‘Alberta’s Louisville’ — Pioneering attorney and civil rights leader to receive Hometown Heroes banner next month

From Insider Louisville authored by Joe Sonka:

“The next “Hometown Heroes” banner in downtown Louisville will be unveiled in September, honoring pioneering attorney and civil rights leader Alberta Jones, whose life was tragically cut short at 34 years old in 1965.

In 1959, Jones became the first African-American woman to pass the Kentucky bar exam, then became the first female prosecutor in the state in 1965, handling domestic abuse cases in Louisville. She was the first attorney of Muhammad Ali, negotiating his first professional boxing contract in 1960. Jones also established the Independent Voters Association, through which she led drives to register thousands of African-American voters in Louisville and education campaigns on how to use the voting booths.

Just five months after becoming a prosecutor, Jones was abducted from her car, beaten and thrown off the Sherman Minton Bridge. No one was ever arrested for her murder, though LMPD recently announced that it was reinvestigating the cold case due to possible new leads.”

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Heather Heyer’s Law Firm Starts Foundation in Her Honor

From The American Lawyer authored by Meghan Tribe:

“A day after the MTV Video Music Awards honored Heather Heyer, a legal assistant killed earlier this month while protesting against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a high-powered law firm announced that it would be among the first to support her former employer in its effort establishing a nonprofit organization in her memory.

The Heather Heyer Foundation, whose internet web domain name was registered last week by Alfred Wilson, head of legal support and a former colleague of Heyer’s at Charlottesville’s Miller Law Group, will provide scholarships to individuals committed to seeking positive social change in and around the legal profession.”

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Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: A Judicious Trailblazer

From Above The Law authored by Nicole Black:

“While on vacation earlier this summer, I read the book Sisters In Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor And Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (affiliate link). I was so intrigued and inspired by this fascinating biography, penned by Linda Hirshman, that chronicled the trailblazing paths of these two amazing women jurists, that I’ve decided to take an occasional break from legal tech issues every few months to write about each of the women Supreme Court justices.”

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It’s time to change the conversation about “token” judicial appointments

From Tribtalk authored by Courtney R. Chavez:

“Dear Judge Richard Posner:

Recently, you sat for an interview with Professor Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago — which the Chicago Tribune reported on — that is causing concern for many lawyers. Specifically, on the subject of judicial appointments, you said:

[Politicians] do not care about quality beyond a minimum. A very low minimum. They care about other things. They care about tokens — (laughing) you have to have a woman, you have to have a Hispanic, you have to have a this, you have to have a that, but they care more than that about the politics. The political leanings, the religious leanings, so on, about the candidates, so you end up with mediocre courts that are highly politicized.

Your words transported me back to a time in high school when my calculus teacher told me I would succeed in this world not due to my own merits, but because I was a woman and Hispanic. He did not mean it as a compliment.”

 

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Judge shouldn’t be booted from case because of Facebook friendship with lawyer, appeals court rules

From ABA Journal authored by Debra Cassens Weiss :

“A Florida judge isn’t disqualified from a case merely because she is Facebook friends with a lawyer who represents a potential party and witness in the litigation, a state appeals court has ruled.

A Facebook friendship doesn’t necessarily signify a close relationship, according to Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal. A mere allegation of a Facebook friendship, without more, does not provide a basis for disqualification, the court said (PDF). Law.com(sub. req.), the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) have coverage.”

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Pay Up: Female lawyers are working for income fairness—by suing their firms

From ABA Journal authored by Stephanie Francis Ward:

“Traci Ribeiro is single and has no children. Practicing law, the Chicago insurance-defense attorney has said, gives her significant joy.

“It’s what I do for fun. So the usual defenses firms use for not paying women fairly, they couldn’t use those with me even if they wanted to,” the Sedgwick partner said last November, shortly after she filed an Equal Pay Act lawsuit against the firm.

