John Keker (Photo by Hugh Williams)
In the litigation trenches, John Keker is known as the toughest lawyer around.
The founder of San Francisco’s Keker & Van Nest gets the call when Major League Baseball is sued over the possible move of its Oakland Athletics franchise; when Standard & Poor’s is threatened by claims that it was negligent in awarding financial ratings; when investment bankers, athletes and others face indictment and loss of reputations and livelihood. Continue reading
Outside California, the term “AB 540 student” may be nothing if not arcane. Inside the state, though, it has become a virtual identity for thousands of undocumented immigrants benefitting from a 13-year-old law that allows them to pay the lower college tuition usually reserved for California residents.
From that perspective, it’s an ideal choice for the name of an office at the University of California-Davis dedicated to the unique needs of those students: the AB540 & Undocumented Student Center, which opened this month. Through a partnership with the law school’s immigration clinic – the first of its kind in the University of California system – the center will provide free legal services to undocumented students and their families. Continue reading
Harvard University is standing by a new sexual harassment policy implemented this fall despite criticisms from more than two dozen law school professors, who say it fails to protect the rights of accused students and that it lacked sufficient faculty input. Continue reading
Pepperdine Law Dean Deanell Tacha opens the conference on domestic violence.
Dana Bolger had consulted an Amherst College administrator to find out her options for dealing with the student who sexually assaulted and stalked her in 2011. The official’s advice was simple: Take some time off from school. Go home. Come back after your attacker graduates.
“I felt like a liability, not a student,” she said in the keynote address of a Pepperdine Law conference on domestic violence on U.S. campuses. “Later I would come to realize that the way my dean responded to me that day was part of a larger pattern of administrators seeking to downplay violence, sweep it aside and keep survivors quiet.” Continue reading
He’s the dean who’s excited by what turns students off.
“It’s a valuable lesson for them – discovering what they don’t want to do as lawyers,” said Harold J. Krent, dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Continue reading
The arrest of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice in a domestic violence case didn’t prompt Pepperdine Law’s conference on intimate-partner abuse, but it has increased interest in the weekend event.
Baker
Public scrutiny of the case, and attention to a video of the attack, which occurred in an Atlantic City hotel elevator, “is an indicator that our culture and our society are becoming more aware of domestic violence and learning how to respond to it,” said Jeff Baker, Pepperdine’s director of clinical education, who’s organizing the conference. Continue reading
Gina Clayton, left, and Crystalee Crain prepare for an Essie Justice Group session for women with loved ones behind bars. Clayton is one of three recipients of 2014 seed grants from Harvard’s Public Service Venture Fund.
For Alec Karakatsanis and Phil Telfeyan winning cases means getting justice for clients unable to fight for themselves. Clients like the hundreds of people locked up in a Montgomery, Ala., jail because they were too poor to pay their traffic tickets.
Equal Justice Under Law, the organization founded by the two Harvard Law alums to provide pro bono legal services, filed a federal lawsuit in March arguing that Montgomery’s system of requiring people who couldn’t pay fines to sit out their debts behind bars at a rate of $50 a day was unconstitutional.
In May, a federal judge barred the city from jailing three Equal Justice clients on that ground, and Montgomery subsequently released dozens of inmates incarcerated for the same reason.
Without the seed grant that Karakatsanis and Telfeyan won from Harvard Law’s Public Service Venture Fund in 2013, some of those inmates might still be in jail. The two were the first to benefit from a program designed to help Harvard Law graduates found startups that target unmet legal needs at a time when other sources of funding were drastically reduced by a recession and years of slower economic growth. Continue reading
STUDENT NAME: David Medina
LAW SCHOOL: Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law (Arizona State University)
STATUS: 3L
UNDERGRADUATE: Bachelor of Science/ Management Science and Engineering/ Stanford University
HOME CITY, STATE: Pico Rivera, California
At the intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship, David Medina found the law.
As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Medina majored in what he described in an interview as “Startups 101″ – a broad education in all things engineering with a deep dive into the business management side of things. Continue reading
LOS ANGELES – Susan Westerberg Prager has vivid memories of the high school counselor who explained, before she graduated in 1960, the limited career paths available to her.
“You’re a good student, but because you’re a woman,” said the counselor, a woman herself, “there are really only two professions that you can go into: nursing or teaching.” Continue reading
From kindergarten through graduate-degree programs, millions of U.S. students went back to school in September. So did Lawdragon Campus.
We joined pre-law advisers in the Midwest and the South who visited six of the 200-plus American Bar Association-accredited law schools in the United States, rubbing shoulders with members of an entering class that likely continued to shrink on a nationwide basis this year, though initial enrollment tallies aren’t yet available. Continue reading
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