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In People v. Hartsch, S074804, the California Supreme Court faced a challenge to a conviction of defendant for three counts of first degree murder and sentence of death based on the special circumstance of multiple murder. In affirming, the court held, inter alia, that defendant failed to meet his burden of establishing a prima facie case of discrimination in the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges. The court rejected defendant’s claim that the court’s failure to sever the charges resulted in a fundamentally unfair trial, denying him due process as without merit....

Circuit Court procedures often are so complex that they seem arbitrary. A senior judge can hear a case, but he can’t vote on en banc rehearing. He can dissent from a panel rehearing denial, but not an en banc rehearing denial. He can sit on the en banc panel but can’t vote or dissent on granting the rehearing. If that sounds confusing, welcome to the party. Senior Judge Plager was equally confused, and irritated, and expressed as much in a footnote to his dissent, calling the original decision and judge-created rule for determining disability levels for veterans a “miscarriage of justice....

Harvard University’s dining services workers went on strike last week, after months of stalled negotiations with the university. The workers are asking Harvard, a nonprofit with a $35 billion endowment, to pay them $35,000 a year, or less than half the $88,000 it costs to attend Harvard Law for a year. Some of HLS’s 1Ls want to lend the striking workers a hand – and a meal. Students have proposed feeding the workers at their section events, causing Harvard Law School Dean Marcia Sells to send out a letter declaring that it “does not seem to make sense for us to encourage with Section Funds for students to bring in food to feed workers who are on strike....

It’s Google’s 15th birthday, and everyone is celebrating the essential search engine’s quinceañera. Google has provided some fun and frivolity with a piñata party-themed Google Doodle as well as a flashback to Google as it appeared in 1998. But we wanted to give Google something as well. So in honor of its 15th anniversary, here are 15 legal tidbits you may have missed involving our favorite search engine: Don’t expect Gmail privacy....

While the United States Supreme Court granted same-sex couples the right to marry in 2015, the battle for full recognition and equal protection and treatment under state law continues. And, as many same-sex couples are finding out, gaining parental rights under state law can also mean taking on parental responsibilities. Last week, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex spouses must be treated the same as heterosexual spouses, and that means owing child support the same way as well....

A new paper published in the Journal of Legal Education announces the interesting but ultimately unsurprising news that law grads who fail the bar never quite catch up in earnings to their classmates who pass. Soon-to-be grads can take this as just one more bit of motivation to stay awake in BarBri courses, or they can just pause and ask some further questions about the relevance of this new study to their lives....

Ed Forchion – who made headlines for his unsuccessful attempt to legally change his name to NJWeedman.com – finally scored a court win. Soon, he’ll score some pot, too. Although Forchion was convicted of pot possession in New Jersey, he recently received court approval to spend 10 days every month in California to – you guessed it – smoke medical marijuana, according to The Trentonian. The process is called a medical furlough....

Note to practitioners before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: Limit your use of acronyms. It really ticks off Judge Laurence Silberman. Above the Law showcased its “Quote of the Day,” with a mention of Judge Silberman’s annoyance at the overuse of abbreviations in the recent case of National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners v. United States Department of Energy. Here’s the quote, (brief thanks to Christopher Danzig of Above the Law):...

Los Angeles is firmly committed to seizing stuff from the city’s homeless population. After losing in both a district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the city has filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court, asking the Court to overturn an injunction that stops the city from clearing unattended belongings off the streets, Reuters reports. According to the Ninth Circuit, “The Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments protect homeless persons from government seizure and summary destruction of their unabandoned, but momentarily unattended, personal property....

People feel a range of emotions when a defendant leaves the courtroom in handcuffs. Victims may feel a sense of justice. Jurors, perhaps, feel relief because their job is done. Maybe one attorney revels in victory while another is shamed in defeat. But every lawyer should be mindful about the conviction of attorney Evan Greebel, formerly with Kaye Scholer. As one observer famously said during a parade of prisoners, “There, but by the grace of God, go I....

