Ellen Freeman immigrated from Odesa, Ukraine, to Pittsburgh almost 30 years ago. And although her family always planned to leave—she grew up learning various languages so that she could communicate wherever they settled—moving to the United States as a young single mother was one of the most difficult things that she has ever done.
It's no secret that lawyers are asked to attend or preside over many kinds and types of meetings. From attending a professional association's annual meeting with hundreds of fellow attorneys (as the ABA just had in August) to being asked to chair a nonprofit board or preside at a homeowners association meeting, lawyers are often looked to for guidance.
Thanks to nearly two-years of COVID-19-related shutdowns and sheltering-in-place orders, working from home has become the new normal. Face-to-face interactions have been replaced by meeting on real-time videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom, FaceTime or Microsoft Teams, while cloud-based collaborative programs have become absolutely vital if any work is to be done.
It's time for the Modern Law Library's summer recommendations episode, in which host Lee Rawles shares her pop culture picks with you, plus a re-airing of one of our older episodes that has become relevant again.
After several collaborations with bestselling author James Patterson, Judge David Ellis of Illinois, a prolific novelist, decided to go it alone for his latest book, Look Closer.
Aliza Shatzman didn’t realize that federal judicial employees are not protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That is until the judge she worked for in 2020 ended her clerkship early—for reasons that she thinks were due to gender discrimination.
The U.S. immigration system is complex and confusing, and it causes no shortage of stress for those who have to go through it.
In Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, geographer Reece Jones argues that Supreme Court precedent, a growing workforce and mission creep have made the U.S. Border Patrol a national police force that operates without appropriate accountability.
Even during times less tumultuous than the one we are in now, lawyers as a profession report high levels of stress. Finding the way to keep motivated and healthy on an individual level while fighting systemic problems is no easy task. It was this challenge that lawyers Nora Riva Bergman and Chelsy A. Castro set out to address in their new book, 50 Lessons for Happy Lawyers.
If you are studying for the July bar exam, you’re not going to memorize every flashcard for the Multistate Bar Examination, and that’s OK. You can still pass, says Michael Anspach, who founded the Organization for Student Wellbeing as a student at the Marquette University Law School and passed the Ohio bar on his first attempt in 2018.
Are you struggling with debt? Do you have collectors breathing down your neck, threatening to repossess your property and filing lawsuits against you in court? For many Americans facing this dilemma, their options are fairly limited.
Are you a lawyer who plays League of Legends late at night? A World of Warcraft warrior who engages in courtroom combat during your daytime gig? And have you ever wished you could break into esports on a professional level—whether you're armed with a game controller or a briefcase?
A good home-school program provided a nurturing environment that was lacking in elementary education, and the experience helped build confidence for law school, says Haley Taylor Schlitz, who left public school at age 10 and at age 19 may be the youngest Black person to complete a JD program.
As a lawyer, Michelle Good spent years investigating the trauma that Canada’s residential school system inflicted on Indigenous people. As an author, it took her nine years to write her first novel about the lives of five teenagers who leave a church-run school and coalesce in Eastside Vancouver, British Columbia. For Good, it was imperative that she took her time to get the story right. Her patience paid off.
Facial recognition software is becoming a greater part of our everyday lives. The police use it to investigate crime. Smartphones and computers use it to secure data. Businesses use it to provide more customized, targeted solutions and experiences for its customers. Even bar examiners used it to conduct remote testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the cover of Brian Hochman's book The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States is a martini cocktail complete with a skewered olive. Someone attempting to judge a book by its cover may think this is a riff on James Bond and his brethren in espionage. But international espionage is not the primary use of wiretapping in the United States; it's been a longer, stranger tale than that.
A recent order from Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directing the state to consider medical treatments for transgender youths as child abuse is hurtful to children and their families, as is a new Alabama law that makes providing gender-affirming care to a minor a felony, says lawyer Asaf Orr.
During its time as a Soviet republic within the USSR, Kazakhstan was the site of massive nuclear tests, both above and below ground. The cost to the environment and health of the Kazakh people and livestock was likewise massive, though the full scale of the effects was understudied and suppressed for decades. Through massive public protests in the 1980s, nuclear-weapons testing in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan was brought to a halt.
Like many Americans, Jazz Hampton and two of his friends, Andre Creighton and Mychal Frelix, watched in horror as two fellow Minnesotans, Philando Castile and George Floyd, were killed by police officers following what seemed to be routine traffic stops. If only there had been a way to de-escalate those situations while protecting the rights of the person detained, as well as the law enforcement officer involved. So they came up with one.
In August 2020, contract attorney Laura Frederick accepted a challenge: Post to LinkedIn once per day, every day, for a month. Frederick thought that she might be able to keep up a string of several days in a row. Instead, her daily posts became a way to connect with colleagues, build business, create a brand identity, and have a social lifeline during the isolation of the pandemic. A selection of those posts also found its way into her self-published book, Practical Tips on How To Contract: Techniques and Tactics From an Ex-BigLaw and Ex-Tesla Commercial Contracts Lawyer.
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