Many Roads To Preventing Fair And Free Elections: Louisiana v. Callais teed up Virginia’s Supreme Court to overturn an election.

A Loss And An Explanation: Matt Taibbi loses SLAPP suit, gains our ridicule.

These Small Firms Punch Above Their Weight Class!: These are the small, boutique, and midsize firm worth keeping an eye out for.

NYU Law Dean Steps Down: He plans to return to teaching. Living the dream!

We Have Our Winner: Check out the champion of our 17th Annual Law Revue Video contest!

The post Biglaw Insider Trading Scheme Gets Even Bigger — See Also appeared first on Above the Law.

While there’s a sudden relevance to Biglaw layoffs, it’s not nearly as dire as the past. How many lawyers were laid off in Biglaw (based on self-reported numbers) in 2009, widely considered the worst year for lawyer layoffs?

Hint: Even this scary number is likely an underestimate, given the prevalence of stealth layoffs and Biglaw firms underreporting their real cuts.

See the answer on the next page.

The post Sure, Biglaw Layoffs Are Trending, But Not Like 2009 Trending appeared first on Above the Law.

Top judicial honors went to U.S. Tax Court Judge Jeffrey Arbeit (17:48) on the men’s side and to Judge Florence Pan (25:39) of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on the women’s side. Kavanaugh, for his part, finished in 26:23.

Jack Fitzhenry from the Office of Legal Counsel had the fastest time among male runners (15:30), while The Washington Post’s Emma Kumer came in first among female runners with a time of 17:46. “All The News That’s Fit to Sprint,” a team fielded by The New York Times, was the top-scoring team overall.

Judge Arbeit’s Tax Court team, “540EZ,” also won the dubious honor of Worst Team Name. The Best Team Name award went to NPR: “Defunded But Not Outrunded.”

Some of the other competition for the best (and worst) names included:

• The Devil Wears Hokas (DC Circuit Court of Appeals)
• Learned Feet 1 (DC Superior Court) and Learned Feet 2 (Federal Circuit)
• Call Me If You Chutkan (DC Circuit Court of Appeals)
• The Fast and the FRCP (DC Circuit Court of Appeals)
• Res Ipsa No Quitters and Race ipsa loquitur (DC Court of Appeals)
• Resisting A Rest (DC Court of Appeals)
• The Sovereign Immuniteam (Court of Federal Claims)
• Running Tariffied (International Trade Commission)
• Running Better Than DHS (Bloomberg Industry Group)
• Pro Slay (Law360)
• C-SPAN. C-SPAN Run

The race, which is sponsored by American Council of Life Insurers Inc. to raise money for Junior Achievement USA, featured members of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, and the Washington press corps.

Kavanaugh Places Fifth Among Federal Judges in DC Road Race [Bloomberg]
ACLI Capital Challenge Hits $1 Million Milestone for Junior Achievement [ACLI]

The post Stat(s) Of The Week: The Fastest Judge appeared first on Above the Law.

Spirit Airlines was the poster child for customer frustration — an airline that charged passengers for everything except oxygen. Social media and mainstream outlets were filled with jokes and cringeworthy videos about the airline, leaving many travelers wondering whether enduring the hassle was worth the cheaper fare.

On May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines ceased all operations after multiple failed restructuring attempts. Customers were stuck at airports due to sudden cancellation announcements. In addition, customers who planned their flights to see important events like the World Cup will have to rearrange their travel plans.

While many are happy to say “good riddance” to its notoriously poor service, is its disappearance actually good for consumers? Let’s examine how Spirit operated, how it disrupted the industry, why it ultimately failed, and what higher fares may await us in a post-Spirit world.

Spirit followed the ultra-low-cost carrier (ULCC) business model. While its “no-frills” approach became infamous, the airline cut costs in several other ways. It operated a single aircraft type — the Airbus A320 family — which simplified maintenance and training. Like other ULCCs, Spirit purchased planes in bulk for better pricing and leased others for favorable tax and accounting treatment. It also negotiated favorable deals with smaller airports.

