Category: News Feeds

Odds that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to talk about the events leading up to the January 6 Insurrection: ZERO.

Meadows famously tried to get the Justice Department to investigate a rumor that Barack Obama conspired with the Italian president to steal the election via military lasers, and CNN reports that Chairman Dick Durbin is interested in sitting down for a little chat about it. Ditto for Meadows’s recollections of White House efforts to enlist the Justice Department in an effort to overturn the election results.

“I’d like to have the opportunity,” Durbin said, although he acknowledged that he’d have to get Republican cooperation to issue a subpoena in the event Meadows refuses to come in voluntarily.

Let’s take a wildass guess that Meadows will not cheerfully accede to requests to come in and reminisce about his time in Trumpland. The January 6 House Select Committee has subpoena power, and will doubtless want a piece of Meadows’s time, too. But short of an engraved invitation from Jesus himself, Meadows will never spill the beans on his former boss.

Despite DOJ assurances that it will not be invoking executive privilege for presidential communications about the events leading up to the Capitol riot, Team Trump has steadfastly maintained that the former president retains the right to invoke executive privilege as a private citizen.

“Please be advised that the Department’s purported waiver and authorization are unlawful, and that President Trump continues to assert that the non-public information the Committees seek is and should be protected from disclosure by the executive privilege,” huffed former Georgia congressman Doug Collins, now Trump’s private lawyer, in a letter to former DOJ officials summoned by congress.

Note that he’s not actually invoking privilege with regard to any particular statement. Collins is just continuing the four-year run of gesturing vaguely in the direction of an inchoate executive privilege covering all executive branch communications without actually invoking it.

Which was always bullshit, of course. Congress has wielded broad oversight power of the executive branch for decades, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have generally cooperated. But the Trump administration flatly refused, because they knew that they controlled the Justice Department, and Bill Barr wasn’t going to prosecute anyone for blowing off Democratic congressional demands. They did it because they could.

“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump admitted in 2019, insisting on his right to refuse to cooperate with any Democratic congressional oversight if they didn’t back off the Ukraine impeachment inquiry. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”

Remember when Hillary Clinton refused to sit down with Congress for eleven hours to talk about Benghazi because it was illegal to conduct oversight if you had evil, partisan designs in your heart? No, you don’t.

IRL lawyers like former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue aren’t stupid enough to keep playing this game when “their” ref has left the field. Once the DOJ told them to cough it up, they ran not walked to Congress to spill the beans before Trump could get into court and bollix it up with some inane attempt to exert post-presidential privilege.

But no one has ever accused Mark Meadows of insufficient stupidity. From his new position heading the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute (where he and Cleta Mitchell both got a soft landing), he has zero incentive to cross the Big Man. So it’s a safe bet that he’ll go along with any harebrained scheme to claim privilege over any and all conversations he had with coup plotters, conspiracy theorists, and Justice Department officials — much less Donald Trump himself.

Maybe he’ll say he’s washing his hair. Maybe he’ll shout “EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE!” and run away laughing at the three Clinton chiefs of staff who didn’t know the one weird trick to get out of giving congressional testimony. Maybe he’ll make like Eminem and put one of those fingers on each hand up. But he will never appear before Congress.

Senate Judiciary chairman wants to interview former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows [CNN]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Pretty much every legal professional knows a lawyer who has decided to leave the industry. Indeed, one of the good things about a law degree is that a legal education can be helpful in a number of fields, and many people decide to use their legal education and experiences to pursue endeavors outside of the law industry, such as in the business world, journalism, or a plethora of other fields. However, many lawyers talk about leaving the legal profession as an “escape” and deride their former work. It is not uncommon for people to talk about how they “broke free” from the legal profession as if being in the legal industry was a horrific ordeal. It is unclear where much of this bitterness comes from, and this sentiment can help reinforce a negative view of legal professionals.

When I was deciding in college if I wanted to join the legal profession, the only people I knew who went to law school beside my brother were educators. These individuals did not suggest going to law school and talked negatively about their experiences in private practice before they were able to join academia. This experience showed me early on that people might leave the legal profession and not have good feelings about their former vocation.

