If you’ve ever assumed fat meant lazy, threw on high heels even though you knew they’d kill your feet, considered using an antiwrinkle lotions based on promises of prolonged youth, or made a snap judgment based on appearance alone, ‘The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law’ is written for you. In this day and age we have legal protections from discrimination based on religion, race, ethnicity, and disabilities. But what author and Stanford professor Deborah L. Rhode says we’re missing out on is protection from something almost more basic: appearance-related discrimination. Part of the problem, she explains, is our present culture’s preoccupation with all things beauty- and appearance-related. … Rhode reveals that what turned her on to this subject in the first place was her own battle with appearance-related discrimination and double standards. As the director of Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the chair of the American Bar Association [Commission on Women in the Profession] (correction requested), Rhode was always considered ‘frumpy’ by her colleagues. Make-up artists, hair stylists, and personal shoppers were engaged for meetings with important clients and conferences with large attendances. This experience and others like it forced Rhode to ask some tough questions about why appearance is so important to most. … While Rhode’s argument for laws against appearance-based discrimination sometimes stands on wobbly legs, it’s hard to deny the validity of the problem that she confronts.

University of Montana law students will graduate this Saturday with diplomas but not necessarily with jobs. Robin Gregory of Missoula has been in law school since 2007 and is among 74 law students anxious to graduate.  Gregory is preparing for finals week and, like all her classmates, she cannot afford to fail in class or in the job market. … Many law students racked up thousands of dollars of debt in student loans.  Combine that with the bleak economy and it is simpl[e] to understand how students like Gregory feel stressed as graduation day looms closer. … And, just to put the student loan issue in perspective, the American Bar Association expects a third of law students in the U.S. will graduate with more than $120,000 worth of dehttp://www.abanow.org/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=10792&message=6bt.

Texas is reaching a crisis point, putting itself at risk of a civil rights lawsuit — or worse, a total meltdown of the criminal justice system — because it so severely shortchanges the system designed to ensure impoverished accused criminals get adequate legal representation, advocates told a Senate committee last week. … Nine years ago … Texas had more people in jail, more people on death row and executed more people than nearly any other state, but there was no mechanism to provide decent legal defense for the poor. … The question for the state and for criminal justice advocates, says Andrea Marsh, executive director of the Texas Fair Defense Project, is at what point the funding becomes so minimal that it is impossible to meet the Constitutional obligation to provide adequate defense. … In addition to funding questions, Marsh says, there are concerns about the fairness of the system. The American Bar Association, in its best practices for public defense, recommends that lawyers for indigent defendants be chosen independently — not by the judge, as is the case in most Texas counties. The Bar Association also calls for independent oversight of indigent defense lawyers and monitoring of their caseloads, neither of which regularly happen in Texas, Marsh says.

Should the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office have the authority to set its own fees? House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) and Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today introduced the Patent and Trademark Office Funding Stabilization Act that would transfer authority to set fees from Congress to the PTO. The bill also allows the PTO to impose a 15% temporary surcharge for all fees, and prevents money collected from being diverted away from the agency for unrelated government programs. … According to IPO, the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the American Bar Association’s IP section and the International Trademark Association all oppose giving the PTO fee-setting authority. IPO is still evaluating the bill introduced today.

The LLC is one of the most widely used, but by no means straight forward, ownership entities today. When creating the original LLC contract, many potential situations need to be anticipated. A panel for young lawyers at the 21st Annual Spring Symposia of the American Bar Association’s Real Property Trust & Estate Law group discussed the various scenarios that should be considered in LLC formation. The questions to be addressed in the initial LLC contract include: How and when the investors contribute their capital; who makes decisions for the entity and how much control he or she has; how disagreements among investors are resolved; whether and to whom investors will be allowed to sell their interests; and how the cash is distributed.