The lawsuit initially was filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, where Sedgwick was founded. The firm won motions to move the complaint to federal court and compel arbitration, based on the firm’s partnership agreement. By April the parties had reached a provisional settlement, according to a federal court filing; and David Sanford, Ribeiro’s lawyer, said that neither he nor she would comment on the case further. On Aug. 3, a receptionist with Sedgwick’s Chicago office told the ABA Journal that Ribeiro was no longer with the firm.”

 

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A crusading attorney helped free a man framed for murder. They both ended up dead.

From Bridge authored by Ron French:

“There is a photo I kept on my desk for years.  In it, three people stand in a courtroom hallway. On the left is Dwight Love, a middle-aged man from Detroit who hadn’t stood in a courthouse hallway without handcuffs since he was a young man. Love was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit when he was 21 years old. Minutes earlier, a judge had dismissed the case.

On the right is Sarah Hunter, a diminutive Birmingham attorney with cropped blond hair and a thick yellow legal pad. She had worked on Love’s case for years. By the time of the photo, it was her only case, and she had been working for free for several years to try to get Love out of prison. She’d gambled her professional career on what most viewed as a loser of a case, and she’d won.

In the middle is a reporter, with his own legal pad in a binder that displayed a Detroit News business card. I’d never asked to have a photo taken with people I was writing about before, but this was special. For years, I was the only journalist who wrote about the case. In the end, I played a role in getting Love out of prison, and I wanted a memento. Dwight put his arm around my shoulder; Sarah did the same.

In the movies, the snapping of that photo in February 2001 would be the moment the music swells and the credits roll, the happy ending.

Today, Love and Hunter are dead.”

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Of Course Women Have More Stamina Than Men (& Now Science Backs That Up)

From She Knows authored by Elizabeth Yuko:

“In a surprise to no woman, a recent study found women have more stamina than men.

While men may be stronger physically, the research journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism found that women have significantly more muscle endurance than their male counterparts. This means that the women involved were much less tired after “natural, dynamic muscle exercises” than men of comparable age and athletic ability.

“We’ve known for some time that women are less fatigable than men during isometric muscle tests — static exercises where joints don’t move, such as holding a weight — but we wanted to find out if that’s true during more dynamic and practical everyday movements,” Assistant Professor Brian Dalton, one of the authors of the study, said in a news release. ‘And the answer is pretty definitive: Women can outlast men by a wide margin.'”

 

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Why Many Native American Girls Skip School When They Have Their Periods

From The Huffington Post authored by Eleanor Goldberg :

“Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D. ― Dominique Amiotte, 17, always makes sure to keep a few extra tampons in her locker. It’s not much, but it’s enough to encourage at least some of her struggling friends to come to school when they have their periods.

About half of Amiotte’s girlfriends can’t afford tampons or sanitary pads. As a result, when they menstruate, they’ll skip school for as long as a week. This can lead them to fall behind in class, contributing to the already abysmal graduation rates on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There are no official records on how many of the young women at the reservation’s 13 schools have felt the consequences of this issue, but individuals we spoke to say it’s an inescapable part of everyday life.

“It makes me angry,” Amiotte told HuffPost unflinchingly while seated in an empty classroom at the Crazy Horse School, where there are 70 girls enrolled in middle or high school classes.”

 

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Law School Grads Agree: Social Media Is ‘Fair Game’ For Employers

From Above the Law authored by Kathryn Rubino:

“Should a prospective employer or the state bar use an applicant’s social media presence to decide whether the applicant should get a job or receive admission to the bar? It’s a thorny issue that lawyers of yesterday never had to deal with, but it seems there is a consensus among recent graduates.

According to a Kaplan Bar Exam survey of 700 law school graduates from the class of 2017, a full 78 percent of prospective lawyers think it is “fair game” for employers to use social media profiles in hiring decisions. Fewer think it is also acceptable for a state’s character and fitness board to use social media posts in determining who is admitted to the bar, but a clear majority — 66 percent — think it is acceptable.”

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