Words, speech, and a free press.

There are some words that make public interest lawyers get out of bed in the morning ready to fight:

Note the contrast between:

"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

via the US Supreme Court NY Times v. US 1971

and:

Referring to publishing WikiLeaks releases:  “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.” Senator Joe Lieberman 2010

via Daring Fireball 

Wisdom from blog comments

Sometimes a million monkeys randomly banging away on blog comment boxes do produce a little wisdom, no Shakespeare, but still wisdom.  I typically find blog comments to be the largest waste of time and bandwidth on the internet; for some reason this is particularly true of legal blog comments:  sound and fury in abundance but completely devoid of significance--perhaps it is Shakespeare after all.  Against my better judgement, today, I read the comments on an ABA article.  Along with the usual comment induced heightening of my blood pressure and thoughts that rhyme with "LaRouche Swag" and "Back Sass,"  came the unusual feeling that someone had struck on a moment of ever so slight enlightenment:

"Atticus Finch didn’t work in a law factory and probably made just enough to feed his family. If new attorneys are willing to accept that, they can all be Atticus Finches, too. Want to fight for justice in the courtroom? Become a prosecutor or a public defender or start your own solo practice."  --quote some person called MAC in a blog comment

 Delivery of legal services to the poor depends on countless hours performed by private attorneys in big firms, and many people augment the fulfillment they normally get from a larger firm job with pro bono work and community involvement.  Often those larger firm attorneys are able to give larger contributions to pro bono work and the community because of the money and resources at their disposal.  But there is more to the job of a large firm attorney than what they do in their unbilled time.

New lawyers can and do make profound contributions to justice while working at larger firms, but--pay attention, this is the important part--if your purpose and drive is to help the helpless, to protect the innocent or the innocent victims, or to save the world, you are likely to feel unfulfilled and unhappy if your work's main motivation and driving force is not the same.  At the end of the day, the master of the large firm attorney is the paying client, not the pro bono client.

If you came to law school because you want to stand on the side of the Tom Robinsons of the world, if you believe Boo Radley deserves his dignity, then make sure your work's purpose is standing up for Tom Robinson or delivering dignity to Boo Radley.  If you take a public service or public interest position, debt be damned, your reward will follow, it may not be in the form of dollars, but trust that your reward will follow.

What Public Interest Lawyers Believe

Everyone is full of grace and beauty.

Everybody does it, even the judges, so why don't you?

Last week in an article on the Law.com Legal Blog Watch Blog, they reported on a number of judges with LinkedIn profiles, including five US Circuit Court Judges. Like it or not, between Facebook and LinkedIn more and more social and professional interaction is taking place online, so why not just dive in, talk to people, and share your life online?

Well, as an earlier article on the Legal Blog Watch Blog shows, even the best of us, judges included, can get carried away with the social networking. There are, of course, the issues of sharing too many of your youthful indiscretions too freely. (I am personally thankful that, even though photos of me--both strangely messianic and less flattering--are freely available online, I came of age in the era before ubiquitous camera phones and Facebook; otherwise I might regret some of my wilder days, or that toga party when I was in law school...) But beyond unseemly photos of your last kegger, there are more complex social networking considerations for lawyers and law students.

The judge who got reprimanded for using Facebook fell into the trap of commenting without enough thought. You see the Judge's Facebook Friend was an attorney who had an active case in front of the judge, and Facebook comments can be ex parte communications; hence, a trial no-no and a reprimand. The judge did some other mis-deeds like Google a litigant and read the litigant's online poetry into the record, but this story is about caution in social networking...

So you might do well to network in the electronic world possibly even finding a judge to be your friend, but you should not leave your reason and ethical considerations at the keyboard.

Sometimes someone else sums up your feelings completely

Feeling bad about not blogging.

Hopefully very few of you have been feeling this way during the first week of classes.

Welcome back returning students and hello new students!

