NYC agencies borrow lawyers, Hastings says free speech allows name change, sex offender allowed to practice law, DOJ to face bias lawsuit
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As New York City's government contends with what it calls a critical shortage of lawyers, some of Manhattan's biggest law firms are lending out their own associates for temporary positions.
Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday that junior lawyers from eight law firms, including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Shearman & Sterling, will spend a year working in the legal departments of nine city agencies.
Adams' chief counsel Brendan McGuire said the following at a press conference:
"The city has never needed lawyers more than it does today. There are currently hundreds of lawyer positions vacant, and the city's lawyers at the law department and within its agencies do incredible work every day even though they are shorthanded."
The law firms will employ and pay the lawyer fellows, who will "in all other respects" be city employees, the mayor's office said in a statement. According to industry reports, large law firms hired lawyers at record rates last year, but many have since faced slackened demand for their services.
The list of law firms participating in the city's program named the New York City Legal Fellows Program also includes Willkie Farr & Gallagher, King & Spalding, Kirkland & Ellis, O'Melveny & Myers, and Ropes & Gray.
A lawsuit that aims to block the renaming of the University of California Hastings College of Law violates the San Francisco school's free speech rights, school officials told the state court judge overseeing the case on Wednesday.
Hastings' motion to dismiss the lawsuit is the latest development in a five-year debate over the school's name, which honors Serranus Hastings, a former California Supreme Court justice. Hastings, who founded the school in 1878, is accused by historians of orchestrating killings of Native Americans in order to remove them from ranch land he purchased in Northern California.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, on Sept. 30, signed a bill authorizing the school to be renamed as the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. The following week, six Hastings descendants and a group of alumni sued, claiming he was not involved in killings and that any name change breaches an agreement California made with Hastings when he gave $100,000 in gold to establish a school named after him.
The lawsuit contends that California entered into a contract with Hastings that said he would serve as its inaugural dean, that an heir or representative would always hold a seat on the school's board of directors, and that it would forever be called the "Hastings College of the Law."
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A sharply divided Washington Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a man who was previously convicted of a sex offense and other crimes can be licensed as an attorney.
The 5-4 decision clears the way for Zachary LeRoy Stevens, who graduated from Arizona State University's law school in 2018, to practice law in Washington. The Washington bar had recommended denial of Stevens' application for failure to pass its character and fitness review, a standard to ensure lawyers are morally fit to practice. But the state supreme court rejected that decision Thursday.
The opinion said Stevens had a difficult childhood in Utah and sought refuge online, where in 2006, he sent pornographic images of minors to a detective posing as a 14-year-old. He was charged in 2010 with four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of voyeurism, which required him to register as a sex offender.
In a statement, the Washington State Bar Association said it is "pleased that the case was resolved in a manner that protects the public and respects the rights of the applicant." Stevens' Seattle-based attorney Kevin Bank on Thursday said his client has been on a "long journey" to become a lawyer noting that:
"Like many other talented lawyers who have struggled to be admitted to the Bar, he fully acknowledges that his youthful misconduct was serious but also that it should not define him."
A U.S. appeals court said on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice must face an age and sex discrimination lawsuit by a former prison psychiatrist who quit her job after failing a rigorous physical fitness test when she was 67 years old.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a Virginia federal judge and said Jane DiCocco's claims that she suffered financial and professional injuries because she could not pass the test were enough to keep her lawsuit alive. DiCocco had appealed in 2020 after U.S. District Judge John Gibney dismissed her lawsuit. Last year, the same 4th Circuit panel that issued Thursday's decision revived her sex discrimination claim.
But the court, agreeing with the Trump-era DOJ, held that the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) bars federal employees from suing over policies that have a disparate impact on older workers. The panel ruling created a split with the 9th and 10th Circuits, which have allowed disparate impact claims by federal workers in ADEA cases.
The full court vacated that ruling and granted en banc review, but DOJ in August informed the 4th Circuit that it had changed its position on the age bias issue. That prompted the 4th Circuit to reassign the case to the three-judge panel.
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