On the Record

During my days in College Park, I accumulated a pile of free Terps T-shirts that I would wear to football and basketball games. Some may have been a little big, and roughly 5,000 other students would be wearing the exact same shirt, but hey, they were free.

I say this because we all probably did something similarly resourceful while in school to save a few bucks. Two recent stories about law school students have reinforced my point.

First is Julia Neyman, a student at Columbia Law School. Neyman has a blog, the cleverly-titled “Buns of Steal,” in which she chronicles her attempt to work out at health clubs in New York City for an entire year without paying once.

Neyman found gym memberships too expensive upon moving to New York to start law school but soon noticed gyms around the city gave out free passes and coupons. Enter her blog and her goal.

“Most people aren’t cheap enough to do this for a whole year,” she told The New York Daily News. “But I am.”

Next is University of Baltimore School of Law student Burke Miller, who posted an ad on Craigslist seeking tickets to Wednesday night’s Duke-Maryland basketball game in exchange for providing a certain number of billable hours to the seller upon passing the bar.

Miller told The Baltimore Sun one ticket seller contacted him but declined the offer.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said. “I’d sit down with [a seller] and make a contract and look at the standard billable rate for a young attorney. I’ve got full faith that I’d be a good attorney.”

I wish them both the best. (Incidentally, I’d be willing to part with some of my Terps T-shirts for a ticket to the game.)

I mentioned in my story in Wednesday’s paper a letter written by the Board of Visitors at the University of Maryland School of Law concerning former Dean Karen H. Rothenberg and the recent audit of the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Here is the letter in entirety. The board’s chairman, Paul D. Bekman, said the seven judges and one elected official (Sen. Ben Cardin) who are members were ethically precluded from endorsing the letter because of their positions. Otherwise, the letter represents the board’s unanimous position.

I’m not ashamed proud to admit it: I love “Jersey Shore,” the MTV reality show that became a cultural phenomenon.

For the uninitiated, the show followed eight twentysomethings for a month last summer as they lived and worked together on the beach in Seaside Heights, N.J. The Situation, Snooki, battling beats, GTL… the show has captured the cultural Zeitgeist with a pound of hair gel to spare.

Now comes word that one of the show’s stars has taken the LSAT. Vinny Guadagnino, known as simply “Vinny“, said he got a “mediocre” score on the test, which shot his plan of doing really well and enrolling at Yale or Harvard.

Vinny said he would like to practice business or corporate law one day. But right now, he is putting any law dreams he has on hold to ride out his newfound stardom.

“To tell you the truth, man, [being a] lawyer isn’t something I wanted to do,” he said.  “Nobody wants to be a lawyer — it’s hard work. But it was kind of my academic route.”

No matter where Vinny ends up, “Jersey Shore” fans know one thing - Vinny’s mom will love him.

Say hello to the new $107 million John and Frances Angelos Law Center (left), scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2012 and hold its first classes in the spring semester of 2013. The image is looking north from the intersection of Charles Street and Mt. Royal Avenue.

The rendering, plus floor plans and a 3-D model, were displayed three times Thursday - first receiving rave reviews from the state’s Architectural Review Board and Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel and finally during a community briefing Thursday night at UB’s student center (where I saw it).

Stefan Behnisch, whose German architecture firm is teaming with Baltimore’s Ayers/Saint/Gross Inc. on the project, took community members through the 12-story glass building. The law school will hold 1,100 students and will feature lots of open and public space to promote interaction, as well as an atrium the full height of the building. It will also be LEED certified, although the exact level of environmental friendliness has yet to be determined.

The glass facade will control the amount of sunlight entering the building and will make the building look different to passersby depending on the time of day, Behnisch said.

The building will become the first landmark visible to people leaving Penn Station, Behnisch said, so the goal was to make it both blend in and stand out in the neighborhood.

“I think it defines…the urban fabric,” he said.

Steve Cassard, UB’s vice president for facilities and capital planning, said the project remains on schedule and within the budget.

Sesame Street turns 40 today. I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

(Yes, I know, it was only yesterday you were a kid watching it, where did the time go, etc. etc.)

Big Bird and friends have taught generations of children how to count, share, play nice with others, and, perhaps most importantly, why you gotta put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone.

I tried to see if I could connect Sesame Street with with the law, and I’m not talking about any kind of hidden meaning in Bert and Ernie’s friendship. Turns out the show did it for me, as the following clip clearly demonstrates:

(And, just to save you the trouble of searching, please enjoy “Put Down the Duckie.”)

Back in September, I wrote about the University of Baltimore bringing back its long-forgotten alma mater. At the time, the only evidence of the song was a piece of paper from 1958 that included the alma mater and Auld Lang Syne.

The school’s archivists theorized the alma mater was sung as part of graduation programs, but were hoping alumni would come forward with additional information.

