Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien spoke last week at the American Bar Association Annual General Meeting in Toronto. He was the keynote speaker at ABA Section of Litigation luncheon. Chretien, who has been working as counsel at Heenan Blaikie since 2004, joked that the firm ‘forced him to come,’ and offered many candid reflections on his long career on Parliament Hill.

Incoming American Bar Association President William T. Robinson, III takes the reins today of the nations largest association of Attorneys, reaching yet another milestone in what has been a prolific career as an attorney and advocate for justice.

Frost Brown Todd attorney William T. ‘Bill’ Robinson III has been named president of the American Bar Association (ABA). An ABA member for more than 35 years, Robinson is the member-in-charge of the Florence office of Frost Brown Todd. For nearly four decades, civil litigation at the trial and appellate levels has been the primary focus of Robinson’s law practice.

On Monday, the paralegal studies program at DeKalb Tech was granted approval by the American Bar Association. ‘It helps students when they go to find a job,’ said Virgil Costley, director of the Criminal Justice & Paralegal Studies department at DeKalb Tech.

[Nathan Shelby] worked with vice chairman Joe Fanduzz to place 44 law students under the supervision of 43 judges across the state of Tennessee. Shelby was given a president’s award from the Tennessee Bar Association. The Judicial Internship Program also won first place in the Service to the Bar category at the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division meeting in Toronto this month.

But since there was a growing black middle class, even with American apartheid, more began to meet that criterion. So, the American Bar Association then required post-graduate study. To sit for the exam, a candidate must now have completed law school, which is, for the most part, three years of study after completing an undergraduate degree.

[Ryan] Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, has increasingly turned his attention to these issues in recent months. He established the Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving Projects, chairs the committee on robotics and artificial intelligence for the American Bar Association and has written several academic papers on the topic. 

 Also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Nevada Supreme Court adopted the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct in late 2009, thus removing the express endorsement of the Duty to Sit, and adding language that would appear to be contrary.  However, the Court rejected two proposals by the Judicial Code Commission that would have reduced any doubts or questions.

I came to the Dialogue as a lawyer who began practicing in 1970 and who had been profoundly disturbed from witnessing first-hand the battle for the soul of the American Bar Association. As a matter of principle, I resigned from the ABA when it adopted a pro-abortion stance in the 1970s.

Susan Carney (Votes 71-28). Republicans didn’t like [Susan Carney’s] lack of litigation experience, the fact that she is married to a member of The New York Times editorial board, or the fact that she received a less than stellar review by the American Bar Association. She received a ‘qualified’ rating and it was not unanimous.

Law schools must also forthrightly distinguish – as the American Bar Association will soon wisely require – between graduates who find employment as lawyers or at similar jobs in business or government and those at work waiting tables.

‘The dirty little secret is that this is a common practice among law schools,’ said [David] Anziska, who adds that a nearly identical suit has been filed against the New York Law School… He says the American Bar Association needs to control the kind of information that law schools disseminate to perspective students.