Women Lawyers: The Marital Kiss of Death?

Do career women make lousy lifetime companions? Of course, argues a writer in Forbes in a piece stirring up considerable outrage. An e-mail campaign seeking a boycott of Forbes is making the rounds as we speak; this BoingBoing post rounds up the controversy and Forbes’ flip-flop handling of the article.

Michael Noer’s piece begins with this “word of advice” for guys: “Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

50 Judgeships Less Likely by the Day

The odds that lawmakers will create 50 new judgeships just got a little longer. The Assembly missed a procedural deadline today for voting on the judge-creating bill, which means it now needs approval from two-thirds of the house — always a dicey proposition in the highly partisan Legislature.

The problem? Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are still squabbling over judicial picks. Nuñez, as you’ll recall, says the governor isn’t appointing enough minorities, and he won’t authorize more than 25 new bench positions until Schwarzenegger makes some changes.

What those changes might be is the $64 million question. Random thoughts from conversations around the Capitol: It’s no secret that Nuñez is not a big fan of judicial appointments adviser John Davies. But it’s unlikely the governor would give Davies the boot over the current dust-up. We might see Democrats shine a more critical light on the handful of secretive panels around the state that screen potential judges for Schwarzenegger. Or we could see changes in the application process that encourage more women and ethnic minorities to apply.

Or nothing may change in the Legislature’s last week of session. Nuñez’s greatest power right now might be his authority to say “no” to the governor.

 UPDATE: The Assembly took a procedural vote Thursday night that will allow the new-judges bill to pass with a simple majority vote. A deal on 50 judges appears in sight — again. Look for changes to the application that would-be judges complete. A new form may put less emphasis on trial experience in an attempt to attract a broader range of candidates.

— Cheryl Miller

Bill Kills Secret Settlements in Sex Cases

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has not been friendly to Democrats’ frequent efforts to pry open the contents of secret settlements. But late Wednesday he signed into law AB 2875, which bans secrecy in settlements stemming from a felony sex offense.

The bill was inspired in part by the recent, high-profile flood of sexual abuse claims made against Catholic clergy and the quiet settlements with the Church that followed.

The governor’s signature is a big victory for the Consumer Attorneys of California, which deemed AB 2875 “one of the most important consumer right-to-know bills introduced this session.” CAOC’s incoming president, Ray Boucher, has filed more than 100 sex abuse cases against parishes on behalf of clients.

The new law will still allow settlement parties to shield personal information, such as medical histories, and the amount of any cash award.

— Cheryl Miller

Attorney Cries UCL Over Undocumented Workers

Orange County attorney David Klehm this week filed the first of what he says will be many unfair competition lawsuits against employers who hire undocumented workers.

Klehm’s UCL complaint (.pdf) targets Kern County farming operation Munger Bros. and Ayala Agricultural Services, a farm labor contractor, on behalf of a competing labor contractor, Global Horizons Inc. Global claims that Munger and Ayala conspired to use illegal immigrants willing to work for substandard wages to pick a blueberry crop.

Lawyers Back Bar’s Strict Disbarment Play

Before State Bar governors on Saturday approved permanent disbarment for certain crimes or acts of misconduct, they had sought comments from the public.

Many of the sharpest written remarks in support came from within the legal profession. A few responses:

“Anything less allows a fraud or worse on the unsuspecting public and potential clients who are the only ones who should benefit from Bar rules and professional conduct standards.” — Beverly Hills attorney Martin Perlberger.

“The California Bar must act to address the public perception that all California lawyers are ‘crooked shysters.’” — San Diego lawyer Francis Tepedino.

Yet Another Screwup Prosecutor Goes Unnamed

They’re still at it — appeal court justices, that is, who don’t name misbehaving prosecutors in court rulings.

Last week, Los Angeles’ Second District Court of Appeal omitted the name of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Nicol Walgren in an opinion reversing a robbery conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct. Instead, the court chose to refer to Walgren as “the prosecutor” 30 times.

That makes at least five times in the last four months that appeal courts in California have chosen to keep miscreant prosecutors’ names out of print. It’s a practice defense lawyers hate and that Chief Justice Ronald George recently told Cal Law might be worth abandoning in the name of fair play.

Obsessive Defense Thwarts S.F. Eviction

In the animal kingdom of evictions, there are species that tenant lawyers refer to as hoarding and cluttering cases. And like most eviction cases, they go to trial only rarely.

So Joel Liberson and Jason Wolford, two former Gordon & Rees lawyers who started their own civil law firm about a year ago, were treading on unfamiliar ground recently when they went to trial for a pro bono client with a messy apartment — and won, by showing she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. But making that defense work in a time-crunched eviction case was no easy trick.

Berkeley Lawyer a True Metalhead

A year ago, Berkeley criminal defense attorney Lawrence Gibbs suffered a near-fatal cerebral aneurysm. It took nine hours of surgery at UC-San Francisco to save his life.

Today, Gibbs is alive and well and litigating — just last week he helped obtain federal habeas relief for Michael Hutchinson, whose supporters say he was wrongly imprisoned for seven years for a robbery he didn’t commit.

This weekend, to mark his one-year anniversary of recovery, Gibbs is going to run a triathlon. He has dubbed it the Platinum Man Triathlon — a variation on the more common Iron Man — in honor of the platinum coils that were implanted in his skull to fix the aneurysm. He plans to run the entire Memorial Stadium steps at UC-Berkeley, swim two miles in a pool, then complete a 20-mile bike ride in the East Bay hills and along the bay.
 
Gibbs is using the event to raise money for the Neurovascular Service at UCSF. He’s taking per-mile donations and hopes to raise $50,000. If it’s a success, he plans to do it again next year with other former patients. Donors are asked to send checks made out to the UCSF Foundation with a note on the check, “Neurovascular Service Platinum Man Triathlon,” mailed to Sue Merrilees, UCSF Foundation, UCSF Box 45339, San Francisco, CA 94145-0339.

– Scott Graham

A Whole New Frontier of Electronic Discovery?

News.com’s Declan McCullough reports that a federal move to log everything you do on the Internet gained a little steam today. Baby Bell broadband provider Qwest Communications has said it backs a bill that would require your broadband provider to keep track of what you do on the Web for at least a year — with an option to let the FCC extend that to “for at least a year after you cancel your service.”

Data retention is being touted as a boon to law enforcement fighting terrorism and child exploitation, but of course, once it’s known that such records are kept, how could local police not want them for a whole range of investigations? How could litigation involving the whole range of civil issues not lead to subpoenas for home broadband records? As the infamous AOL data leak revealed, that kind of information can create a disturbing — and revealing — personal portrait.

“Qwest’s enthusiastic endorsement of mandatory data retention could make it politically easier for members of Congress to enact new laws even if other companies remain staunchly opposed,” McCullough writes amid a fistful of links to the legislation and to coverage of the issues of data privacy.

— Brian McDonough

Gov Kills Bills — And Big Potential Lawsuits

With one signature Monday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger killed two bills and a potential bevy of civil suits.

Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 1765, which would have allowed Mexican-Americans who were forcibly repatriated in the 1930s to sue for damages. Bill supporters say that Depression-era anti-immigrant anger led government agencies to force or coerce an estimated 400,000 Californians of Mexican descent to flee to Mexico. The move was also a loss — perhaps inadvertent — to victims of the Armenian Genocide.