While more and more cities and groups are announcing decisions to boycott Arizona over the controversial new anti-illegal-immigration bill, one group is going ahead with a long-planned meeting, much to the dismay of protesters. It’s the nation’s largest gathering of Pro Bono attorneys. While the American Bar Association is still holding its Equal Justice Conference here in Phoenix, the organization said it has restructured the meeting’s focus to cover Senate Bill 1070. … Approximately 785 people were expected to attend the event, but some attendees and one of the co-sponsors pulled out after the signing of SB 1070 and the subsequent backlash. It’s expected that 550 will actually attend the meeting, according to Rick DeBruhl with the State Bar of Arizona. … A group of protesters had said they would storm the conference and disrupt the meeting. They said the ABA members are not living up to their sworn oath as lawyers. Many of those protesters said they were prepared to be arrested if it came to that.

Baton Rouge, La, (AP) A group representing big industry in Louisiana that contends actions by Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic drive jobs from the state has recommended to its members to stop all corporate donations to the university and cease recruiting its students. … The Louisiana Chemical Association sent a letter, obtained by The Associated Press, to its 63 corporate members last week detailing 12 ‘recommended sanctions’ companies could employ against the university, encouraging them to contact donors and lawmakers about slashing funding to the school. … The lobbying group is also behind a Senate bill that would strip state funding from any university with law clinics that sue a government agency or business. The bill – scheduled for a May 19 hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee – is the “culmination of years of frustration with Tulane and its support for its environmental law clinic,” Borne wrote in the letter. Critics have said the bill would effectively shutter the majority of the state’s 19 law clinics. … Both the American Bar Association and the Louisiana State Bar Associations have weighed in against the bill, which would impact all of Louisiana’s law clinics.

The Louisiana Chemical Association is heightening its rhetoric against Tulane University in the debate over pending legislation to restrict college law clinics. … The state legislation, which is scheduled for debate next week, would forbid law clinics at public and private colleges that receive state money from suing government agencies, suing individuals and businesses for financial damages or for raising most constitutional challenges. … American Bar Association President Carolyn Lamm, a lawyer from Washington, D.C., sent out a statement Wednesday opposing the bill.

The American Bar Association says a gathering in Phoenix is still on even though about a third of the registrants have cancelled. The Chicago-based group says the annual three-day conference for public-interest lawyers will begin tomorrow as scheduled despite about 265 cancellations and calls for a boycott of Arizona. … But ABA President Carolyn Lamm points out that the roughly 500 attorneys still signed up for the conference represent poor people, including immigrants.

A lack of funding for the judiciary and rising court fees are among problems that are limiting access to the legal system for the poor, University of Florida graduate and incoming American Bar Association President Stephen Zack said Wednesday. ‘We have a justice gap in this country,’ he said. Zack will be…giving the commencement address Friday at UF’s Levin College of Law. Zack earned his undergraduate and law degrees from UF, and will be among three law alumni receiving distinguished alumni awards at the ceremony. Zack, who will become the association’s first Hispanic president when he starts in August, said the cause of ensuring access to the legal system will be a major focus of his tenure.

Louisiana lawmakers have yet to debate legislation that would rein in law clinics around the state, but an industry group backing the legislation isn’t waiting to play hardball. The Louisiana Chemical Association has urged members to impose ‘recommended sanctions’ against Tulane University, whose environmental law clinic is the primary target of the proposed bill. In a memorandum sent to its 61 corporate members, the association advocated that they stop making donations to the university, stop matching employee donations to the school and curtail recruiting there. … American Bar Association President Carolyn Lamm on Wednesday issued a statement commending students who work in law clinics and urging Adley to withdraw the bill. ‘We urge the state legislature to consider that these law clinics represent the people of Louisiana who have very real and immediate problems but few resources to solve them,’ Lamm wrote. ‘Depriving the poorest citizens of these vital services is an affront to their dignity, and for many, diminishes their very means of survival.’