Other former lawyers that I meet now as a practicing attorney share a negative sentiment about their former vocation. I have a few friends from law school who later went on to graduate programs and entered completely different fields. They speak as though they have escaped some kind of hellish ordeal and are so happy that they no longer in the legal field. Of course, there are also a number of active lawyers who also speak negatively about the legal profession, but former lawyers seem to have a greater license to bad-mouth their former vocation since they are no longer practicing lawyers.

However, it is unclear why former lawyers have so much negativity about the legal profession. People who are members of a variety of different fields may find later on that they do not like the line of work they initially decided to pursue. Indeed, I had a few teachers growing up who did all kinds of work before they finally decided to become teachers. I never really heard any of these people bad-talk their former careers, so it is unclear what is so polarizing about the legal profession that departing lawyers hold so much animosity.

Perhaps the law school experience is one of the reasons. Pretty much every lawyer had to endure several years of law school, and this can be a competitive and academically rigorous experience. In addition, people may need to borrow an arm and a leg to attend law school, so perhaps departing lawyers are resentful that they needed to spend so much money and time to earn a law degree that they will no longer entirely need. However, many people think of law school fondly as a great time to grow socially, and people need to borrow student loans to earn all kinds of educational credentials. Moreover, a legal education can enrich all kinds of vocational and personal pursuits even though an individual will no longer be a practicing attorney.

Perhaps the grind of working at a law firm is another reason why former lawyers seem to harbor so many negative sentiments toward the legal profession. Law firm work can be a grind, since many lawyers work on repetitive matters, and administrative chores involved in private practice can be extremely annoying. Indeed, some firms might be competitive or have office politics that can make it unpleasant to work at a given shop. However, the administrative and bureaucratic unpleasantness at many law firms are present in pretty much any other corporate job a person might have. Indeed, anyone who works at an office that has a corporate structure is going to have bosses, annual evaluations, performance expectations, office politics, and everything else that stinks about working in an office. Unless a lawyer leaves the law to work in a completely different setting that does not have the same corporate structure, they are likely to encounter all of the same challenges that makes law firm life unpleasant at times.

Although, there are reasons departing lawyers might not like the vocation they are leaving, there seems to be no reason why former lawyers have more ill will to the legal industry than any other person who leaves a profession.

In the end, I am not sure why former lawyers hold such ill will toward the legal profession and to what degree that can impact the perception people have about the legal profession. I would love to hear perspectives from readers on why they think former sisters and brothers of the bar have animosity to the legal industry.

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

I ran into my old parish priest at a minor league baseball game the other night (along with like a dozen other priests wearing the collars and everything — I guess it was priests’ night out or something). Anyway, I went up to say hello, and the conversation went something like this:

“Hi Father Mark! I’m Jon Wolf. You probably don’t recognize me, [same recycled joke about looking like the fifth Beatle after a year-and-a-half of COVID-19 lockdowns that I’d used like five times already that night], but I used to be an altar boy for you when you said Mass.”

“[Nervous laughter] Oh, I don’t really remember you, but that last name Wolf, was your mom a dental hygienist in town?”

“Of course, that’s why I have such good teeth [weird smile]! See? You have really good teeth too, probably my mams had something to do with that.”

“Thanks. So, are you married now, and do you have a family or what?”

“Oh yes! Well, I’m not married exactly, I do have a long-term girlfriend though, and we have a kid, not my kid biologically, but she’s more or less my daughter, and that look on your face makes clear that you’re now processing my obvious embrace of premarital sex and procreation outside of the bonds of matrimony and so in turn I’m only now realizing that I did not come into this sentence with an exit strategy …”

“You know, I’m going to pray for you tonight.”

Ugh. So often in life it’s just easier to pretend you’ve entirely forgotten someone.

My point in writing about this though is that it would have been perfectly acceptable for me to just say, you know, I appreciated all the sermons and everything when I was a kid, and I think your heart was in the right place, but I’m an atheist now, and everyone is fine with that, and I don’t have any problem with how I now choose to live my life. I shouldn’t have had to feel shame in talking to a guy I used to know just because my lifestyle no longer matches his religious convictions, but I did.

