Spurred by last year’s announcement that U.S. News and World Report magazine is planning to rank law firms the way it ranks law schools, the American Bar Association has decided to study the way such rankings are compiled. The ABA‘s House of Delegates passed a resolution calling for the study at a meeting Monday in Orlando. The final version of the resolution deleted language from the proposal specifically mentioning U.S. News and asking lawyers to consider whether the rankings promote the “core values” of the legal profession. U.S. News announced in July that it was partnering with the Best Lawyers survey of lawyers to create rankings for more than 3,000 U.S. law firms, set to be published this fall. The magazine, which has ranked U.S. law schools for years, plans two separate lists: the best firms and the best firms to work for.

For over a year, the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration and the law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP engaged in a comprehensive review of the current removal process. The law firm poured over hundreds of articles, reports, legislative materials, and other documents, and interviewed scores of participants in the system, including lawyers, judges, advocacy groups, and academics. This study led them to conclude what many immigrants, their families, and immigration lawyers and advocates already knew and what many others suspected: the removal system is severely flawed and fails to afford fair process to all noncitizens facing deportation from the United States. The study details many of the deficiencies in the current system and makes a strong case for systemic reform.

Asylum hearings are ‘like holding death penalty cases in traffic court.’ That’s what San Francisco immigration judge Dana Marks, who also serves as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told The New York Times, as part of an article discussing the American Bar Association’s call to Congress to create a new and independent court for immigration cases. Immigration courts suffer under an increasing backlog of cases, a by product of the increased effort of the Homeland Security department to identify illegal immigrants.

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates today voted to ask Congress to make it easier for federal judges to receive cost-of-living pay increases when other federal employees get them. Passage of the change would remove a continuing source of friction between judges and Congress. The ABA governing body met at the association’s midyear meeting in Orlando, Fla.

U.S. News & World Report’s decision to start ranking law firms along the lines of its much-maligned law school rankings has prompted the American Bar Association to investigate the magazine’s methods. The ABA House of Delegates narrowly approved a resolution on Monday during its midyear meeting to ‘examine efforts to publish a national, state, territorial and local ranking of law firms and law schools.’ Although the final resolution did not specifically name U.S. News, officials of the New York State Bar Association, which sponsored the resolution, acknowledged that the magazine was the catalyst for the move. He noted, however, that the inquiry will look at a range of attorney and law firm rankings – not just the one by U.S. News.

At its mid-winter meeting in Orlando, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates voted Tuesday to investigate how law firm rankings are arrived at by the likes of Best Lawyers and now U.S. News & World Report, as this National Law Journal story reports, And we also have the story on the ABA’s plans to cut membership dues for solo practitioners, judges, and government and nonprofit-group lawyers.

Last summer, we reacted with elation when we learned that U.S. News & World Report would soon be ranking the law firms. It seems to us that it’s going to be one huge nightmare for the firms themselves — especially those poor marketing folks who will invariably be besieged with calls from clueless partners demanding to know why their firms weren’t ranked higher. But for us journo types, such rankings are manna from heaven. In any event, the intrigue over the rankings is building. The American Bar Association on Monday announced that it was going to take a good hard look at the magazine’s methods. According to this story in the National Law Journal, the resolution was prompted by U.S. News’s plan, but that the inquiry will look at a range of lawyer and law-firm rankings.

There was great jubilation and euphoria resulting from the vote to approve the law school merger/donation. The decision was made, and now it is time to move on. The establishment of a law program in a public university is needed and welcomed. Costs will be lower, but hopefully not so much as to discourage quality followed by income. Remember the old business equation: low income equals low salaries, equals low quality, equals liquidation? Some questions still remain. Approval did not erase them. The biggest question remains accreditation by the American Bar Association. UMass Dartmouth officials state they will seek a provisional accreditation followed by a full one. It is unimaginable that a major university would be denied accreditation, but the assumption of success has not yet been supported by any reported assurances that ABA accreditations are a certainty. There are other reasons for enrolling in a school, including cost, admission standards, convenience of location, and the individual’s circumstances, but full accreditation has to be near the top.

The future of NASA was the main topic of discussion as U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson addressed the American Bar Association Monday morning at Walt Disney World. Nelson said he was happy President Barack Obama has allocated $6 billion in his budget for NASA, but added the president has not provided any direction for the future of the space program.

John Morton makes no apology for locking up 380,000 people a year. They haven’t been charged with crimes. Rather, they’re immigrants, confined to a sprawling network of more than 270 jails and prisons for weeks or months while proceedings to determine whether they’ll be allowed to remain in the country are pending. … Recent watchdog and media reports detail many of the ongoing problems inside the facilities. Last week, the American Bar Association released a comprehensive report urging major changes to the entire immigration legal system. The ABA described the current detention system as ‘costly, extremely difficult to manage, and overburdened.’ One of the most acute problems is medical care. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there have been 104 in-custody deaths since 2003. The group says that deficient medical care is believed to be the leading cause of death and is the No. 1 complaint it receives from detainees.

Responding to pleas from immigration judges and lawyers who say the nation’s immigration courts are faltering under a crushing caseload, the American Bar Association called Monday for Congress to scrap the current system and create a new, independent court for immigration cases. In a vote at its semiannual meeting in Orlando, Fla., the lawyers’ organization endorsed a recommendation for a separate immigration court system that would be similar to federal courts that decide tax cases. Behind the seemingly arcane proposal was a portrait of the nation’s immigration courts besieged with new cases arising from an intensified federal crackdown on illegal immigration, and challenged by critics who doubt the courts’ impartiality. The lawyers described the courts’ condition in a report of more than 1,500 [sic] pages released last week.

An American Bar Association report appears to confirm the fears expressed by diversity advocates since the economic recession began 1 1/2 years ago: Spending on law firm diversity initiatives has dried up and layoffs are undoing the gains the profession has made. The report, ‘Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps,’ was the first comprehensive diversity study from the ABA since the legal profession began grappling with the economic collapse. Its conclusions were the result of a yearlong study that included surveys, regional hearings, roundtable discussions and a diversity summit held in June that drew 200 representatives of law firms, corporate law departments and diversity advocates. The goal was to create a ‘functional roadmap for advancing diversity in the legal profession,’ ABA President Carolyn Lamm wrote in the report.