In its early years, Spirit was consistently profitable and maintained one of the best safety records in the industry, with no fatal passenger crashes in its 34-year history. This proved that, despite widespread complaints and memes, enough passengers were willing to tolerate the inconveniences in exchange for lower fares. In response, major airlines introduced their own “basic economy” fares, which typically prevent seat selection and free checked or carry-on bags.

Spirit and other ULCCs like Frontier successfully pushed ticket prices down by offering genuine low-cost alternatives. However, they also created widespread annoyance through aggressive “nickel-and-diming.” Practices such as charging for printing boarding passes and enforcing strict carry-on size limits — often poorly disclosed on third-party sites like Expedia — led to consumer backlash. One notable class-action lawsuit over surprise bag fees was eventually settled.

Spirit’s profitability ended with the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationwide travel restrictions grounded most flights and devastated revenue. The airline never fully recovered to pre-COVID levels and was weighed down by heavy debt.

In 2022, Frontier attempted to acquire Spirit, but the deal was rejected by shareholders. JetBlue then tried to buy the company, only for the Department of Justice to block the merger on antitrust grounds. A federal court upheld the government’s decision.

Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late 2024 (emerging in early 2025), then filed again in August 2025 with approximately $8.1 billion in debt. The federal government considered a bailout, but negotiations collapsed. Spirit ultimately cited surging jet fuel prices caused by the Iran conflict as it ceased operations.

Was the government wrong to block the JetBlue merger? In hindsight, many analysts believe yes. The DOJ acted to preserve competition and protect consumers, but the decision only delayed the inevitable.

Should the government have acquired Spirit? Officials cited the desire to protect jobs (roughly 14,000-17,000 including contractors). Spirit also released optimistic projections claiming it could return to profitability by 2027. But since Trump has extensive experience with bankruptcies through his companies, he likely knew a bad bet when it saw it.

Since Spirit Airlines has given up the ghost, other ULCCs will need to rethink their models, especially their heavy dependence on volatile fuel prices. A better low-cost model may already exist: Zipair Tokyo, a subsidiary of Japan Airlines. Despite being a low-cost carrier, Zipair earns strong reviews for fair add-on pricing, free Wi-Fi in economy, and modern Boeing 787 aircraft. In 2025, it achieved an impressive 17% operating margin.

While low-cost carriers like Spirit aren’t for everyone, they left a lasting mark on the industry. To survive long-term, future ULCCs must reduce excessive nickel-and-diming and become less vulnerable to fuel price spikes.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post Why Spirit Airlines Failed — And Why You Might Miss It appeared first on Above the Law.

Many law firms try to get invoices out to clients as soon as possible since they believe that the sooner a client gets an invoice, the sooner the client will remit payment. Indeed, many law firms have deadlines for attorneys to submit time entries so that administrators can prepare bills and send them to clients as soon as possible.  However, there are a few situations in which it might not make sense to invoice a client immediately, and lawyers might be better served waiting to send a bill to a client.

Small Invoices

If a client has a small balance with a lawyer, it might not make sense to send a bill immediately. Indeed, if a client gets a small bill from a lawyer, they might think that the lawyer is impersonal since the small balance can just be rolled over into a bigger balance before an invoice is sent to a client. Of course, if the lawyer is done working for a client, it might make sense to just send a final invoice even if the balance is low. However, if an invoice is in the low three-figure range, and I am dealing with a consistent client of my law firm, I might wait to send an invoice to a client. 

The administrative process of dealing with invoices can be difficult to clients, especially old-school ones who still use paper accounting methods and paper checks.  Lawyering is all about relationship-building, and clients might be peeved if lawyers send them a small invoice rather than waiting until a bigger balance accumulates.