I’m not alone in that. The religiously unaffiliated proportion of the U.S. population continues to grow, and it stood at 26 percent as of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet, being nonreligious in a country full of religious wackos is a complicated endeavor, and relatively few people are willing to self-identify as atheist even if the definition of “atheist” functionally matches their actual belief structure. Just 4 percent of Americans actually say they are atheists when asked to state their religious identity (although that number is on the rise, too).

I was raised pretty hardcore Catholic, and actually believed a lot of that shit for years. But having read about 30 science books, and about 30 true crime books detailing the misdeeds of falsely religious hucksters bilking believers out of money and power and sex, and seeing a couple of my friends have their whole families randomly murdered, and watching my daughter go through cancer treatments, and having other friends die randomly in their 20s for no goddamn reason at all, and watching a lot of anti-gay bigotry and women-shaming and clergy molestation scandals and a bunch of other things take place, I mean, come on. The evidence is overwhelming. There’s just not some all-powerful altruistic being watching out for all of us. The world is random and indifferent, and if you want a path through life that’s better than that, it’s up to you to create it.

Magic and mental wishes (aka prayer) don’t control everything. We’re all skinsacks holding in five or six liters of blood around a bone framework, and that’s OK. There is no broader plan beyond whatever human beings come up with. It’s only us here, and it’s up to us whether we turn this world into a heaven or a hell. Really that’s not such a bad thing. It gives us all a lot of responsibility.

But most atheists still can’t just say that. There are zero members of Congress who will admit to being atheists, and only one who will even acknowledge being religiously unaffiliated. Atheists shouldn’t have to feel bad about their lack of belief though. We don’t (well, most of us don’t) go around directly insulting the God-fearing for the beliefs that apparently give them some form of comfort through this admittedly rough existence. So maybe the pious could return the favor.

If you’re an atheist, just say it, and try not to feel bad. And if you’re not, perhaps try to make us feel OK with who we are rather than pushing beliefs on us that we’ve already rejected for some pretty good reasons.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

It’s August and that means, well, a lot of things, but for rising 2Ls it means the start of interview season. Yes, it remains a bit bonkers that you begin the interview process for a job you’ll have at the end of your 2L year before that school year even begins, but that’s law school for you. (COVID caused a blip in the schedule, but it’s back to the regular programming this year.)

With the dawn of a new interview season, it is worth remembering that things can go very, very wrong. Not that I’m trying to psych you out or anything but, yeah, it gets rough out there. Anyway, Alison Green of Ask a Manager is collecting stories of workplace mortification, and there’s a story of a law school interview gone awry that is super cringe. In fairness, in the story it’s mostly the interviewer that’s the oversharer, but, it isn’t a good look for anyone.

Take a look:

“Back in law school I was interviewing for a summer position at a state Department of Justice. My interviewer and I weren’t really gelling and I think we could both feel it…nothing horrible was happening, but the energy was down, and we didn’t really have much of a connection.

At the bottom of my resume, I’d added that I’d published a book, so as a way to build camaraderie my interviewer told me that she was an author as well. I was excited that we had something in common, so I asked what genre. She paused, laughed awkwardly, then gestured to what I realized were pictures of book covers with shirtless male torsos on the bulletin board behind her. She said, ‘Well, I write romance…erotica…’ There was a long pause as she tried to struggle her way out of the explanation, but since I just kept smiling and nodding what she ended up blurting was, ‘I write gay sex.’

Since I could tell she was instantly mortified with herself, and I wanted her to know it was OK since I enjoy a good erotica myself, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was judging the M/M aspect of it, I earnestly replied, ‘That’s my favorite kind!’

And when she kind of laughed in amazement and covered her face with her hands, I DOUBLED DOWN: ‘No, seriously! It is!’”

Yikestown.

You can check out other mortifying (though not law-related) stories at Ask A Manager.

Do you have an equally embarrassing interview story to share? If you survived or witnessed some horror story in action, let us know. You can email it to us (subject line: “Interview Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477). Maybe your story will console others.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

The Delta variant is quickly turning law firms’ reopening plans on their heads. Many are pushing back the date of their proposed returns to the office, and even more (almost 40) are introducing vaccination mandates for all employees.

