Hiring law clerks who have experience: A bad thing?

FIU law professor Howard Wasserman has an interesting post today at PrawfsBlawg about the "unfortunate trend," in his view, of judges' tending to hire law clerks who have some real-world experience, rather than straight out of law school. He notes that this trend seems to be increasing, particularly in the Southern District of Florida.

The internet is awesome

1.  Jeff Ashton (the Casey Anthony prosecutor who has 5 kids and preaches family values) is outed on Ashley Madison.  And then he gave a press conference to discuss.  No joke:

His ideal partner would “know what she wants” and would not be afraid to ask for it. A “big toy collection” would not be all that bad either, he wrote.
“You must be discrete, not looking to change my situation, just want to get excited again.”
He also boasted of his sexual prowess in his profile, the Orlando Post shared.
“I want someone that fantasizes about being brought to a climax by a lover with a skillful tongue and fingers as well as his member,” he added.

 2.  Jeb Bush does not have a black hand.  But this flier!

Trump saw red meat:

A campaign leaflet sent out by a pro-Bush super PAC that shows him with a black left hand, and his body apparently super-imposed on a picture of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“Jeb Bush has a Photoshopped photo for an ad which gives him a black left hand and much different looking body. Jeb just can’t get it right!” the real-estate mogul said of his rival for the 2016 Republican nomination, who he has frequently assailed recently on the campaign trail.
The leaflet’s copy, “Why Jeb?” ended up being co-opted by bemused Twitter users to ask, “Why, Jeb?” as to why his hand had become black. The original campaign leaflet was sent by the Right to Rise USA Super PAC to some 86,000 Iowans, as Bush seeks to raise his game amid lackluster polling in the first-in-the-nation caucuses state.

Oh and welcome back to school... and traffic!
 

Don King and "Sugar" Shane Mosley square off in the S.D. Fla.

Former pound-for-pound best fighter in the world “Sugar” Shane Mosely took to Twitter yesterday to discuss a lawsuit brought by Don King’s promotional company (DKP) against him, fellow boxer Ricardo “El Matador” Mayorga, and others seeking to put a halt to the upcoming “Grudge Match” between Mosely and Mayorga, currently scheduled for August 29. According to court documents, Mosley’s seeking to fight Mayorga in the Grudge Match would tortiously interfere with DKP’s exclusive contractual rights to promote its client Mayorga. A hearing on DKP’s motion for a TRO and preliminary injunction was held yesterday before Judge Williams.

Mosely displayed his promotional skills before the hearing:

Thoughts on the strength of DKP’s case?

Any predictions, Champ?

C’mon, Shane! This is the Southern District of Florida! And you have a great judge.

So how’d it go?

Fair enough. Staying silent is probably best until this all gets resolved.

Hope it works out for all involved. Stay tuned.

***

In other news, the Eleventh Circuit issued a few interesting decisions this week, reminding lower courts that they should essentially never vacate arbitral awards, and discussing the risks of providing your cell-phone number to entities that might text you advertisements. 

The US1 apocalypse starts Monday

Enjoy your last day today.

Okay, okay, you want some law.  There's been a lot of internet research and cites coming out of this District and the 11th Circuit recently.  Apparently, the 7th Circuit judges got into a tiff about it in Rowe v. Gibson (via Above The Law):

Jeffrey Allen Rowe, a prison inmate proceeding pro se, is suing various prison officials under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Rowe accuses the officials of deliberate indifference to his serious medical need, specifically, need for proper treatment of his reflux esophagitis aka gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).

...

Judge Posner’s majority opinion, joined by Judge Ilana Diamond Rovner, cites such internet authorities as the NIH, the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and Wikipedia in the course of analyzing Rowe’s medical claims. Judge Hamilton’s opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part, castigates the majority for its extra-record adventures. Let’s start with Judge Hamilton (emphasis added):

I must dissent, however, from the reversal of summary judgment on Rowe’s claim regarding the timing for administering his medicine between January and July 2011 and after August 2011. On that claim, the reversal is unprecedented, clearly based on “evidence” this appellate court has found by its own internet research. The majority has pieced together information found on several medical websites that seems to contradict the only expert evidence actually in the summary judgment record.

