Following up on my post earlier this week about the music-downloading trial of Joel Tenenbaum underway in federal court in Boston, there has been a major development. Late last night, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said she would order a directed verdict against Tenenbaum on his liability for copyright infringement. That leaves the jury to [...]

Early in the 2007 school year at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., cheerleading coach Tommie Hill demanded that each member of the cheerleading squad give him the passwords to their Facebook accounts. No sooner did the students hand over their passwords than most deleted their accounts. But Mandi Jackson, then 14, did not delete [...]

Concerned about the shrinking number of available jobs in the legal profession, the Law Society of England and Wales is warning potential law students to proceed with caution before signing up for law school, advising that they may want to consider alternative careers. As The Lawyer reports, 7,000 people completed the U.K.’s Legal Practice Course [...]

The woman who called the police in Cambridge, Mass., to report a possible break-in at the home of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is now talking to the public — through her attorney, at least. The woman, Lucia Whalen, has hired high-profile lawyer and TV commentator Wendy Murphy (pictured). Through Murphy, the woman issued [...]

The jury is back from its flat-panel bedecked deliberation room, and the verdict for the greatest legal television show of all time is… "L.A. Law," according to a panel of 12 "experts" (including nine lawyers) selected by the ABA Journal. The rest of the list shows a mixed affinity for the classic (#2 — "Perry [...]

As an attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the administration of President George W. Bush, John Yoo helped write the so-called torture memos, justifying the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" against "enemy combatants." Among the iconic images to come out of that era were the photographs of black-hooded prisoners at Abu [...]

Has the revolution been co-opted? That was my first thought when I read that the ABA Journal, one of the most mainstream of all legal industry publications, is sponsoring the Legal Rebels project in an effort to remake the legal profession. So who are the legal rebels? According to Ed Adams, ABA Journal editor-in-chief, the [...]

As far as I can tell from reading his blog, H. Luiz is currently in law school. That does not mean, however, that he is happy there (even if "happy law student" is an oxymoron). Luiz has compiled a list of the top eight reasons not to go to law school. Were it not far [...]

You wouldn’t expect a simple Blawg Review from a site with a name like The Complex Litigator, and this week’s Blawg Review #221 doesn’t disappoint. It’s anything but a simple summary of this week’s past posts. Covering a wide swath of the blogosphere, this edition of the weekly "blog carnival" includes topics like the potential [...]

Back in November 2008, a couple months after I joined Twitter, it was clear to me that at some point down the road big law firms were going to discover Twitter, too. I assumed that for consistency and branding, they would likely want to use their internet domain names as their Twitter username, and took [...]

Our friends at Tex Parte bring us news of a good ol’ fashioned Texas lawyer shout-out, courtesy an A&E reality TV show called "After the First 48." The new show documents what happens in a Texas capital murder case in the days after a suspect is arrested — following a series of events chronicled in [...]

As these Google news search results show, coverage of the Sotomayor hearings has been almost unrelenting. Yesterday’s session was largely devoted to introductory remarks from the senators on the judiciary committee. Now, day two of the Sotomayor hearings is just about complete, with the post mortems from this morning’s session rolling in. The WSJ Law [...]

It’s one thing to be fired for using Facebook. It’s quite another to be jailed for it. According to the Reporters Without Borders Web site, 69-year-old human rights activist Khedija Arfaoui is facing an eight-month jail sentence imposed by a court in Tunisia for posting a message on Facebook referring to rumors about children being [...]

Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters. Pretty hard to get in too much hot water with that kind of word limit, right? Well, Jean Anleu has found otherwise. In May, authorities in Guatemala arrested and charged Anleu after he sent a 96-character tweet urging depositors to withdraw funds from a bank involved in a [...]

We noted here Monday the abrupt resignation of Mark Sargent as dean of Villanova University School of Law. His resignation was later linked to his involvement in a prostitution investigation. State police said he had been seen leaving a house of prostitution during a raid last November. He was not charged with any crime and [...]

Has the legal blogosphere gone to pot? Mike Cernovich at the blog Crime & Federalism seems to think so. He sees it as overrun by shallow marketing and exclusive cliques. He makes good points. His post is inspired by one at another blog, Apt. 11D, that considers how blogging has changed over the past six [...]

With the number of virtual law firms on the rise, expect cloud computing to become more pervasive. After all, because virtual firms do not share office space, it’s the most efficient tool for enabling individual lawyers within a virtual firm to share files, prepare joint bills or access common documents. Just as law firms are [...]

"You don’t have to say much to set off an avalanche in the blogosphere," observes James M. Beck, counsel in the Philadelphia office of Dechert, in a post yesterday at the blog Drug and Device Law, which he co-authors with Mark Herrmann, a partner in the Chicago office of Jones Day. In this case, the [...]

Dan Slater, the former lead author of the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, has a controversial new column at the New York Times Deal Book in which he ponders whether all of the BigLaw layoffs just might be a good thing after all. Slater writes: The legal media, in its rush to side with the [...]

Two major legal publishers announced initiatives this week to help laid-off lawyers keep their heads above water and make the transition to new jobs. Coincidentally or not, both West and LexisNexis announced their initiatives on the same day. West’s initiative is a two-pronged effort built around two new Web sites. The first prong is Between [...]