U.S. Supreme Court Clerk William Suter to speak to the Federal Bar today

They call him "The General" and he'll be at the Hyatt at noon. 

He's retiring at the end of this Term after 20 years at the High Court.

Should be an entertaining talk.

11th Circuit

The judges are back from the 11th Circuit conference, which was in Savannah, Georgia last week.

Apparently the agenda included a re-enactment of a slavery trial that occurred in Savannah and also a speech by a Thomas Jefferson impersonator.



Meantime, there are still two openings on the 11th Circuit and apparently no progress being made in moving those nominations forward.

Since the 11th got back to business this week, it has ruled on an interesting case involving Cuba.  From Bloomberg:

Florida lost a court bid to reinstate a law prohibiting state agencies from entering into contracts worth $1 million or more with companies that do business with Cuba.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta said today that the Florida measure “reaches far beyond the federal law in numerous ways and undermines the president’s exercise of the discretion afforded him by Congress.” A three-judge panel upheld a July ruling by a lower court in Miami barring enforcement of the law.
The “Cuba Amendment” legislation was signed on May 1, 2012, by Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, and covers an estimated $8 billion in annual state contracts, the appeals court said. The law, designed to apply economic pressure to the communist regime in Cuba beyond the U.S. government sanctions already in place, was challenged by Odebrecht Construction Inc. 

And back home in South Florida, it looks like Judge Rosenbaum will be busy with this case filed by Frank Haith.  From the Herald:


Former University of Miami basketball coach Frank Haith on Monday morning filed a petition in Miami-Dade federal court seeking subpoenas to try to uncover whether his checking account records were accessed illegally by unauthorized parties as part of the NCAA Nevin Shapiro investigation.
He and his attorney, Michael Buckner, want to be able to depose Bank of America employees and make sure the bank preserves evidence in anticipation of a civil lawsuit.
The Rule 27 Petition, obtained by The Miami Herald, states that in October 2012, Haith and his wife, Pamela, became suspicious of a possible privacy breach and have tried unsuccessfully to resolve the issue through repeated requests to the bank. If a Bank of America employee or agent permitted an unknown party to view or procure the records, it could be a violation of federal and state laws.
Haith, now at the University of Missouri, had been asked by the NCAA to provide microfiche copies of three checks dated June 10, 2010. He had already provided photocopies of those checks, and other financial documents, in October 2011, but the NCAA wanted clearer images. Each check was for $3,200 andmade out to his assistant coaches — Jorge Fernandez, Jake Morton and Michael Schwartz.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/07/3383416/bank-account-of-ex-um-coach-frank.html#storylink=cpy

How pro-business is this Supreme Court

Apparently, the most pro-business Supreme Court ever... From the NY Times:

But the business docket reflects something truly distinctive about the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While the current court’s decisions, over all, are only slightly more conservative than those from the courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, according to political scientists who study the court, its business rulings are another matter. They have been, a new study finds, far friendlier to business than those of any court since at least World War II.

In the eight years since Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, it has allowed corporations to spend freely in elections in the Citizens United case, has shielded them from class actions and human rights suits, and has made arbitration the favored way to resolve many disputes. Business groups say the Roberts court’s decisions have helped combat frivolous lawsuits, while plaintiffs’ lawyers say the rulings have destroyed legitimate claims for harm from faulty products, discriminatory practices and fraud.

Whether the Roberts court is unusually friendly to business has been the subject of repeated discussion, much of it based on anecdotes and studies based on small slices of empirical evidence. The new study, by contrast, takes a careful and comprehensive look at some 2,000 decisions from 1946 to 2011.

Published last month in The Minnesota Law Review, the study ranked the 36 justices who served on the court over those 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes; all five of the current court’s more conservative members were in the top 10. But the study’s most striking finding was that the two justices most likely to vote in favor of business interests since 1946 are the most recent conservative additions to the court, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush.

 

I wonder how district courts around the country as a whole rank now -- I would bet that like the Supreme Court, they are more pro-business now than ever. 

Cuban spy to give up citizenship and remain in Cuba

Curt Anderson has all of the details:

One of the convicted spies known as the "Cuban Five" will be able to permanently remain in Cuba in exchange for renouncing his U.S. citizenship, a federal judge ruled Friday after U.S. officials dropped their initial opposition.
Rene Gonzalez, 56, has been in Cuba since April 22 to attend memorial services for his father, who died earlier last month. Gonzalez was released from U.S. prison in October 2011 but was still serving three years' probation, which the Justice Department had previously insisted must be completed in the U.S.
This week, however, the Justice Department reversed its position, leading to U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard's ruling accepting Gonzalez's offer to give up U.S. citizenship.
Reached in Havana, Gonzalez told The Associated Press he was thrilled but wanted a chance to review the judge's decision.
"First I have to read the order," he said. "If the order is real, it will be a great relief to me."

Nominees for Florida Circuit Court

The blog generally doesn't cover state court appointments (that's Rumpole's domain), but that latest Circuit Court seat has some interesting applicants from the federal family.  The Governor will decide from the following five, three of which have federal court ties:

Jason Bloch
Donald J. Cannava
Wendell M. Graham
Ayana Harris
Robert Luck

Bloch is a county attorney.  Harris is a AFPD.  Luck is a AUSA.  Cannava and Graham are county judges.

