“All Rise!” With the smack of a gavel, the mood of the courtroom changes. An air of formality envelops the room as the proceedings get underway. As professionals, we put on our respective hats and prepare to carry out our duties.
There are more female managing partners and women at leadership levels in law firms today than ever before, and many of the young women lawyers climbing the ladder of success behind them show promise for leading law firms of the future. Although progress in the retention and advancement of women lawyers has been slower than expected and gender parity in the practice has not been achieved, there is a lot to applaud.
“Man is a rope, stretched between the beast and the Superman, a rope over an abyss.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra As a public interest lawyer, I feel this tension every day. From the stoic sense of focusing on what is possible to the idealistic urge to remake the system,…
In my previous post, I detailed the growing pressure on federal judges to disguise the sentencing process so that cooperation is invisible. Now I address the obvious but difficult-to-answer question: What’s to be done?
Criminal trials have virtually disappeared in many federal courtrooms. According to a U.S. Sentencing Commission report released last month, “In recent years, 97 percent of federal defendants convicted of a felony or Class A misdemeanor offense are adjudicated guilty based on a guilty plea rather than on a verdict at…
I graduated from Columbia Law School in 1945, 20 years before the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of sex. Although some eastern law schools—Yale and Columbia, but heavens, not Harvard—already admitted women, female graduates couldn’t expect to be recommended as law clerks to sitting judges, no matter how well their records stacked up against their male classmates.
Editor’s note: In his previous essay, Mark Alcott bemoaned numerous cringeworthy linguistic errors that appear in common parlance, even among the purportedly literate classes. In this piece, he expresses his displeasure at various cliches, banalities and bizarre usages that mar contemporary discourse. Now that I’ve established my linguistic bona fides—and…
OK, it’s true. When it comes to language, I’m a bit cranky. All right, all right. I admit it. I’m more than a crank. I’m an absolute curmudgeon. ’enry ’iggins had nothing on me. I have enough pet peeves to fill a kennel. And I never hesitate to point them…
It’s my third time reading Joanna Litt’s brave piece in the American Lawyer about the death by suicide of her beloved husband and accomplished lawyer Gabe MacConaill, and I’m still stumbling through it in tears. As she describes the pressures Gabe experienced as an attorney, I lose my breath because…
The ABA Journal wants to host and facilitate conversations among lawyers about their profession. We are now accepting thoughtful, non-promotional articles and commentary by unpaid contributors.