For reference, the following firms are requiring all employees to be vaccinated before they return to the office: Akin Gump, Arent Fox, Ballard Spahr, Boies Schiller Flexner, Cleary Gottlieb, Clifford Chance, Cooley, Cozen O’Connor, Crowell & Moring, Davis & Gilbert, Davis Polk, Davis Wright Tremaine, Debevoise & Plimpton, Dickinson Wright, Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, Fenwick & West, Fried Frank, Goodwin, Hanson Bridgett, Hogan Lovells, Hueston Hennigan, Lowenstein Sandler, McDermott Will & Emery, Mintz, Norton Rose Fulbright, Patterson Belknap, Paul Weiss, Reed Smith, Ropes & Gray, Sanford Heisler, Schiff Hardin, Seyfarth Shaw, Sheppard Mulllin, Simpson Thacher, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, Weil Gotshal, Wilson Sonsini, and Winston & Strawn.

We can now add two more firms to that list. Skadden and Carlton Fields will now require employees to be vaccinated to return to the office. Sidley, on the other hand, has simply pushed off its full reopening date, and to our knowledge, hasn’t yet made a move on vaccinations. Clifford Chance, which had already required vaccines, will also be deferring its return-to-office plans.

Yesterday, Sidley announced via email that the firm would be delaying its proposed return-to-office date to “no earlier than October 12.” The firm had originally planned to go back to the office right after Labor Day in September. While the firm has yet to embrace a vaccination mandate, 92% of U.S. employees report that they’ve already been fully vaccinated. Going forward, unvaccinated personnel who go to the office must wear masks. The firm continues on with its gradual and flexible return policy until mid-October.

Today, Clifford Chance announced to all U.S. employees via email that it would be pushing back its plans for a full reopening. The new target return-to-office date for the firm is sometime during the week of October 25, deferred from September 13.  If that date changes again, the firm will provide at least 30 days’ notice to all personnel. Clifford Chance previously announced a vaccination mandate as part of its plans to return to the office.

When Skadden first announced its reopening plans — setting its sights on a September 13 return to its U.S. offices, with a hybrid work model that would include at least three days of in-office work — the firm did not require vaccinations. The firm announced earlier this week that it’s still planning to open its doors in mid-September, but will now require all employees (and clients, guests, and vendors) to be vaccinated to enter the office. About 90% of U.S. employees at the firm are fully vaccinated.

Last week, Carlton Fields notified all employees that they must be fully vaccinated to return to the office by October 4. More than 90% of attorneys at the firm have been fully vaccinated, but only 65% of staff have been vaccinated. “We are thrilled that so many have taken advantage of this opportunity, which is now readily available in our country. But we are very concerned that so many have not done so,” Gary Sasso, president and CEO of the firm, noted in his memo. Accordingly, effective August 9, the firm started its new policy of limiting office access only to those vaccinated.

Will your firm be changing its plans when it comes to vaccination for attorneys and staff thanks to the Delta variant? Please let us know.

(Flip the page to read the memos from Sidley, Clifford Chance, Skadden, and Carlton Fields.)

What has your firm announced as far as a reopening plan is concerned? The more information is out there, the more likely it is that firms will be able to establish a market standard for a return to the office.

As soon as you find out about the reopening plan at your firm, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Office Reopening”) or text us at (646) 820-8477. We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Having been stiffed by the former president, looking at a flopped Gofundme, and without a Biglaw job as a safety net, Rudy Guiliani has to find some way to pay the legal fees piling up in those pesky criminal probes he’s landed in. Where is a guy to turn when the Eastern European lobbying… er… “consulting” dries up?

Apparently, the answer is Cameo.

Rudy Giuliani announced on Twitter that he would be joining Cameo, offering his surely deeply thought out and personal greetings for $275 a pop (which is up from $199 yesterday afternoon… do with that information what you will). And you thought Biglaw billing rates were unjustified.

But Rudy isn’t expecting people to shell out that kind of money without offering us a sample of just how seriously he takes his new job. His Cameo page — which you really should check out — offers some demo videos.

Folks, they are a journey.

