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Petition for Review of Secretary of Labor Rules Granted in Part In Int’l. Union, United Mine Wkrs. of Am. v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., No. 09-1014, a petition for review of the Secretary of Labor’s rules on Refuge Alternatives for Underground Coal Mines, the court granted the petition in part where the miner training requirements at issue were arbitrary and capricious because the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) failed to explain the basis for them other than to state it relied upon its “knowledge and expertise....

The bar exam was the most stressful time of my entire life. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, except … I went through the suck, most lawyers go through the suck, and YOU TOO SHOULD GO THROUGH THE SUCK! It’s a rite of passage, a filter to remove the barely literate and the incomprehensibly lazy, especially in states with ridiculously high passage rates, like Iowa, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. Proponents of the move argue that it will help grads avoid four months of stress (boo hoo) and accrued student loan interest, but here’s a better idea, one that Iowa is also considering, but nobody is talking about: adopt the Uniform Bar Exam, especially since, as Iowans may already know, they are basically using it anyway....

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: it’s never too early to teach our children about business and entrepreneurship. For instance, is 11 years old too young to learn how to take cocaine from the cartel to the street dealer? We say no. That’s why we need more science teachers like the one at Bear Creek Intermediate School in Keller, Texas, who sent 6th graders home with an assignment titled, “The Cocaine Trade: From Field to Street....

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Reed Smith. James Lawlor. Ballard Spahr. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. Blank Rome. Drinker Biddle & Reath. They were recently mentioned in the Los Angeles Times as representing a sign of the slimming tendencies of a summer in economic recovery. The law firms are mentioned are reported to have modified their summer internship programs to match the waning tides of the economy. The article noted that many prominent law firms have gone about the slim-down in different ways:...

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the falling pass rates of bar exam takers in the last few years. As fingers get pointed, the usual question is asked as to whether or not law schools are to blame. Are they admitting students who should not have been admitted? Yes. At least that’s the reasonable conclusion to infer from a new study by Law School Transparency. Dubious Practices The Law School Transparency Study shows that about a one third of the currently 204 accredited law schools in this nation admitted applicants into its incoming class that scored below 150 – so called “at risk” students....

It’s a tale as old as lawyering. Lawyer has a drug problem. Lawyer goes to court. Lawyer starts jonesing for their drug of choice. Lawyer sneaks off to bathroom to snort drugs off their cell phone in a toilet stall. Someone overhears the suspicious noises and reports it to court security. Lawyer gets arrested while in court for doing drugs in the courthouse bathroom. Sadly, for one law student intern in Macon, Georgia, she is living this unfortunate tale before even becoming a lawyer....

Merit Systems Protection Board judgment regarding the Office of Personnel Management’s calculation of plaintiff’s retirement annuity is affirmed where: 1) the Board erred in stating that neither it nor OPM had the authority to question the Administrative Office’s determination of plaintiff’s basic pay; 2) the Board properly affirmed the OPM’s decision that transcript income should not be included in the definition of basic pay; and 3) plaintiff’s request for class treatment is moot since Board’s decision that plaintiff’s transcript income did not qualify as basic pay has been affirmed....

A Tennessee man left a large chunk of his estate to his two cats, and not to his five human children. Leon Sheppard, 79, of Memphis, passed away in December 2012, but in his will left $250,000 and his 4,200-square-foot home to his two cats Frisco and Jake, Memphis’ WMC-TV reports. (When reached by phone, one of Sheppard’s children told WMC the family didn’t want to talk about it.) Can you really leave that much money to cats in your will?...

If you’re going to cook meth, you should probably do it the old fashioned way. You know, in a rundown home, a hotel room or a trailer. Carrying around a meth lab in your pants? Well, that’s just a horrible idea. Just ask David Williams. The Oklahoma man was arrested on Friday after a portable meth lab exploded in his pants. A brief encounter with a Highway Patrol trooper led to a roadside struggle that caused the one-pot lab to burst....

In plaintiff’s petition seeking compensation on behalf of her infant daughter under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, 42 U.S.C. sections 300aa-1 and 300aa-34, claiming that the DPT vaccine caused her daughter’s seizures, decision by the Court of Federal Claims upholding the special master’s finding that the plaintiffs failed to establish causation is affirmed where: 1) determination by the special master and the Court of Federal Claims that no treating physician ever drew a causal link between the child’s seizures and the vaccination is neither arbitrary not capricious; 2) the special master did not err in concluding that the blood-brain barrier theory did not support the plaintiffs’ claim of causation; 3) the special master properly held that the plaintiffs could not rely on the NCES (British epidemiological study) to prove causation because they failed to establish that the child would have been regarded as a “case child” within the scope of that study; and 4) the special master applied the correct legal standard and found, based in part on the unconvincing nature of the expert evidence and the lack of credibility of the plaintiffs’ expert, that the plaintiffs failed to prove causation by a preponderance of the evidence....