Holidays

Lawyers usually send invoices out on the first day of the month. However, sometimes the first day of the month or the first business day of the month lands on a day that clients might not be working. January 2, 2026, the first business day of 2026, fell on a Friday. As a result, many people took that day off so that they could enjoy a four-day weekend. Accordingly, even though lawyers might have wanted to get a jump on billing, they were probably best-served waiting until January 5, 2026, to send invoices. If lawyers sent invoices on January 2, 2026, clients might feel as if their free time was being violated and that counsel did not care about the holiday period.

End Of Matter

In some instances, it might make sense to wait until a matter has concluded before sending an invoice to a client. Lawyers need to beware of this strategy, since I have written before about how clients are more likely to stiff lawyers on the final invoice than on other invoices.  However, if lawyers have a good relationship with a client, and know that they pay reliably, it might make sense for a lawyer to wait until the end of the matter to invoice a client.

Sometimes, clients do not want to pay a monthly invoice and then a small invoice weeks later for work that came after the last regular invoice was generated. In addition, some clients specifically request invoices at the end of a matter due to budgetary reasons or internal workflows. So long as a client reliably pays bills it is usually advisable to wait until the end of a matter to invoice if the matter will conclude shortly after a monthly invoice timeframe.

In any case, lawyers should not be robotic in how they generate invoices for clients. Sometimes, attorneys can create better connections with clients if they wait to send bills to the people and businesses they serve.

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@rothman.law.

The post Sometimes Lawyers Should Wait To Send Invoices To Clients appeared first on Above the Law.

In any functional justice system, this disqualifying act of judicial irresponsibility would shock the nation’s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn’t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would register as an all-timer scandal. But it’s America in 2026, so it barely registers more than a “sure.”

In an exclusive report, The Guardian identified false data included in the Alito authored majority opinion in Callais v. Louisiana. The factual claim, that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, comes “almost verbatim” from an amicus brief filed by the Trump Department of Justice. Alito cited this data to support the premise that the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary.

Are you sitting down? Because this is shocking: the same Department of Justice repeatedly caught lying to courts… lied to the Court!

But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.

One would hope this speaks to why Alito delivered such an unhinged response when Justice Jackson baited him into acknowledging that the Callais opinion was reverse engineered. That somehow her needling got to Alito because he realized he’d uncritically parroted false data in an opinion. Sadly, that probably had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it’s unlikely that Alito and company will even consider the gravity of enshrining lies into the nation’s constitutional legacy.

Hey, let’s give Alito the benefit of the doubt… he probably figured it out it was false and included it anyway. It’s certainly not the first time the Court’s conservatives have embraced falsehood in order to get the outcome they desire.

The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

While conservative apologists will try to split hairs and argue that that this is a misleading mistake as opposed to false, The Guardian brought in one of the country’s leading experts to analyze the data. The University of Florida’s Michael McDonald concluded:

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

Someone knew what they were doing. That’s a lot nicer than everyone involved knew what they were doing.

Isn’t it pretty to think so.

Samuel Alito’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ [The Guardian]
Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act [The New Republic]

Earlier: Ketanji Brown Jackson Sends Sam Alito Raging

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 or Bluesky 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.

The post Sam Alito Put Fake Facts In A Supreme Court Opinion!?!? appeared first on Above the Law.

The accounts look good. The projections hold up. By every measure that’s visible, retirement should feel within reach.

And yet the office is still full of attorneys who are ready on paper and stuck in practice.

The obstacle is almost never the money, but it likely will take the blame.

Retirement asks attorneys to do something their entire career never required — define themselves without the work. Being a lawyer is more than a job title. It’s the framework through which problems get solved, respect gets earned, and days get structured. Stepping away from a 35-year identity requires more than a retirement date.

To make things even more challenging, financial uncertainty and identity anxiety are very good at masquerading as each other. Attorneys who aren’t ready to confront the identity question often find financial reasons to delay. One more year. The market feels uncertain. The practice isn’t quite ready. The timing isn’t right.