First, we have a birthday greeting to “Molly,” who we’re told has a beautiful voice and a podcast. At this point, Rudy pivots to explaining that, as it happens, he TOO has a podcast. Fully a third of the message is then dedicated to laying out how to subscribe to “Rudy’s Common Sense” podcast. The Cameo game seems a little fuzzy to me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be a sales pitch. If I wanted to spend money just to hear someone else’s sales pitch, at least promise me a time share!

Our second birthday greeting is for “Joe,” who eats too much Wendy’s and tries to meet pretty girls doing beach yoga. Sounds like a guy who really has his shit together. You know you’re winning at life when your friends are asked to sum you up as a human being for the benefit of a disgraced politician and all they can come up with is “he likes Baconators and being a creep.” Oh, he also has bad taste in quarterbacks, which Rudy doesn’t understand because fantasy football seems lost on him.

Only a 20-second plug for Rudy’s Common Sense this time! Did you know it’s free to subscribe?

Rudy’s also got pep talks! He gives “Johnny” a congratulatory message as he enters his first year at NYU with a dream of eventually becoming a lawyer. To be fair, this is Rudy’s best Cameo because he earnestly approaches it like the deadbeat uncle you haven’t talked to in years who just showed up at your graduation party. Giuliani shares his story about going to NYU for law school, “which I’m sure you’ll see every day on the way to class… Hayden Hall.” Hayden is a dorm, but whatever. Also, I went to NYU for law school and there was nothing to suggest Giuliani went there… and he was inexplicably popular back then.

But he really does offer useful advice and encouragement mixed with the usual platitudes. As for being a lawyer, he explains that “there are a lot so many different ways to be a lawyer, you can be a trial lawyer, a commercial lawyer, a business lawyer”… or you can be a farting your way through a bogus election challenge kind of lawyer. The world is your oyster!

Unfortunately, Johnny will never learn how to subscribe to Rudy’s Common Sense because it slipped Giuliani’s mind this time.

“Andre” gets a 50th birthday message from “Alexandria.” She didn’t fill out the form very well because Rudy’s got absolutely nothing to work with here other than how old the guy is. But pop in a vague “you’re as young as you want to be” reference

Finally, “Rich” has retired and gets a call from America’s Dingbat Mayor. Ole Rich is moving to Florida and hates cancel culture. Of course he does. Rudy takes this opportunity to say that people from the Northeast are moving to Florida because of Democrats as opposed to year-round summer weather.

While we assume Giuliani signed up for Cameo thinking he was locking down a cameo in a major motion picture, only later learning that the platform is the “Total Landscaping” of bit movie parts, we certainly wish him the best in his new endeavor. And if you ever want to let a friend know about Rudy’s Common Sense, it’s just a $275 investment away.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

After the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pushed back the date for when it will start covering certain “breakthrough” medical devices, healthcare companies might be wondering what comes next.  Two former leaders with CMS and the Food and Drug Administration shared their thoughts at HIMSS Digital.

The policy would ensure Medicare would cover devices that address an unmet medical need once they are approved or cleared by the FDA. Originally proposed last year, the policy was put on pause as new leadership under the Biden Administration reviews it. At the earliest, it would go into effect in September.

On the upside, the policy would allow people covered by Medicare to access these devices much faster — and would also give the companies building them a swift source of income. The challenge is that the rule might apply to many more devices than originally intended. At first, it was expected to only apply to two to five devices, and gradually increase from there.

“Part of what CMS realized fairly quickly was that there were a lot more of those breakthrough devices and products than they anticipated, and it was going to be a much bigger workload and have a much bigger impact on the Medicare program than I think anyone had originally anticipated,” Brandy said.

She added that it would require close collaboration between the FDA and CMS going forward.

Amy Abernethy, who spearheaded the FDA’s real-world data efforts before joining Verily as its president of clinical studies platforms, said alignment between the two agencies in using real world data could serve as a way to continuously evaluate these products in the future. For example, these datasets could support both the evaluation of safety and effectiveness from an FDA perspective, as well as the outcomes of interest from CMS perspective.

Although the policy doesn’t specifically say this, it could also set up a framework for a device to be continually evaluated once it’s cleared and throughout its lifecycle, she said.

