Archive for September, 2009

A Northwestern University law school symposium will focus on false confessions and wrongful convictions.

The school says speakers will include a man who falsely confessed to killing his parents when he was 17 and served 17 years in prison, as well as another man who served 38 years behind bars after being convicted of rape at age 14.

The symposium is to take place from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, in the law school’s Thorne Auditorium. It is open to the public, but registration is required.

[Chicago Tribune]

A new, centrally located home for CUNY Law School has been approved by The City University of New York’s Board of Trustees, a move that will give the School nearly 70,000 additional square feet of space, enable it to offer a new, part-time program, and situate it within walking distance of numerous city subway and bus lines, the Long Island Rail Road, and the New York State Supreme Court building in Long Island City.

Under action approved by the Board, CUNY will own a condominium interest in a 14-story environmentally green building at historic Court Square. The 26-year-old Law School, currently in Flushing near Queens College, will be relocated to the first six floors, and Citigroup will retain ownership of the remainder of the building. The Board’s action follows a competitive request for proposal process which led to the identification of the site.

Served by seven subway lines, seven bus lines, the LIRR and within minutes of midtown Manhattan, the new convenient location will expand accessibility for current and prospective students drawn to CUNY Law’s high academic quality, nationally recognized clinical training, and public service mission. Additionally, the space already contains classrooms previously used for staff training, as well as smart technology and study areas. And the larger space will enable the Law School to expand opportunities with a new part-time program.

“The CUNY Law School is already soaring as a result of the exemplary leadership of Dean Michelle J. Anderson and its dedicated faculty, staff and students,” said Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. “This new facility will assure that CUNY Law School is marvelously positioned to achieve new heights, both academically and in fulfillment of its vital public service mission. I want to especially thank Governor Paterson, the New York State Legislature and Queens County elected officials for their longstanding support of CUNY Law School, the only public law school in New York City dedicated to public service and the public interest.”

[CUNY]

An Oklahoma law school wants to make sure innocent people are not put behind bars. That’s why the school is teaming up with the non-profit group the Innocence Project, which has helped overturn nearly 300 convictions in the last two decades.

The Innocence Project has a number of affiliates at law schools across the country and Oklahoma City University’s School of Law is hoping to have one up and running within two years. Oklahoma is no stranger to wrongful convictions which is why the school says this program is needed.

It took 11 years for the courts to figure out what Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson already knew that they were falsely convicted of murdering an Oklahoma waitress. Williamson spent most of his time on death row before DNA evidence cleared both men.

“It’s very important to identify the cases where the system did go haywire,” Lawrence Hellman, Dean of Oklahoma City University’s School of Law, said.

It was the work of the Innocence Project that freed both Fritz and Williamson. Working with law schools across the country, that non-profit group reviews cases where questionable evidence led to incarceration of hundreds of men. Hellman wants to open a chapter of the project at OCU.

[News on 6]

A Stanford Law School graduate was sentenced Monday on a federal tax conviction related to running a high-priced call girl service, punishment that includes restrictions on her ability to keep advertising as an escort while she’s on probation.

During a hearing in San Jose federal court, U.S. District Judge James Ware concluded he needed to impose those restrictions on Cristina Warthen after federal prosecutors disclosed she’s continued to advertise herself on the Internet as a high-priced escort, even as she awaited sentencing on federal tax evasion charges related to her days as an upscale prostitute named “Brazil.”

Warthen gained notoriety when she was busted as a jet-setting call girl who sold her services to pay off her Stanford Law School debts. She got her law degree from Stanford in May 2001, but quickly began to run a steamy Web site with offers to jet off for liaisons with clients in cities around the country, including New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

She eventually pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes on more than $133,000 she earned as a prostitute in 2003.

Under a plea deal with the government, Warthen was sentenced Monday to one year of home detention with an electronic monitoring device and three years of probation. She also has to pay the government a total of about $243,000, less than the original $313,000 set out in her original plea arrangement.