A California court has dismissed a motorcyclist’s BMW erection lawsuit. In his suit, Henry Wolf alleged that a four-hour ride on his 1993 BMW K1100RS motorcycle led to a prolonged and painful erection that lasted 20 months. It kind of makes you wonder about that Viagra commercial showing an older man riding home on a motorcycle, ready to rekindle his passion with his perimenopausal wife. So why did the court give Wolf’s case the shaft?...

For every villain trying to blame a DUI on his pet squirrel or hastily fake a black ice-laced intersection, there are intoxicated heroes among us, willing to drive themselves drunk right up to the police station in an effort to turn themselves in. And to these brave souls, Norman Boiselle of Old Mystic, Connecticut, who called the police to report that he was driving drunk and had crashed into a snowbank, we say, “Bravo!...

No, it’s not 2003 anymore, but Netflix still sends millions of DVDs through the Postal Service every week. Indeed, Netflix alone purchases 97 percent of the U.S. Postal Service’s “round-trip” mailers, the products that allow you to return a mailed DVD with an enclosed envelope, no extra postage necessary. Currently, the law restricts how much the Postal Service can charge for those mailers. USPS had recently sought to change that, seeking to raise rates on those red envelopes, but their request was denied by the Postal Regulatory Commission....

Lisa Marie Presley is all shook up because her $100 million fortune is gone. As Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie inherited the estate through a trust when she turned 25. That was 25 years ago. Now, she’s down to $14,000. She has sued her former business manager in Los Angeles Superior Court, but he says the trust baby blew it all. Lost Fortune – Twice In an answer and cross complaint, Barry Siegel says his company always informed Lisa Marie that her lavish spending was depleting her estate....

Probate court’s order determining that settlor’s revocation of a trust is ineffective due to his lack of capacity is affirmed as the certifications of mental competence are insufficient because neither physician who found mental competence was aware of the earlier certifications of mental incompetence. Read Rands v. Rands, No. B208062 [PDF] Read Rands v. Rands, No. B208062 [HTML] Filed October 27, 2009 Judges Opinion by Judge Gilbert Counsel For Appellant: Law Offices of Tamila C....

Is nothing sacred? Seattle’s green mayor, Mike McGinn, had his commuter bike stolen right out from under him. Granted, Mayor Mike McGinn forgot to lock the bike he borrowed from his wife. He left it in the parking garage at City Hall last Wednesday. When he returned to ride it home, it was gone, reports the Seattle Times. “I know I’ve been encouraging people to ride bikes more,” Mayor Mike McGinn posted on Twitter, “but I didn’t mean u could ‘borrow’ my wife’s bike w/o asking....

You’d think that for $100,000 dollars or so, law schools would teach you everything you need to know to hang out your shingle and start out in criminal defense, but it just ain’t so. Hopefully you’ve got good mentors, good practice guides and good malpractice insurance. In some jurisdictions, once you’ve made a general (as opposed to a special) appearance, you’re on the hook and you’ll need to continue representing your client all the way through trial whether he pays you or not....

Summer associate season is coming. It’s a time to learn skills, meet new people and – oh, forget that. You want to get an offer for after graduation. It’s summer. The perfect time for tank tops, shorts and flip flops – you’re a hard-bodied young thing so why not show it off, right? Wrong. You want to show that you’re an adult, and that you have the mad skills to look like an adult even when it’s hot....

90 percent of all U.S. bills tested had traces of cocaine on them; that’s on the high side for one of these studies, according to the Snopes research;places like Baltimore and Detroit produce more cocaine-laced bills; cities like Salt Lake City, fewer. Try not to act surprised;the U.S. Government is on record: their bill-making process is 100% coke-free. Asked about the tainted money, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing assures us that “when it leaves here, it does not have any cocaine in it”;this study took on an international flavor, with bills from Canada, Japan, Brazil, and China being tested....

For some reason, people are hard-wired to be unable to turn away from a garbage fire. And since it’s no secret that lawyers hate legal dramas for their wild inaccuracies, for some reason, a good number of us just can’t turn away. Our more experienced TV watching companions know to hover their finger over the pause button, lest our couch objections and grumblings about real life timelines would disrupt the predictably twisted plot line....