Perspective on Seventy Cents

Seventy Cents an hour, or about $1,400 a year for full-time workers is what today's minimum wage increase means. In Oregon, though, it will not mean any change because the state minimum wage is already $8.50 per hour, that is $1.25 more than the new national minimum wage of $7.25.

What does $7.25 per hour mean for the working poor? First it means that, in states where the federal minimum wage applies, a single parent of one who works a full-time minimum wage job will make just slightly more than the federal poverty guideline for a two person family. But beating the poverty level (just $14,570 annually for a family of 2 in 2009) is far from a comfortable or secure life.

The State of Oregon Housing and Community Services attempts to make a more realistic estimate of what constitutes poverty in each of Oregon's County and reports the results in an annual report. According to the most recent, January 2009, report that single parent with one child living in Multnomah County would require $35,556 per year to afford a basic family budget. In order to create that income, the single parent working full time would have to earn $17.09 per hour. More than twice Oregon's minimum wage, and nearly ten dollars an hour more than the new national minimum wage. It would take $41,316 for two parents with one child to afford a basic budget in Multnomah County, equivalent to $9.93 per hour with both parents working full-time jobs; still well in excess of Oregon's and the nation's minimum wages.

Surely the 24 hour news channels and the Sunday TV Politics and Press shows of the chattering class will be full of people alternately calling the minimum wage increase salvation for the poor and the death knell for our economy, but neither of those things loudly proclaimed straight from the gut of their speakers will prove to be true. When talking about those who live at the edges of poverty, it is easy to react from the gut, but a little perspective can provide more meaning.

Even with the 70 cent increase in the minimum wage, it is still possible to work hard, to work full-time in American and not make ends meet. It is possible for a woman to work full time and come home to wonder how she will find enough money to pay a lawyer to get a restraining order to help keep herself and her child safe from an abusive relationship she just escaped. It is possible for man to work full time and wonder where the money will come from to pay a lawyer to help get back what was lost when a shady mechanic took advantage of him. It is possible for a couple, both working full time to find themselves staring at a retaliatory eviction notice without money for a lawyer to fight and afraid that they and their kids will be kicked out into the street.

These are some of the people served by public interest attorneys. To leave you with a little more perspective: some of these public interest attorneys do not even make enough to afford the state of Oregon's budget for a single parent in Multnomah County. See the national distribution of attorney salaries for the class of 2008.

William is wondering if he will be destroying his career with his status message

The weblogs and even the NY Times have been all Henny Penny concerning a beta and possibly broad changes to how people can control privacy on Facebook, but the reality sounds much more subdued than the initial end of June panic. Despite reality being less frightening than some have predicted, this is a good time to do a social networking privacy checkup.

What is going on with Facebook and privacy?

Fecabook rolled out a beta of the new publisher (that box where you enter your status message, links, and other things) that allows people to select the privacy level they want on a per post basis. A combination of the fact that one of the options is to make your post visible to everybody, and the fact that the beta was only provided to people who previously set their status to visible by everyone caused some fear that we would all be soon living in a brave new Facebook naked of privacy settings and having to remember to lock away every single post. From what I can tell, past the hype, your default settings will remain if/when the new publisher goes beyond the beta tests. So let us checkup on your defaults.

Defaults?

In Facebook you can control your default privacy settings on several elements of your profile. You can even partition your friends into lists and specifically block certain profile elements from certain friends; this can be useful for separating things you want professional colleagues to see from all your friends/acquaintances/angry towns people who remember that wicked awesome toga party you once threw--no matter what you think, there are photos, and they will be posted one day. Facebook has detailed help on privacy settings. Pay attention to friends of friends and network settings thinking hard about who this might include.

Do not forget the search settings.

Separate from your default privacy settings are your search settings. These control what shows up when people search for your name. It is worth noting that one of the items you can turn off in your search settings is the listing of the pages you are a fan of. If you tighten down all of your other privacy settings and forget this one, everyone will be able to see that you are an enormous fan of Emo Sponge Bob and judge you based on that revelation.