Network Hoping “The Hair” Plus Jungle Humidity Equals Ratings Gold NBC has apparently reached a tentative deal with Rod Blagojevich to have the painfully shy former Illinois governor appear as a cast member on “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here,” or “Who the @#*! is That?”, as the show is known informally. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Blagojevich would get paid $80,000 per week to appear on the reality show, which is set to start taping on June 1 in the Costa Rican jungle....

Lawyers, consider yourselves warned, according to the results of a recently released study, there is “no safe level of daily alcohol consumption.” According to science: That nightly cocktail, beer, glass (or bottle) of wine, isn’t actually good for your health. And the more you drink, the worse it is for your health. And what’s even worse is that the nightly drink often encourages a second or third, sometimes more than a few times a week, which leads to alcoholism....

Trial court’s denial of plaintiffs’ petition to set aside their Ukrainian adoption of a Ukrainian girl is affirmed as Family Code section 9100 applies only to adoptions granted by a California state court, and as such, the trial court correctly found that section 9100 could not be used to undo the Ukrainian adoption. Read Pracht-Smith v. California Dep’t of Soc. Serv., No. C060992 [HTML] Read Pracht-Smith v. California Dep’t of Soc....

If you’ve been following the marijuana industry over recent years, you may already know about the RICO charges many legal pot operations are facing. But a recently filed lawsuit by a horse lawyer against nearly 200 different pot operations in Oregon is taking one of the biggest shots at the industry to date. The gist of these cases alleges that the legal marijuana businesses still violate federal law, and by working in concert, despite being licensed by the state, are violating RICO....

Ronald McDonald got in some trouble when he went into a McDonald’s restaurant in violation of a restraining order against him. There hasn’t been a falling out between McDonald’s and their cheerful clown mascot. The clown wasn’t even involved in the incident. Instead this concerns a real man living in England named Ronald McDonald. His ex-wife took out a restraining order against him in September. But McDonald violated that order when he followed his ex-wife into a McDonald’s restaurant....

You don’t need to be an economist to know that having one lawyer for every 257 Americans isn’t good news – for lawyers, that is. If you’re looking to hire an attorney, it’s definitely a buyer’s market. Over the past decade, numerous big-wig law firms have folded due to declining profits. Some of them include Brobeck, Proffitt & Wood LLP, Thelen Reid, Thacher, Howrey & Simon, Arter & Hadden LLP, Phleger & Harrison LLP, and Jenkens & Gilchrist....

If you are considering dropping out of law school, or, worse, you’re on the verge of failing out, you might be wondering about all that student loan debt you took on. Unfortunately, unlike just about every other kind of debt, student loans cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. This means that, like your family, student loans are basically forever. However, there is a counterintuitive silver lining for law students: the more you take out in loans, the less likely you are to default....

“Deadpool” has taken attention away from the real dead pool. In the comic books, Deadpool is a Marvel character with superhuman abilities. In the Ryan Reynolds version, he is also super-irreverent and deathly funny. But a real dead pool is a game that involves guessing when someone will die. In the law-school watch, it looks like the pool is filling up. Biggest Enrollment Declines Paul Caron, editor of the TaxProf Blog, published a list of law schools with the biggest enrollment declines in first-year students....

Like clockwork, the ABA has released its latest employment placement data. And it looks like for recent New York law school grads, small firms are where it’s at. Almost 20 percent of 2010 New York law graduates were employed in law firms with 50 or less attorneys. Many of those firms had less than 10 lawyers. On the surface, it would seem that recent graduates have heeded the “sagely” advice of their contemporaries....

All lawyers seek to serve their clients zealously, but some really go the extra mile. Take, for example, the recent case of Senor Ruiz Zuniga, a Costa Rican defense attorney. Mr. Ruiz was recently caught smuggling 142 grams of cocaine to a client in prison – via his anus. That’s about enough cocaine to fill half a Coke can. Pura vida, indeed. Ruiz isn’t the first lawyer who has been tripped up by drugs....