“I think that actually puts us in an interesting place and does signal for an interesting area of focus for our community for the future,” she said.

Photo credit: claudenakagawa, Getty Images

In a momentous first for the state, last week the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Statistics (RVRS) issued its first three-parent birth certificate.

I spoke with Massachusetts family law attorney — and the force behind the new dawn in state documents recognizing legal realities — Joyce Kauffman. Kauffman explained that while this was the first time RVRS has issued a three-parent birth certificate, Massachusetts courts have long been legally recognizing three-parent family structures through adoption.

When the first three-parent adoption orders were being issued more than 20 years ago, RVRS was unlikely to amend a birth certificate accordingly. The state arm has always been strictly rule-driven, Kauffman explained, and has been without a rule, or an appropriate form, explicitly permitting the issuance of a more-than-two parent birth certificate.

This past year, when Kauffman’s clients were petitioning for a three-person adoption order, she suggested to her clients that they could request that the court order RSVS to issue a new birth certificate including each (and every) parent. But even with the court ordering it to be done, Kauffman was not 100% sure RSVS would make it happen. It took a while — from May 2021, when the court’s order was submitted to RVRS, until August, when the birth certificate was issued — but Kauffman and her clients were pleased when RVRS did, indeed, issue the appropriately modified birth certificate.

Kauffman believes this first three-parent birth certificate paves the way for other families in the state to request birth certificates to be corrected to be more accurate. In fact, Kauffman is excited for her own, now 37-year-old daughter to be able to have a birth certificate issued that recognizes all of her parents.

Many Forms Of Families. Kauffman has spent almost 30 years providing legal representation for all forms of families in Massachusetts, with a particular focus on those in the LGBTQ+ community. Kauffman explained that there are many forms of families where more than two adults are fully functioning as parents of a child but not receiving the legal recognition or the rights and responsibilities (such as being able to register a child for school, to provide health insurance, or to seek custody, etc.) that importantly come with legal recognition. Some of these families involve a grandparent or a step-parent fully immersed in the role of a parent. Other families start with three or more persons planning a family together with the intention that all will parent the child. (Check out this podcast interview with Indra Lusero describing their household raising two kids with four parents.)

Time For Updated Parentage Laws In The Commonwealth. Although this first birth certificate is a strong step forward, Kauffman explained that Massachusetts is overdue for an update to its parentage laws. A revised version of the uniform parentage act has been introduced to the Massachusetts legislature this session and would bring greater clarity and protection to the modern realities of family formation, especially those turning to assisted reproductive technology. At the moment, Massachusetts has only one statute specific to parentage through assisted reproductive technology, and the language of that statute only addresses married couples who conceive through “artificial insemination.”

This session’s introduction of the revised uniform parentage act is the third attempt for the state. Let’s hope the third time’s a charm. In the meantime, huge congrats to Kauffman, her clients, and the many families in the state with more than two parents raising a child with a new opportunity for greater recognition of their family structure.

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Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

Opacity is to a very large extent the whole point of a special-purpose acquisition company. It is what investors in blank-check vehicles are ultimately signing up for. The usual way of going public, via an initial public offering, is a gigantic pain-in-the-ass involving an enormous amount of disclosure for those who are so inclined to pore over and sift through before deciding whether they want a piece. This is precisely what many if not most companies merging with SPACs are trying to avoid—a fact that is, or ought to be, well known to the investor in a pre-merger SPAC, who have in effect outsourced all of that hard work to the people running the SPAC. This arrangement works pretty well for all sides until it doesn’t, and then, well, you know what happens.

* Are civil arrests a thing? These Texan lawmakers are about to find out. [New York Post]

* If you aren’t in Texas or Florida, you may need to flash your other paperwork if you want to grab drinks after work. [PBS]

* Inroad on weakening the undue hardship requirement for declaring bankruptcy on student loans may be on the way. [Yahoo News]

* 4th Circuit says requiring skirts in school uniform violates Title 9. Three cheers for letting people wear things! [Justia]

* Did we lose our shot at herd immunity? This vaccine developer thinks so. [Business Insider]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com.