After a months long confirmation process, the U.S. Senate confirmed Morrison & Foerster partner Tony West today to be Civil Division chief at the Justice Department. The San Francisco lawyer (pictured at right) passed by a vote of 83-4, with 13 not voting. Those opposing West were Republican Senators Jim Bunning of Kentucky, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, both of Georgia, and Richard Shelby of Alabama. A Judiciary Committee spokeswoman said she had not heard those four Senators explain their no votes on the floor.
Turns out West will have a little San Francisco company at the Justice Department. Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass partner Marisa Chun (pictured at left) has accepted a job as deputy associate attorney general, reporting to the No. 3 in the department, Thomas Perrilli. While she won’t have direct line authority, like West, Chun will be in charge of coordinating [corrected] civil and antitrust, budget and transparency matters for her boss. So she and West will probably be seeing a lot of each other.
Chun, a civil litigator, had previously worked for the Justice Department and, like West, was heavily involved in Obama’s California campaign. Both Chun and Obama worked on the Harvard Law review at the same time.
Let’s face it, the California Supreme Court will face a tough decision after it hears oral argument next month on the challenge to Proposition 8 and same-sex marriage. Essentially, the court will have to choose between being on the Roger Taney side of history or egregiously flouting the will of 7 million voters (with a retention election just 18 months away).
Happily, we've come up with a third and much easier way out. As a public service to the court, we’ve drafted the first four pages of an opinion that gets the resolution the majority wants while shifting the blame elsewhere – to our grandstanding hard-working state senators and assembly members.
After Prop 8 passed in November, we at Legal Pad HQ had a hearty debate over whether the No on 8 folks would have fared better if they’d pegged their ad campaign more to real gay couples instead of concepts like fairness and equality. In other words, we fought over wondered (we're all on the same page, all the time! nothing to see here!) if watching gay married couples act just like straight married couples would have provoked more sympathy or antipathy from California voters on the fence.
Well, we finally saw the commercial we were envisioning this week. Only it wasn’t really a commercial: It was a video attached to an Internet petition that we randomly got in our e-mail, asking the Supreme Court to invalidate Prop 8 when it hears arguments over the initiative.
Rick Jacobs, chairman and founder of the Hollywood-based group behind the petition-video, says the Courage Campaign is aiming to get 200,000 signatures. (Incidentally, Prop 8 passed with about 7 million votes for it, and about 6.4 million against.) We at Legal Pad can’t totally recall, but we think the petition's signature tally was up in the 70,000s when we first saw it on Monday. Yesterday evening, it was in the 130,000s. And as of the lunch hour today, it was topping 160,000.
The reasons why the Supreme Court justices may or may not watch this video, after the jump ...
In Tuesday's issue of The Recorder, our Exhibits feature takes a look at some of the legal types who are so into celebrating Barack Obama's presidency that they've given at least $200 to help fund his inauguration. (You can see that feature page online (.pdf) here.) In the interest of space, we didn't include all the generous legal eagles we could spot there. But in the interest of your curiousity, we do so here.
In today’s Recorder we told the story of election lawyer Steven Churchwell, a DLA partner who’s monitoring the uber-close vote tally in California’s Fourth Congressional District for Democrat Charlie Brown. Well this morning the lawyer for Brown’s Republican opponent, Tom McClintock, called to mention that he’s a little busy too.
“This is what we in the business call harvest season,” said Ben Davidian, a Sacramento elections lawyer who chaired the Fair Political Practices Commission between 1991 and 1995.
Actually, Davidian was chatting while driving to meet Churchwell. The two are former colleagues at the FPPC and they were going to carpool together to Nevada County, where the vote count has hit a few speed bumps. Opposing attorneys carpooling?
Our local ABC affiliate has posted its election-night video of Barack Obama's California fundraising team, so if you're wondering what John Roos, Tony West, Kamala Harris, et. al., were up to in Chicago that night, click here.
Particularly if you're worried about your big-law job ...
We’ve written before about California legal types who’d thrown their weight heavily or early behind Barack Obama’s candidacy. And we’ve wondered who might be angling for a job if he ended up in the White House.
Now it appears that the Bay Area legal eagle closest to the inner circle may be UC-Berkeley School of Law’s Dean Christopher Edley: He just got named to the advisory board for Obama’s transition team.
A lot of people are going to wonder that, especially those couples who got married in the last few months but have been told by a slim majority of California voters that their marriages aren't valid. And the people answering those very complicated questions are going to be family law attorneys. Chaos and limbo are the words on the L.A. Times' metaphorical lips.
Family law practitioner Deborah Wald, who runs a two-attorney shop and a blog, put up a post on Monday night that addressed the questions that would arise if Prop 8 passed. Well, the ban on same-sex marriage passed, 52 percent to 48 percent, so unless the suit to argue that 8 was too sweeping a change to the Constitution to be permitted by initiative, those questions are suddenly very relevant.
It's been a night of mixed results for attorneys running for state offices. It's been a better night for attorneys throwing big money into legislative races.
Alyson Huber, the Bartko, Zankel, Tarrant & Miller associate running for the Central Valley's 10th Assembly District was losing to business consultant Jack Sieglock by about 2,000 votes with 96 percent of the votes tallied. Huber proudly touted the fact that she's an attorney, even though her opponent tried to cast her as one of those n'er do well trial lawyers.
Consumer Attorneys happy with early returns, after the jump
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