Last year, legal professionals, and experts in the field of legal education gathered to discuss how law schools and CLE programs can address the changing skill set necessary to be successful in the practice of law. The American [Law] Institute, the American Bar Association and the Association for Continuing Legal Education recently published a final report from its October 2009 Critical Issues Summit entitled ‘Equipping Our Lawyers: Law School Education, Continuing Legal Education, and Legal Practice in the 21st Century.’ In the 23 years since the last conference of its kind, much has changed. Certain factors – the Internet, advanced technology, competition, global practice, and generational differences, to name a few – have transformed the dynamics of law and lawyering. Nearly 150 professionals from across the country − including CLE providers and regulators, law school educators, and law practitioners – discussed lawyer training and education for successful practice in today’s world.

The Public Defender Service Corporation was the latest agency to appear before the Committee on Appropriations.  The agency is in desperate need of funding to provide law and order. ‘The truth of the matter,’ stated Mike Nisperos, ‘is that we are the redheaded step child of the justice system.’  The executive director of the PDSC painted a grim picture for lawmakers as he and his staff are faced with a growing caseload, that admittedly has become hard to keep up with and beyond American Bar Association standards. ‘Currently we have 8,646 cases spread across ten and a half attorneys. I say ten and a half because I carry half of a caseload – so that’s roughly 770-800 cases per lawyer.’ The situation is so severe; a moratorium is currently in place on civil cases.

A year ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission was the target of jeers such as its lawyers ‘couldn’t find ice cream at a Dairy Queen.’ Members of Congress were seriously considering stripping away agency powers in a regulatory overhaul. Now, the SEC is all but swaggering down Wall Street in the wake of the April 16 fraud complaint against The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., as well as an across-the-board rise in enforcement activity. But securities lawyers wonder whether the SEC, in a bid to prove its re-emergence as a tough cop on the beat, has bitten off more than it can chew. … The SEC has a number of very fine attorneys, but it’s a finite resource. The 3,800-person agency has about 640 lawyers in its Enforcement Division — equivalent to the 64th biggest law firm in the NLJ 250. … The SEC is also looking to add more bodies to help with the workload. President Barack Obama has proposed increasing the SEC’s fiscal year 2011 budget to $1.258 billion, a 12% increase that would allow the agency to hire 374 additional professionals. … Hogan Lovells partner Jeffrey Rubin, who is chair of the American Bar Association’s federal regulation of securities committee, added that ‘the SEC’s enforcement mechanism is very much in high gear. The staff is working very hard.’

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell said Monday he would have voted to confirm one of President Barack Obama’s U.S. Supreme Court nominees but not the other. The reason, he said, was experience. That’s why he would have backed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but would vote against Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whom Obama nominated last week to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. … Campbell, a former Stanford University law professor, said he does not necessarily consider judicial experience to be a prerequisite for appointment to the Supreme Court. ‘A good example of a fine justice is Lewis Powell,’ he said. ‘Justice Lewis Powell had never been a judge, but he was president of the American Bar Association and a distinguished attorney from Virginia with many, many years’ experience.’

A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.’ CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president would be criticized for.’ … What of the record of Republican presidents? Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford made seven nominations. All were white Protestant males: Warren Burger, Clement Haynsworth, Harrold Carswell, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens. The diversity Nixon sought was first to put a Southerner on the court. He succeeded in his third try, with Powell. And he sought to put the first woman on the court, but pulled back from nominating Judge Mildred Lillie of California when the American Bar Association rated her unqualified. With Ronald Reagan and Bush I came Republican diversity.

President Barack Obama’s liberal pick for a San Francisco-based appeals court survived his first Senate test Thursday but still faces strong Republican opposition.  The Judiciary Committee voted 12-7 along party lines to recommend confirmation of Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California law school at Berkeley. … Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, criticized the American Bar Association’s ‘well qualified’ rating, saying the lawyers’ organization failed to follow its own standards that required 12 years of experience as a practicing lawyer or trial judge. Liu’s career has been in academia.

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.