Above the Law ranks law schools

It's a very interesting read and analysis:

The basic premise underlying the ATL approach to ranking schools: the economics of the legal job market are so out of balance that it is proper to consider some legal jobs as more equal than others. In other words, a position as an associate with a large firm is a “better” employment outcome than becoming a temp doc reviewer or even an associate with a small local firm. That might seem crassly elitist, but then again only the Biglaw associate has a plausible prospect of paying off his student loans.
In addition to placing a higher premium on “quality” (i.e., lucrative) job outcomes, we also acknowledge that “prestige” plays an out-sized role in the legal profession. We can all agree that Supreme Court clerkships and federal judgeships are among the most “prestigious” gigs to be had. Our methodology rewards schools for producing both.
Now more than ever, potential law students should prioritize their future job prospects over all other factors in deciding whether to attend law school. So the relative quality of law schools is best viewed through the prism of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment. The bottom line is that we have a terrible legal job market. Of the 60,000 legal sector jobs lost in 2008-9, only 10,000 have come back. So the industry is down 50,000 jobs and there is no reason to believe they will ever reappear. If you ignore school-funded positions (5% of the total number of jobs), this market is worse than its previous low point of 1993-4. The time has come for a law school ranking that relies on nothing but employment outcomes.

Tuesday News & Notes

1.  Justice Breyer has been released from the hospital following shoulder surgery after his biking accident. (via AP)

2. Justice O'Connor regrets Bush v. Gore:

“It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” Justice O’Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board on Friday. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’”
She continued: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”
The result, she allowed, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

3.  Is 100 years a life sentence under Graham (via NY Times)?:

The lower courts are split on how to interpret the Graham decision, and the Supreme Court seems to be in no hurry to answer the question. Last week, the justices turned away an appeal from Chaz Bunch of Ohio, who was convicted of kidnapping and raping a woman in a carjacking when he was 16. He was sentenced to 89 years. Even assuming he becomes eligible for early release, he will be 95 years old before he can leave prison.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, upheld the sentence, even as it acknowledged that there were two ways to approach the matter.

“Some courts have held that such a sentence is a de facto life without parole sentence and therefore violates the spirit, if not the letter, of Graham,” Judge John M. Rogers wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. “Other courts, however, have rejected the de facto life sentence argument, holding that Graham only applies to juvenile non-homicide offenders expressly sentenced to ‘life without parole.’ ”

Until the Supreme Court speaks, Judge Rogers wrote, there is no “clearly established federal law” to assist Mr. Bunch, who was challenging his state conviction in federal court.

Applying the reasoning of the Graham decision to long fixed sentences, Judge Rogers added, “would lead to a lot of questions.” An appeals court in Florida last year listed some of them in upholding a 76-year sentence meted out to Leighdon Henry, who was 16 when he committed rape.

“At what number of years would the Eighth Amendment become implicated in the sentencing of a juvenile: 20, 30, 40, 50, some lesser or greater number?” Judge Jacqueline R. Griffin wrote for the court. 

4.  Judy Clarke has been appointed to assist the Boston Fed PD in the Marathon Bombing case. She also represented Jared Loughner.

5.  President Obama isn't getting his judicial nominees confirmed. Who is to blame? Via Huffington:

It's bad enough that there are 82 vacant federal judge slots around the country, a level so high that many observers have deemed it a crisis situation.

But perhaps even more startling is the fact that of those 82 vacant slots, 61 of them don't even have a nominee.
On its face, the absence of nominees would appear to be a sign that President Barack Obama is slacking. After all, he is responsible for nominating judges, and he did put forward fewer nominees at the end of his first term than his two predecessors. But a closer look at data on judicial nominees, and conversations with people involved in the nomination process, reveals the bigger problem is Republican senators quietly refusing to recommend potential judges in the first place.

Maybe it's time to stop riding the bike

Justice Breyer had a horrible biking accident this weekend, requiring reconstructive shoulder surgery.  It was his third bad biking accident.  From CNN:

In 1993, he had a nasty accident when a car stuck him in Harvard Square while he was on his two-wheeler. He suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs.

Then, over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, Breyer broke his right collarbone after falling off his two-wheeler in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has a second home.

 

Man, that's rough.

 

Closer to home, Judge Jordan is explaining that prosecutors actually have to prove up guideline enhancements. From the Court's opinion in United States v. Washington:

 

Sometimes a number is just a number,* but when the number at issue triggers an enhancement under the Sentencing Guidelines, that number matters. In this appeal we decide whether the government presented sufficient evidence that 250 or more persons or entities were victimized by the fraud scheme in which Gary Washington participated. Because the government failed to put on any evidence that there were 250 or more victims, we vacate Mr. Washington’s sentence and remand for the district court to resentence Mr. Washington with a 2-level enhancement under U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(2)(A) rather than a 6-level enhancement under § 2B1.1(b)(2)(C).
*See, e.g., J. Keefe, Dow 10,000: Sometimes a Number is Just a Number, CBS Moneywatch (Oct. 15, 2009).

This part of the decision was also interesting:

The government asks that it be allowed to prove on remand that there were 250 or more victims for whom Mr. Washington was responsible. We decline the government’s request. Nothing prevented the government -- which was aware of Mr. Washington’s objection -- from putting on evidence concerning the number of victims at the sentencing hearing, and a party who bears the burden on a contested sentencing issue will generally not get to try again on remand if its evidence is found to be insufficient on appeal. We have discretion to permit the government to present evidence at resentencing even though it amounts to giving the party a second bite at the apple. But often a remand for further findings is inappropriate when the issue was before the district court and the parties had an opportunity to introduce relevant evidence, and here the government failed to present any evidence concerning the number of victims.