Bill Clift (Class of 1951) responded to inquiries with an answer. He checked his Reporter yearbook from 1951 and found two copies of the program from his senior banquet held in June of that year. The alma mater is part of the program, along with Auld Lang Syne. An insert with the program contained the words to both songs.

Both documents are now part of the university archives. So the only question that remains concerns the alma mater’s origins.

Incidentally, the university has also recently digitized all of its Reporter yearbooks, which were published between 1928 and 1975. The yearbooks were started by the first graduating law class.

On Saturday, I spent a rejuvenating morning serving as a judge for the semi-final round of a moot-court competition hosted by American University’s Washington College of Law.

My service to the Burton D. Wechsler First Amendment Moot Court Competition stirred me in three ways:

1. It made me feel 20 years younger, when I nervously stood as a law student waiting to be grilled by “judges” at the same school;

2. It enabled me to step out of the role of spectator (I have reported on oral arguments for two decades) and participate in the enterprise; and

3. As a husband — and father of a teen and a tween — it was refreshing to have people listen to me and answer my questions.

It also didn’t hurt that the fact pattern and issue were right up my alley.

The head of research and development at a major high-tech company was suing for libel a blogger who had accused him online of running a Mumbaian sweatshop where child laborers built computer components.

The issue before the moot court was whether the company executive qualified as a “public figure” or “private person” under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, a critical distinction that largely determines who wins the case.

Public figures, to prove libel, have the heavy burden of showing that the reporter wrote an erroneous story either knowing it was false or with a reckless disregard for the truth.  Private individuals need only show that the journalist was negligent in reporting a story that was  untrue.

The three-judge panel on which I served — as “chief” no less — ruled for the reporter. Imagine that.

Sorry, University of Maryland and University of Baltimore law school students – you don’t have a shot of clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

An ABA Journal story about the composition of current and past clerks at the highest court in the land quotes Scalia telling an American University Washington College of Law student earlier this year she should look elsewhere for a clerkship: 

By and large, I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?

(The real chutzpah of the quote is that Scalia said it on AU’s campus after being invited by the law school.)

For this upcoming term, the Harvards and Yales of the world still dominate the clerkships, although Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “caused a stir” by picking a Seton Hall alumnus as his one of his clerks, according to the story. The universities of Georgia and Texas and George Washington University are also represented this term.

One former justice who didn’t automatically gravitate to top-10 law schools was Byron White, who hired ”interesting people,” including a man who worked in a coal mine.

“Look, there are a hundred people a year that could to the job adequately,” the NFL-player-turned-justice told biographer Dennis Hutchinson. “I might as well have someone who’s interesting, and that doesn’t mean the ones that the fancy law profes­sors recommend.”

I was driving on Charles Street by our office this morning when I saw a woman walking across the street with the help of a cane and what I thought was a full cast on her left leg. Upon closer inspection, I thought the woman was Phoebe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland School of Law.

Turns out I was half right. The woman was in fact Haddon, but she was wearing a brace, not a cast, according to Jamie Smith, a law school spokesman. Haddon has been rehabbing from a summer leg injury, he said, and part of the treatment is to wear the brace.

Haddon is on her way to her goal, incidentally, of a full recovery by Saturday, when she will deliver her first address since becoming dean in July. Ron Kirk, the U.S. Trade Representative, will give the keynote address at the program, titled “Justice & the Global Economy”  but designated on the school’s Web site as “an event celebrating [Haddon's] appointment.” Registration for the event had to be closed after 500 people signed up, Smith said.

On the cover: With their progressive pilot potentially on the chopping block, the OPD’s Neighborhood Defenders in Park Heights are defending not only their clients but their problem-solving approach. Also, Caryn Tamber talks to University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron about her research into online gender harassment and the law.

In the news: An EPA official says the agency wants more weapons in its arsenal; Maryland’s top court upholds a sex-abuse conviction based on the testimony of a 6-year-old victim; Mike’s Train House is sued for infringement; and an offshoot of the “driving while black” case will be the subject of a rare Court of Special Appeals en banc hearing.

 Also:

• Verdicts & Settlements features the case of an HIV-positive teacher who was fired from his job at a private elementary school in Arnold.

• Before there was “The Power of Nice” or his success as a sports agent, there was the Modern Bar Review Course. In My First/Business, Ron Shapiro reflects on the lessons learned from his initial foray into commerce.

• In Opinion/Commentary, Jack L.B. Gohn weighs in on the narrowing difference between blogs and journalism, while Edward J. Levin points out a key requirement under a Maryland deed of trust: naming an individual as the trustee. 

• Catch up with our Week in Review and the Law Digest, this week with cases from the Maryland Court of Appeals, Court of Special Appeals and the Office of Administrative Hearings.