The American Bar Association didn’t cancel their conference in Arizona this week despite letters from local immigrants’s rights activists urging them to do so.  ABA president Carolyn Lamm said: ‘Normally one challenges the constitutionality of a law in court, if you want to stop it.’ Lamm made clear the ABA’s position: ‘We are absolutely opposed to SB-1070 the new anti-immigration law.’

How will President Barack Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court treat issues of foreign, international, comparative, or transnational law? … Kagan, who seems likely to succeed in her bid to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, has among the sparsest written record of public writings of any nominee in decades. Consideration of the question of Kagan and international law thus requires resort to reading tea leaves. … Among the judgments issued during Kagan’s OT ‘87 clerkship for Justice Thurgood Marshall was Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), in which international context played a role in the Court’s holding that execution of a 15 year old would violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The controlling plurality opinion stated: ‘The conclusion that it would offend civilized standards of decency to execute a person who was less than 16 years old at the time of his or her offense is consistent with the views that have been expressed by respected professional organizations, by other nations that share our Anglo American heritage, and by the leading members of the Western European community. Thus, the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute have formally expressed their opposition to the death penalty for juveniles. …’

The American Bar Association will begin to evaluate Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s qualifications for a seat on the Supreme Court, the ABA said Tuesday.  In a statement, Carolyn Lamm, the president of the ABA, said the group’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary will provide the Senate ‘with the important perspectives of lawyers and judges with whom Kagan has worked for consideration during the confirmation process.’ Lamm said committee members will interview ‘hundreds of lawyers, judges and members of the community’ familiar with Kagan’s ‘integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament.’ Panels of law professors and lawyers with Supreme Court and appellate experience will examine Kagan’s legal writings, and the committee will interview her, Lamm said. A White House official, speaking on background, said Kagan has agreed to participate.

Professor Orde Kittrie spoke as a panelist at the American Bar Association’s national security conference, the 19th Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law, on Nov. 12-13, in Washington, D.C. Kittrie was on the panel, ‘Emerging Issues in National Security Law: Narco-Violence along the Border,’ on Nov. 12. … In his speech, Kittrie discussed the status of the battle against narco-trafficking in Mexico, the impact of Mexican narco-trafficking on the United States generally and Arizona in particular, and the response thus far to this challenge by the U.S. federal and Arizona state officials. He also offered several recommendations for next steps in the battle against narco-trafficking in Mexico. The conference was co-sponsored by the ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security, the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University School of Law.

Reveling in its first conference championship in 26 years, the Highland Park High School girls varsity basketball team has been selling cookies for months to raise funds for a tournament in Arizona. But those hoop dreams were dashed when players learned they couldn’t go because of that state’s new crackdown on illegal immigrants. … Subrina Collier, whose daughter Briana is a junior on the team, said even if someone were worried about presenting immigration papers in Arizona, it should be a personal decision to stay away. She called the administration decision a misplaced political statement. … Meanwhile, other Chicago-area organizations continue to wrestle with their involvement in Arizona. Local immigrants’ rights activists delivered a letter Tuesday to the Chicago-based American Bar Association that urged the group to cancel a conference slated for this week in Arizona.

Legal aid services for the indigent are extremely difficult to obtain. A report last year found that legal aid clinics turn down an estimated half of their potential clients because of insufficient resources. In Illinois, the state deficit has made the problem even more acute. After cutting funding administered through the state-based Lawyers Trust Accounts by one-third last year, the state is now more than seven months behind on issuing payments to municipalities for its share of public defenders’ salaries. For the past 12 years, the Chicago-based American Bar Association and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association have convened an annual Equal Justice Conference to address this issue, providing an opportunity for over 800 lawyers to meet in mid-May and collaborate on strategies to better serve the poor. This year, however, there’s one big problem: the conference is scheduled to take place in Phoenix, AZ, home to the nation’s most anti-immigrant state government. And that’s leading some Chicago-based attorneys to call for a boycott.