Ketanji Brown Jackson to hear arguments, Law school reduces intake, Arianna Freeman confirmed to 3rd Circuit, Judge boycotts Yale law clerks
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?? Good morning from the Legal File!?On the docket today: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to hear arguments for the first time on Monday. Golden Gate University School of Law reduced its new class by 67% and said it will provide full scholarships to all new full-time J.D. students who are joining this fall. Arianna Freeman wins Senate approval to become the first Black woman on the 3rd Circuit. Trump-appointee Judge James Ho of the 5th Circuit no longer wants to hire clerks from Yale Law School. Let’s get into it!
President Joe Biden's liberal appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to hear arguments for the first time on Monday as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Jackson, the first Black woman on the court, and her eight new colleagues will consider over the next nine months a slate of important cases on issues, including race-conscious admissions policies used by colleges and universities to foster student diversity, voting rights , environmental regulation, LGBT and religious rights , the power of federal agencies and a copyright case over Andy Warhol paintings.
Jackson, a successor of now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer, will be joining the court’s liberal bloc that has been relegated to issuing strongly worded dissents in the most important decisions, including the overturning of abortion rights and expanding gun rights .
"I decide cases from a neutral posture. I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath," Jackson, who faced opposition among Republicans, told the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing in March.
Although the justice was formally sworn in on June 30, Jackson’s ceremonial swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for Friday.
Golden Gate University’s law school dramatically reduced the size of its first-year class by enrolling just 21 new full-time J.D. students and 24 part-time students, down from 103 and 42, respectively, last year. The law school has also provided full scholarships to all new fulltime J.D. students this fall in a bid to improve sagging bar pass rates, reduce graduate debt loads and remain accredited.
Bringing in a smaller class helped raise Golden Gate's median Law School Admission Test score from last year’s 151 to 153 this year, law dean Colin Crawford said.
Golden Gate has struggled with dismal bar exam pass rates for years with its first-time pass rate on California’s July 2021 exam being 38%. The ABA put the school on notice in November 2021 that it is out of compliance with an accreditation standard requiring that at least 75% of a school’s graduates pass the bar within two years of leaving campus.
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The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved public defender Arianna Freeman to become the first Black woman on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as Democrats raced to approve another of President Joe Biden's judicial nominees before the November midterm elections.
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Senators voted 50-47 in order to approve Freeman, marking a re-do for Senate Democrats who failed earlier this month to win her confirmation when two party members were absent. ?
Freeman's nomination has been rocky because her work as a court-appointed defense lawyer led to opposition from Republicans, with some saying her credentials were in a "very niche area of the law" and others criticizing her work on behalf of a Pennsylvania death row inmate during a hearing in March.
The vote for Freeman came shortly after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced two other 3rd Circuit nominees.
Eight of Biden’s confirmed circuit court nominees worked as public defenders representing indigent criminal defendants, a record for a president and a contrast to former prosecutors and law firm partners who comprise much of the bench.
Conservative Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in a speech delivered at a Federalist Society conference in Kentucky on Thursday said he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, which he said was plagued by "cancel culture" and students disrupting conservative speakers.
“I don't want to cancel Yale. I want Yale to stop cancelling people like me," Ho said in his prepared remarks.
Ho, who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, urged other judges to likewise boycott the school.
In a speech largely focused on "cancel culture" censorship targeting conservatives on law school campuses, Ho cited a number of incidents at schools in which prominent figures had faced "campus vitriol."
Among the events he cited was one in March in which Kristen Waggoner, now the president of the conservative religious rights group Alliance Defending Freedom, was disrupted by students supporting the LGBTQ community during a talk, which police attended.
He previously defended Ilya Shapiro after students at Georgetown University's law school urged that he be ousted from a new faculty position over Twitter posts he made questioning President Joe Biden's pledge to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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