The nomination of Monroe County District Attorney Michael C. Green for a federal judgeship is before the Senate Judiciary Committee which is expected to schedule a hearing soon. Answers to the questionnaire are posted on the committee’s website (http://judiciary.senate.gov), along with the recent rating of the American Bar Association. The majority of the association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary finds Green ‘qualified,’ while a minority voted him as ‘not qualified.’

Not me, of course, but lots of workers complain about their bosses. In fact, tens of thousands of employees each year go so far as to take their concerns to the Department of Labor – more grievances than the agency can handle. Now there’s backup help. The Labor Department has established a first-of-its-kind program with the American Bar Association. The agency would put workers whose complaints it won’t take up in touch with private employment lawyers. The Bridge to Justice program focuses on potential violations of overtime, minimum wage and family medical leave laws.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is soliciting comments about a planned program that would cut down on controversial pat-downs and full-body scanner searches at airports and instead rely on an ‘intelligence’ system that focuses on people who have been identified as a threat. …The blog comes weeks after TSA Administrator, and former FBI agent, John Pistole told a group of American Bar Association lawyers that the agency is attempting to move more into intelligence on passengers who pose a threat rather than making air travel unpleasant for all of the 628 million people who are screened in the U.S. each year.

‘A truly mobile lawyer with a laptop can do everything they can do in their office by connecting through various software tools to access documents there and store that content on their laptop,’ says Pinnington, co-author of the book, Busy Lawyer’s Guide to Success: Essential Tips to Power Your Practice, published by the American Bar Association in 2009.

U.S. … Student applications to law schools this year are down about 12% from a year earlier, as college seniors grow leery of a degree that promises certain debt and uncertain job prospects. ‘The rising cost of a legal education and the realities of the legal job market mean that going to law school may not pay off,’ the American Bar Association warned in a 2009 report.

It used to be that getting a real estate license was the fallback career change du jour, then after the housing market collapsed it seemed everyone was going to law school.  But now, The Wall Street Journal reports, a job drought in the legal field has convinced 11.5 percent fewer students than last year from applying to become future Ally McBeals and Phoenix Wrights, causing the lawyer incubation pool to run dryer than it’s been since 2001. In 2009, says the story, the American Bar Association warned the throngs of prospective law schoolers that their investment may not pay off.

The number of students applying to American law schools is at its lowest point since 2001, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. According to the Law School Admission Council, applications have dropped 11.5 per cent over last year, a sign that students are becoming disillusioned with the job market for law graduates. In 2009, the American Bar Association released a report that concluded that, ‘The rising cost of a legal education and the realities of the legal job market mean that going to law school may not pay off.”

The hue and cry generated by the Transportation Security Administration’s directives on ‘pat-downs’ and scanning devices minimizes two salient problems: the erosion of civil liberties; the risks to health posed by scanners. …The outcry over the full-body scanners finally produced a response. In January, at a meeting of the American Bar Association, John Pistole, TSA Administrator, said he expected modification to the scanning equipment this year to address privacy concerns. The TSA, he noted, is now testing new software on millimeter wave scanners that show only a ‘generic outline’ of the person being scanned. Those millimeter wave scanners now appear in three major airports; the TSA has plans to expand those devices to ‘backscatter’ machines later.

Frustrated by the growing secrecy that shrouds political spending, some good-government advocates have set out to at least pull back the curtain on lobbyists. They’ve found some surprising allies on K Street, where many lobbyists themselves argue that outdated disclosure rules leave a world of lobbying activities unreported. … The lobbyists league has already endorsed eliminating the 20 percent exemption, arguing that all lobbyists should be held to the same standard. … A task force of the American Bar Association is also game to throw out that exemption; in January, it recommended a package of lobbying reforms that the full ABA will consider this summer. The task force set out to define ‘the next generation of lobbying reforms,’ said Thomas M. Susman, who directs the ABA governmental-affairs office. Organized by the ABA’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, the task force made some recommendations that make lobbyists look like reform advocates. One proposal to separate lobbying from fundraising would raise some eyebrows on Capitol Hill. In essence, a lobbyist would not be permitted to lobby a member of Congress for whom he or she had raised campaign money in the past two years. It would discourage K Street pros from bundling donations and organizing fundraisers, although direct contributions from individual lobbyists would be permitted.

The American Bar Association knows the drill. Trying to beat back the repeated attempts over the years to slash funding for the Legal Services Corp. (LSC) is a familiar exercise. ‘We’ve fought this battle many times,’ said ABA President Stephen Zack. …As far as lobbying efforts before Congress, the ABA’s Thomas Susman wouldn’t provide details about specific strategies being pursued by the nine lobbyists in his office. But he said that the key is to go beyond the ‘30,000 feet’ approach. ‘It’s not the Legal Services Corp. that’s important,” he said. “It’s the clients’ situation, the clients’ rights, that are important. It’s about keeping people in their homes, keeping people in their jobs.”

Bill Robinson believes that equal access to the judicial system is crucial to democracy. That’s why the president-elect of the American Bar Association is concerned about a proposal in Congress to slash funding for legal services for the poor. … Robinson was here Friday to speak at the annual Junior Achievement Ethics Luncheon held at the Grove Park Inn. He also toured the offices of Pisgah Legal Services, which provides representation and advice for the poor in six Western North Carolina counties.

On March 7, 2011, FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker spoke at the American Bar Association’s panel discussion on the FCC’s Open Internet Order, criticizing the order as exceeding the agency’s authority. Commissioner Baker suggested that, instead of the Open Internet rules that were adopted, better spectrum policies would have been a better use of FCC authority and would have ensured that wireless broadband could become an effective competitor to wireline broadband.