Gotta love Judge Hamilton’s use of scare quotes around “evidence.”

Judge Posner’s opinion defends the use of outside research because pro se prisoners like Rowe don’t have easy access to expensive expert witnesses to support their claims, arguing that “[i]t is heartless to make a fetish of adversary procedure if by doing so feeble evidence is credited because the opponent has no practical access to offsetting evidence.” (By the way, Judge Posner seems quite fond of the h-word these days; remember his calling Chief Justice Roberts’s gay-marriage dissent “heartless.”) Judge Hamilton’s opinion doesn’t buy it:

The majority writes that adherence to rules of evidence and precedent makes a “heartless … fetish of adversary procedure.” Yet the majority’s decision is an unprecedented departure from the proper role of an appellate court. It runs contrary to long-established law and raises a host of practical problems the majority fails to address.

After acknowledging the existence of a debate on the subject of factual research by judges, Judge Hamilton writes this (emphasis added):

Using independent factual research to find a genuine issue of material, adjudicative fact, and thus to decide an appeal, falls outside permissible boundaries. Appellate courts simply do not have a warrant to decide cases based on their own research on adjudicative facts. This case will become Exhibit A in the debate. It provides, despite the majority’s disclaimers, a nearly pristine example of an appellate court basing a decision on its own factual research.

Ouch. Translation: “Judge Posner, you are now the poster child for irresponsible judicial fact-finding.”

Later on in the opinion, Judge Hamilton refers snarkily to “[l]aw-office or judicial-chambers medicine,” arguing as follows about the web:

Law-office or judicial-chambers medicine is surely an even less reliable venture. The internet is an extraordinary resource, but it cannot turn judges into competent substitutes for experts or scholars such as historians, engineers, chemists, psychologists, or physicians. The majority’s instruction to the contrary will cause problems in our judicial system more serious than those it is trying to solve in this case.

In other words, to use a health-care metaphor, the medicine here is worse than the disease.

Wednesday notes ICYMI edition

1.  The Wilkie Ferguson Courthouse was closed yesterday for two hours while the feds dealt with a suspicious package.  This happens on a daily basis at the state courthouse and it doesn't cause lockdowns for two hours where no one can get out of the building.  What took two hours and why is it safer to lock people up in the building for two hours?

2.  The 11th Circuit website is down as we speak, but there were a few interesting opinions earlier this week.  One was by D.C. Circuit Judge Ginsburg on structuring, which really expanded what constitutes structuring.  Judge Rosenbaum thought the D.C. judge for the 11th Circuit (joined by her former boss Judge Marcus) went too far:

During oral argument in this case, the Court, in effect, asked counsel for the government whether a salaried person who earned $9,000 a week and deposited it in cash weekly, intending at least in part to evade the reporting requirement, committed the crime of structuring under 31 U.S.C. § 5324(a)(3). The government suggested that such a person did. Today the Court embraces this construction of § 5324(a)(3) as the law.
Granted, most of us do not have the problem of trying to figure out what to do with our $9,000-per-week salary, but this same logic applies to any weekly salary payment under $10,000. And it does not end with weekly salary payments. As a result of today’s ruling, in this Circuit, no matter how small a sum of money a person may possess or otherwise enjoy a right to control—even if only a few dollars—he may find himself facing structuring charges if he goes to the bank often enough to create the appearance to the government of engaging in a pattern of financial transactions of $10,000 or less. I suppose that we will discover in the coming years how frequent a bank visitor one must be to imperil himself, but, in any case, it is clear today that § 5324(a)(3) has taken on a far broader reach than Congress ever intended.

3.  Judge Rosenbaum wrote the majority of this other interesting opinion dealing with a dispute in the Glock family.  And yes, she fires away with lots of gun metaphors.  But I like the pop culture references like footnote 2:

Within four years of their arrival in the United States, Glock firearms worked their way into American pop culture in Die Hard 2, when Bruce Willis’s character John McClane made the remark, “That punk pulled a Glock 7 [sic] on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. Doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines, here, and it cost more than you make in a month.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/quotes (last visited Aug. 15, 2015). Ironically, the statement was factually inaccurate in just about every way.

Yippee Ki Yay!