Passage Rates:

• BAYLOR 97.06%
• UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 89.19%
• TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY 88.57%
• ST. MARY’S 87.50%
• S.M.U. 83.61%
• TEXAS 83.33%
• SOUTH TEXAS 80.67%
• TEXAS WESLEYAN 77.36%
• TEXAS SOUTHERN 40.74%

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State Average for February 2009: 81.52%

Donald J. Guter served as dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh between 2005 and 2008. Prior to his service there, he served as Judge Advocate General in the Navy, leading a group of 1,800 lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. By comparison, in 2007 South Texas College of Law had 1,252 students enrolled. The school, located in Houston, is known for its trial advocacy program.  The only other Texas law school currently searching for a dean is Texas Tech.  Dean Walter Huffman, who is currently the dean of the law school at Texas Tech, will be retiring at the end of the semester.

The locations for examinees using laptops are as follows:

Austin
Palmer Events Center
http://www.austinconventioncenter.com/PEC/index.asp
900 Barton Springs Rd
Austin, Texas 78704

DFW Area
Arlington Convention Center
http://www.arlingtoncc.com/
1200 Ballpark Way
Arlington, TX 76011

Houston
George R. Brown Convention Center
http://www.houstonconventionctr.com/
1001 Avenida de las Americas
Houston, Texas 77010

• Judge James E. Baker, from the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and served as Legal Advisor to the National Security Council and as Chief of Staff to Senator Moynihan;
• Mr. Charles Blanchard, a former O’Connor clerk who served as General Counsel to the U.S. Army;
• Retired Brigadier General John Cook, who is the Deputy Director for the Federal Judicial Center; and
  
• Judge Jeffery Sutton, Sixth Circuit judge who clerked for Justice Powell and Justice Scalia.

The panel discussed the very real threats facing our nation and the challenges faced by the legal community and national security lawyers who advise the President, the National Security Council, and the military. The question is not whether an attack will occur, it is instead when, how, where, and how prepared we will be.

One challenge faced by national security lawyers is that most intelligence that is gathered is piecemeal and indefinite. This challenge is heightened by the need not only to keep our citizens protected, but also to do so in a manner that is consistent with the values that our country was founded on.

The panel discussed how imminence of threats and recency of attacks affect the national security decision-making process. Highlighting the human element in the decision-making process, the panel observed that conclusions drawn in the light of imminent threats often differ from decisions aided by the luxuries of time and reflection. To draw an extreme example, attorneys who might find some liberties justifiably and legally stripped from a suspect who knows the location of a ticking dirty bomb in a large metropolitan area might come to different conclusions if viewing the threat retrospectively and as a single isolated event rather than an imminent threat or a potential series of attacks.

Guantanamo Bay highlights another challenge faced by our nation. While Guantanamo Bay may have been the best place in the world to hold enemy combatants who could neither be tried nor released, the mistakes made at Gitmo has made it a symbol for violation of civil liberties. Our country is now called upon to find a new location for these detainees and a process to handle these and future detainees who we may not want to bring on to American soil, thereby providing them with greater protections than they otherwise might have. While there is a need for process, what sort of process and to what extent the process should be extended is yet to be determined.

As the panel pointed out, while lawyers have the duty to advice the executive of what is legal, lawyers also have the duty to counsel when legally available options are not the right choices. Similarly, while more serious threats require a more expansive reading of the law, it also calls for greater oversight and broad appraisal from the legal community. It is by balancing the expansive reading of the law when the country is facing imminent threats with greater appraisal of these decisions by the legal community that our nation can gather actionable intelligence while protecting the values that our country stands for, proving that we do not have to make a choice between liberty and security.

A new website named AcademicEarth aims to provide just that. AcademicEarth has lectures from renowned professors from universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. There are courses from a wide array of subjects ranging from Economics and History, to Physics and Religion. There are even a few courses in the law section including a copyright lecture from MIT and a class on climate change law and policy from Berkeley. The videos are free to watch, and can be viewed without registering.

LectureFox, a site focused primarily on science lectures, does remarkable job of aggregating free lectures and organizing them so they are easy to access.

What other online lecture sites do you use?

Textfixer.com, a website originally designed for web developers who were editing code, offers a text-editing tool that is useful to anyone who regularly cuts and pastes text between documents: a line break remover. Line breaks are the broken lines of text seen when text is pasted between documents that are formatted differently. For lawyers and law students, this is most often seen when cutting text from a dual-column PDF document, such as a statute or case prepared on WestLaw or Lexis, into a word processing document. Unlike most formatting problems, pasting text as “plain text” does not get around the problem of line breaks. Although line breaks can be removed manually or by a “find and replace” command, using textfixer.com seems to be the quickest and easiest way to ensure properly formatted pastes.

Additionally,Textfixer.com preserves paragraph breaks while removing only the line breaks from the text. To use the line break remover, simply cut and paste the text from the source to the website, hit the “Remove Line Breaks” button, and then cut and paste the resulting text into the document you are working on.

Headline Image Credit: Immortal412

The newest journal at the Texas Tech School of Law unveiled its online companion today. The Codicil currently includes articles by estate planning attorneys, professors, as well as a student comment. The Codicil will provide news and timely updates relevant to the estate planning community and a forum for discussion of articles published on The Codicil and the print edition of the Estate Planning and Community Property Journal.

Welcome to Blawg Review #186. Blawg Review is a weekly roundup of the best posts from the world of legal blogging. Each week Blawg Review is hosted by a different blog, which gives Blawg Review a unique perspective each week. Today is International Students’ Day, and as a current third-year law student I’ve included posts written by and of special interest to law students.

