Judge attacks 'cancel culture,' California bar hires 'public trust liaison,' Katten adds from Curtis, and what do law profs think of ChatGPT
Reuters Legal
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A conservative federal judge who has said she won't hire law clerks from Yale Law School to protest "cancel culture" on its campus on Tuesday told students at its rival Harvard that law schools need to "step up" and do more to encourage free speech on campus.
11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Elizabeth Branch, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump, told Harvard Law School's Federalist Society chapter that she remained concerned about protesters who "shut down" conservative speakers they disagree with at law schools across the country.
In Yale's case, Judge Branch said the "straw that broke the camel's back" for her was an event in March at which students disrupted a campus discussion with a conservative lawyer, Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom. She said that was why when U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho, a fellow Trump appointee on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in September?called for judges?to boycott hiring students from Yale in protest, she?followed suit in hopes of promoting change.
Branch argued law schools like Harvard and Yale should be doing more to enforce "robust speech codes" that make disrupting speeches on campus an offense and warned that student protesters who threaten speakers risk criminal prosecution.
She said:
"We're asking the law schools to step up... They must educate their students on why open debate on campus matters."
Amid mounting criticism of its lawyer oversight, the State Bar of California has appointed a public trust liaison—a newly created position tasked with handling complaints about the organization’s attorney discipline system.
The state bar said Monday that the liaison, Enrique Zuniga, will hear and address concerns from the public, attorneys, and others about its action or inaction regarding complaints about attorneys. Zuniga, who has worked in other roles at the bar for more than a decade, will make recommendations to improve the bar’s attorney discipline program, reporting directly to the bar’s Board of Trustees.
Zuniga said in a statement:
“We want to alleviate any apprehension the public might be experiencing and, within the limits of the law, get them the answers they need to resolve their issues.”
Audits have for years identified large backlogs in California attorney discipline cases, low rates of lawyer punishments and racial disparities in disciplinary actions. And the bar’s mishandling of complaints against well-known plaintiff’s attorney Thomas Girardi, the husband of reality TV star Erika Jayne Girardi—has generated headlines for two years.
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Chicago-founded law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman said Tuesday that four litigators have joined the firm in New York from Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle.
Eliot Lauer, Jacques Semmelman, Gabe Hertzberg and Julia Mosse, each longtime lawyers at Curtis, joined 700-lawyer Katten as partners in the firm's commercial litigation practice.
Katten's New York office is the firm's second largest, behind Chicago with more than 200 lawyers, according to its website. The firm's New York lawyers moved into new office space last spring.
Law professors are among those both alarmed and delighted by ChatGPT since its November release. The program generates sophisticated, human-like responses based on requests from users and mountains of data, including from legal texts.
Jake Heller, chief executive officer of legal tech company Casetext, said law schools should encourage students to use ChatGPT and similar tools as a starting point for documents and a way to generate ideas. Heller predicted that law schools will soon begin to amend their codes of conduct and professors will need to clarify that simply turning in a paper produced by a chatbot is akin to plagiarism.
In their?Dec. 31 paper?on GPT 3.5's performance on the bar exam, Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Daniel Martin Katz and Michigan State University College of Law adjunct Michael Bommarito found that the program got answers on the Multistate Bar Exam correct half the time, compared to 68% for human test takers.
Those limitations are not enough to soothe many skeptics. Among them is South Texas College of Law Houston law professor Josh Blackman, who urged professors to rethink take-home exams in a recent post on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. “This technology should strike fear in all academics,” he wrote, noting that ChatGPT produces original text that cannot be identified by existing plagiarism detection software.
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