judge Adalberto Jordan was nominated to fill Judge Susan Black's seat on the 11th Circuit. So we're losing one great judge, but we gain another -- the Senate just unanimously confirmed Kathy Williams to sit on the Southern District of Florida (Judge Hurley's seat).

I'm so happy for Kathy. It took wayyy too long, but that's a story that's been written about quite a bit and today is not the day to rehash it. Today is the the day to celebrate for Kathy. And yes, I'm biased -- I used to work for her at the Federal Public Defender's office, where she is known and respected around the country as running the model FPD office.

She's going to be a fantastic judge -- smart, hardworking, and compassionate. What else do you want from a federal judge?

The picture is Kathy from her confirmation hearings.

Congrats to Judge Adalberto Jordan!

President Obama nominated him today to sit on the 11th Circuit. He will be terrific on the court of appeals but will be sorely missed on the district court where he was known for his smarts, his patience, for treating everyone with respect and for calling 'em right down the middle.

Here's the press release from the White House:
President Obama Nominates Judge Adalberto José Jordán to the United States Court of Appeals

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, President Obama nominated Judge Adalberto José Jordán to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

“Judge Adalberto José Jordán will bring an unwavering commitment to fairness and judicial integrity to the federal bench,” President Obama said. “His impressive legal career is a testament to the kind of thoughtful and diligent judge he will be on the Eleventh Circuit. I am honored to nominate him today.”

Judge Adalberto José Jordán: Nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
Judge Adalberto José Jordán has served as a District Judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami since 1999. He also teaches as an adjunct professor of law at University of Miami School of Law, where he has taught since 1990, and Florida International University College of Law, where he has taught since 2007. Judge Jordán was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of six. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Miami in 1984, and his J.D. summa cum laude from University of Miami School of Law in 1987. After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Thomas A. Clark of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 1987 to 1988, and the following year he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1989, Judge Jordán joined the Miami law firm of Steel Hector & Davis LLP (now Squire Sanders & Dempsey) as a litigation associate, eventually specializing in appellate practice and becoming a partner in 1994. Later that year, he joined the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida, serving as an Assistant United States Attorney in the appellate division and handling criminal and civil appeals on behalf of the government. Judge Jordán became appellate division chief in the office in 1998, and also served as special counsel to the United States Attorney for legal policy. Since being appointed to the District Court bench in 1999, Judge Jordán has presided over nearly 200 trials on a wide range of civil and criminal matters. In addition, he has frequently sat by designation on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

August in Miami

It's boiling outside and there's a hurricane that may slide by us this weekend, but at least there's no traffic.

Now that the debt deal is about done, the Senate has the rest of the week before the August recess to get Kathy Williams and Bob Scola confirmed. Let's see what happens.

Big reversal in the Second Circuit yesterday in US v. Ferguson. The AP summarizes the case this way:

Former executives of American International Group Inc. and General Re Corp. who were convicted in a $500 million fraud case deserve a new trial, because the judge at their 2008 trial wrongly admitted stock-price data into evidence and gave improper jury instructions, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the fraud convictions for the five officials and sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Hartford.

Prosecutors had accused the executives of participating in a scheme in which New York-based AIG secretly paid Stamford-based Gen Re to take out reinsurance policies with AIG in 2000 and 2001 to boost AIG's falling stock price. Reinsurance policies are backups purchased by insurance companies to completely or partly insure risk they have assumed for their customers.

Ronald E. Ferguson, Elizabeth A. Monrad, Robert D. Graham and Christopher P. Garand, all former executive officers of Gen Re, and Christian M. Milton, AIG's vice president of reinsurance, were sentenced to prison in 2009 for their involvement in the scheme, which authorities estimate cost AIG shareholders more than $500 million.

Testimony from two cooperating witnesses associated with Gen Re helped convict the five executives of conspiracy, mail fraud, securities fraud and false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They received sentences ranging from one to four years in jail, but remain free on bail pending the outcome of the appeal.

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[Chief Judge Jacobs] said the verdicts had to be vacated because of how U.S. District Judge Christopher Droney handled stock-price evidence and because Droney gave jury instruction that influenced the verdict.

The lower court was inconsistent in its rulings on displaying stock-price charts, Jacobs said. One chart showing the full decline in stock price was excluded as overly prejudicial, but it was "functionally identical" to another chart shown during prosecutors' opening statement, he said.