[Mercury News]

The UC Davis School of Law is expanding a groundbreaking program to ease the debt burden of graduates whose passion for public interest law leads them to lower-paying jobs.

The law school’s Loan Repayment Assistance Program provides annual interest-free loans to UC Davis graduates who take a qualifying job with a nonprofit or government agency. The loans must be used to help pay off law school, undergraduate or graduate school debt. The law school then forgives all or a portion of the loans, depending how much the participant earns.

Beginning January 2010, graduates who take qualifying jobs that pay $60,000 a year or less will be eligible for a loan, up from the previous salary cap of $53,000. Each loan will be forgiven at the end of the year, assuming the participant remains in a qualifying job, down from a five-year wait for loan forgiveness eligibility.

Participants who continue to work in a qualifying job may reapply for the program for up to 10 years, the usual term for education loans — meaning that participants who spend a decade in public interest law could erase all of their student loan debt.

Those who earn $40,000 or less are eligible for full annual loan forgiveness. Those who make $40,000 to $60,000 are eligible for partial loan forgiveness.

Graduates must apply for the program within three years of earning their law degree.

“Our law school has been in the lead in California in encouraging students to pursue careers in the public interest,” said Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the law school. “This expansion comes at a critical time as low-income people struggle for access to justice. We hope that it will encourage more students to pursue their dreams of a public-interest career.”

[UC Davis]

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be the keynote speaker at the GW Law Review Symposium, the school’s dean announced last Monday.

The symposium will begin Thursday, Oct. 15 and is traditionally a two-day event with several speakers and discussion panels.

Tickets to the symposium will be distributed to select Law School students, faculty and University officials, said Mark Taticchi, editor in chief of the GW Law Review. The law school will distribute the tickets to University officials and faculty and the Law Review will hold a lottery for the remaining 200 student tickets. Interested law students will have to enter their names in the lottery by Oct. 7, and winners will be announced on Oct. 9. Tickets will be free for winning students.

Kennedy’s address will either be held in Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre or the Jack Morton Auditorium, although the final location has not been confirmed, Taticchi said.

Currently, Kennedy has requested that no media be allowed into the event, but the law school is looking for clarification from his chambers as to if that includes student media, the law school’s Assistant Director for Public Relations Claire Duggan said in an e-mail.

Taticchi said that Kennedy is, however, open to having his address streamed to law school classrooms so he could speak to more students. The school is trying to work out the technological issues that would allow for a broadcast of the event.

Yale Law School professor Heather Gerken believes that rankings have the power to shape policy — and now, her ideas will play a major role in reshaping how the nation’s largest city runs its elections.

Two weeks ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, pending his re-election in November, the city would be the first jurisdiction in the country to implement electoral reforms in line with Gerken’s “Democracy Index,” a ranking system that compares the ease and integrity of voting across different states and localities by tabulating statistics generated by the voting process.

The New York plan, called “Easy to Vote & Easy to Run,” aims to measure indicators such as the quantity of discarded ballots, the ease of voter registration and the time it takes to vote at different city polling locations. That data will then be used to improve and modernize the city’s voting infrastructure.

“For far too long, our election system has been plagued with antiquated rules and procedures that effectively limit its fairness and effectiveness,” Bloomberg said in a Sept. 10 statement. “This plan will enable more New Yorkers to engage in the democratic process by making it easier for them to run for office and easier for them to vote.”

The New York plan is a major landmark for Gerken, who first developed the idea for the Index in January 2007. A 2007 editorial in Legal Times caught the attention of then-senators Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 and Barack Obama, each of whom introduced bills to create a state-by-state index based on Gerken’s theory.

“A ranking system could tell us, for instance, which states and localities discard the most ballots, which polling places have the longest lines, and where the greatest political or racial disparities in registration and turnout levels lie,” Gerken wrote in 2007. “Rather than bogging down voters in the technical details of election administration, reformers could let the numbers speak for themselves.”

[Yale Daily News]