Technology: The Twitter Wars

Twitter, a cross between “social networking, blogging, and texting,” took center stage this week as legal bloggers debated the usefulness of the new networking platform. For a run down and the new technology and reasons why some attorneys are not embracing it, check out David Giacalone’s post about Twitter at f/k/a. In response to Mr. Giacalone’s post, Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs posted reasons why Twitter is a valuable tool for lawyers. Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice offers more insight into what Twitter is, and how it can be an effective tool for lawyers. Meanwhile, over at Health Care Law Blog, Bob Coffield discusses the legal implications of a surprising development: live tweeting from the operating room during a surgery.

Daniel Schwartz at the Connecticut Employment Law Blog takes a look at whether social networking sites should be off-limits to discovery in discrimination suits. Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion discusses the expectations of privacy for content uploaded to personal or social networking websites.

The Greatest American Lawyer writes about how advances in technology make the legal field a better place to work in by creating new opportunities for lawyers to take their practices anywhere in the world.

Richard Georges at FutureLawyer directs readers’ attention to ten things to look forward to with the next iteration of Windows, currently known as Windows 7.

Blake Boyd, a guest blogger at The Mac Lawyer, discusses various approaches to using technology in trial.

Politics

David Giacalone at f/k/a reports the Obama administration questionnaire has job applicants searching through shoe boxes, diaries, and old emails. Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy notes the hostility toward legal gun ownership in the Obama administration’s appointment questionnaire. More excerpts from the questionnaire are available at Dean Paul Caron’s post here.

Balkinization takes a look at whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Thornton prevents states from prohibiting convicted felons from becoming Senators.

International News

Mark Edwards at Concurring Opinions writes that recently released NSA documents establish that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy, but suggests his wife Ethel Rosenberg’s execution was due, in part, to her refusal to provide the Justice Department with information regarding the spy network.

Jon Katz discusses why attorneys need to take special care in explaining to courts the language limitations faced by their clients and by those law officers with whom the clients attempt to communicate.

Duncan Hollis at Opinio Juris covers the international law implications of the Maldives’ search for a homeland with higher ground.

The Paper Chase discusses the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor’s attempt to obtain warrants on Darfur rebel leaders.

Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice points out that there is simply no place for Nazis in a lawyer’s elevator pitch.

News of Interest to Law Students

Brian Lauter at The Shark points out that government work is becoming the new BigLaw.

Jordan Furlong at Law21 discusses the pressures facing the venerable LSAT.

Michael Law at Law Vibe provides solid advice on how to pass the bar exam the first time you take it.

Law Ingenue points readers to an article that offers a valuable lesson to young lawyers on the importance of being humble and guarding their reputations.

Professor Wayne Schiess at LegalWriting covers situations in which passive voice can be used effectively.

Luke Gilman at The Blawgraphy links to a story covering an Arizona State University law student who fought off an intruder to protect his notebook containing all his notes from the semester. Luke points also highlights an application that automatically backs up files stored on a laptop in case some does happen to your laptop.

For a roundup of other great posts by law students, be sure to check out The Legal Underground.

Supreme Court News

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog provides a summary of Supreme Court’s decision not to review the test for “victim impact videos.”

Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy discusses whether the Sixth Circuit is overruling the Miranda decision.

Local News

Justice Scalia will be visiting Texas Tech School of Law today for the Sandra Day O’Connor Distinguished Lecture Series. Justice Scalia spent the weekend hunting with Texas Tech Law alumni and benefactor Mark Lanier.

Above the Law reports University of Texas School of Law seeks to double the school’s endowment by 2014 under the leadership of Dean Lawrence Sager.

Luke at The Blawgraphy also points out that Baylor Law School recently bestowed an honorary degree on a canine.

Community News

The National Arbitration Forum Blog celebrates its 4th Birthday.

Dan Hull at What About Clients discusses whether the curse of large firms is the “aggregation of narrow views.”

Enrico Schaefer at The Greatest American Lawyer discusses why clients perceive greater value when they can see, follow, and actively track the attorney’s work process.

Intellectual Property News

At first glance, publishers of open source software seem to have little use for copyright. A newly-minted lawyer over at IP’s What’s Up takes a look the seemingly straightforward proposition and comes to a surprising conclusion.

Interested in filing a trademark? Traverse Legal presents a podcast interview with Bryan Hall on the topic of trademark registration, and whether a person can register a trademarks or brands without the help of an attorney.

Patent Baristas serves up a new argument against “product hopping,” the process in which companies make small changes to products in order to avoid antitrust litigation.

Jeremy Phillips at IPKat sorted through numerous submissions from his readers and published a list of great intellectual property advice.

Joe Mullin at The Prior Act reveals that Britannica has revived an infamous new media patent to leverage claims against GPS manufacturers.

Mark Herrmann at Drug and Device Law discusses the implications of a California appellate court ruling last week that held the manufacturer of a pioneer drug could be held liable for a patient who ingested not the pioneer product, but rather a generic equivalent manufactured by a different company.

Humor

Is a note left in a chair really the best way to fire a managing partner? Lowering the Bar takes a look at the question.

Kristen Osenga at Concurring Opinions discusses “reasonable men,” “persons having ordinary skill in the art,” unicorns, and other mythical creatures.

Judge Jerry Buchmeyer’s Say What?! blog features an excerpt from voir dire that is sure to make you laugh.

Professor Gerry Beyer at Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof Blog has an interesting post about a dead husband killing his wife.

That’s what She Said provides legal analysis Andy and Oscar’s antics from the latest episode of The Office.

Thank you to everyone who submitted posts for inclusion in this week’s Blawg Review. This Blawg Review would not have been possible without your help. A Blawg Review hosting opportunity is coming up, check out the Editor’s post: “Who will host MLK Day?” If you run have a story that you would like to submit to Blawg Review, check out the submission guidelines and form here. LawyerCasting will be hosting next week. Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.