"The court's solution, to allow only isolated ranges of stock-price data, did not mitigate the prejudice," Jacobs wrote. "Instead of a downward line, there were three dropping sets of dots; it is inevitable that jurors would connect them."

In instructing the jury, the trial judge erred by offering an ambiguous standard of conviction that allowed the jury to convict without determining what caused the fraud, Jacobs wrote.

Oh, and Rumpole is finally back from his vacation.

Justice Ginsburg is funny!

Here's a recent speech she gave to the Otsego County Bar Association, which I found to be a great read (One example: “I am now delighted to report that not once this term has an advocate called me Justice Sotomayor or Justice Kagan, and the same holds true for my junior colleagues.")

JoshBlackman.com summarized some of the questions Justice Ginsburg reviewed from this Term (Ginsburg: “From the foregoing samples, you may better understand why the court does not plan to permit televising oral arguments any time soon.”):

• “What [did] James Madison th[ink] about video games?” --Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

• “What do you think about Satan?” -- Justice Antonin Scalia in Matrixx Initiatives v. Siracusano.

• “Does al-Qaida know all this stuff?” --Justice Antonin Scalia in NASA v. Nelson. (after a lawyer for the employees said they worked in a “campus atmosphere” and they posed little or no security risk).

• “Where is the 9,000-foot cow?” --Justice Stephen G. Breyer in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, involving Breyer’s hypothetical involving a Swiss law only allowing the purchase of milk from cattle grazing in pastures higher than 9,000 feet.

Bob Barr and I agree!

Here's an op-ed he just wrote on the over-criminalization problem in America. From the piece:

[F]ailure to address the overcriminalization of America is turning us into a society in which the average citizen is at the mercy of the federal government for fear of running afoul of some criminal law or regulation on any given day, despite having no intention whatsover of doing so.

The explosive growth in the number of federal crimes in recent decades has been nothing short of phenomenal. Three crimes — three — were considered of sufficient importance and of a unique federal nature, to be included specifically in the Constitution. Those three uniquely federal crimes are treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Over the decades, of course, other crimes were added, usually pegged to the infamous “commerce clause.” By 1980, the federal criminal code had mushroomed to about 3,000 separate criminal offenses. What has happened since 1980, however, has been nothing short of phenomenal — the list of federal criminal offenses has exploded to nearly 4,500 offenses; as noted most recently by Gary Fields and John Emshwiller in the Wall Street Journal. This figure does not even include the many more thousands of federal regulations that can be enforced by the government as criminal offenses.

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The list of such unfair and outrageous instances of abusive federal prosecutions is depressingly long; with many the result of the explosive growth of “environmental crimes” since the birth of the EPA four decades ago. Yet Congress after Congress continues to add crime after crime to the burgeoning federal criminal code, based often on pressure from interest groups and federal agencies themselves.

Finalists for U.S. Marshal

They are: James S. Higgins, Eben Morales and Amos Rojas Jr..

Many of you will remember Jaime Higgins, who is an ATF agent, currently on assignment in Vancouver, Canada. His wife is Celeste Higgins, a former AFPD in Miami.

Florida drug laws ruled unconstitutional

Today Judge Mary Scriven from the Middle District granted a writ of habeas corpus and declared Florida’s drug law unconstitutional. The case is Shelton v. Dept. of Corrections. NACDL filed this amicus brief . Here's the intro to the order:

On May 13, 2002, the Florida Legislature enacted changes to Florida’s Drug Abuse Prevention and Control law, FLA. STAT. § 893.13, as amended by FLA. STAT. § 893.101. By this enactment, Florida became the only state in the nation expressly to eliminate mens rea as an element of a drug offense. This case, challenging the constitutionality of that law, was filed following Plaintiff’s conviction for delivery of cocaine without the jury being required to consider his intent in any respect and the subsequent imposition of an eighteen year sentence following his conviction. Upon consideration of all relevant filings, case law, and being otherwise fully advised, the Court GRANTS Petitioner’s request for habeas relief (Dkt. 1), and finds that FLA. STAT. § 893.13 is unconstitutional on its face.

Full disclosure: I was one of the co-signors of the amicus brief for NACDL, authored by Todd Foster.