The financial planning and the identity planning — most attorneys have done neither.

The good news is that these two problems are more connected than they appear. Financial clarity not only improves your retirement plan but also removes the uncertainty that identity anxiety needs to survive. When you actually know what your retirement looks like — the income, the taxes, the timing, the sequence — you stop bargaining with yourself about whether you’re ready from a numbers standpoint. You either are or you aren’t, and you can see it plainly.

Whether you’re ready emotionally or not is different.

And that’s what a real transition plan does. And it’s different from what most attorneys get.

What “Ready” Actually Means

Being “ready” is more than just a number in an account. Being ready means you know the answers to questions most attorneys have never been asked.

When exactly will you stop working — and what does your income look like the day after? How will you draw from your accounts without handing a bigger-than-necessary check to the IRS? What happens to your practice — and how does that fit into your broader financial picture? What does your life actually cost in retirement, and what does it cost if something goes wrong?

Perhaps the most important question: What will you actually DO in retirement?

These are the decisions that determine whether retirement feels secure or stressful. And when they’re answered — really answered, with numbers and scenarios attached — the identity question gets a lot easier to sit with. It’s hard to imagine who you are on the other side when you can’t see the other side clearly. Financial clarity makes it visible. Emotional clarity makes it a reality.

What Most Advisors Skip

Investment managers manage investments. That’s the whole job — and in today’s age of portfolio construction it’s easier to find one that does it well.

But managing your portfolio is not the same as planning your transition. The questions that matter most in the two to three years before you retire aren’t only about asset allocation. They address timing, sequencing, and tax strategy as well.

What’s your tax exposure between now and the day you retire — and are you making moves to reduce it? How does a practice buyout or wind-down affect your income and your taxes in the year it happens? When do you start Social Security, and how does that interact with your retirement account withdrawals? What does your plan look like if the market drops significantly in your first year of retirement?

Those questions belong to a different discipline entirely — one most advisors aren’t trained to engage with. And when they go unanswered, they don’t just create financial risk. They create the ambient uncertainty that keeps attorneys at their desks long after they’re ready to leave.

Four Phases Every Attorney Transition Should Cover

If you’re within five years of retirement, here’s a framework worth measuring your current planning against.

Clarity. Start with an honest, complete picture of where you stand today. Your income sources, your balance sheet, your firm structure, your tax situation — all in one place. Most attorneys are surprised by what this reveals. Some are further ahead than they thought. Others find gaps they didn’t know existed. Either way, something important happens when the full picture is in front of you: the story you’ve been telling yourself about not being ready either holds up or it doesn’t. Clarity is where the guessing stops.

Design. Once you have clarity, you can build a real strategy. This is where your retirement date gets modeled against your income needs, your tax planning begins to take shape, and your practice transition gets integrated into the financial plan — not treated as a separate problem to solve later. A coordinated strategy not only aims to reduce your tax bill but also gives you a concrete picture of what your life actually looks like after you leave — which makes leaving feel like a destination rather than a cliff.

Decision. This is where some attorneys get stuck. The go/no-go question — when to leave, whether to reduce hours first, how to sequence the financial moves that come with exiting — deserves real thought, not a gut check. When you’ve modeled the scenarios and stress-tested the plan, something shifts. The decision stops feeling like a leap and starts feeling like a conclusion you can actually stand behind. That confidence is what the identity transition needs to begin.

Transition. Leaving is just the beginning of a new financial chapter, and yet many lawyers mistakenly see it as the end. A sustainable retirement needs an income strategy, a tax plan, and an investment approach designed for someone who is spending, not saving. This phase makes sure the plan that got you to retirement keeps working once you’re there — so the financial foundation is solid enough that you can focus on figuring out who you are next.

Five Questions Worth Asking Your Advisor

You don’t need to become a financial expert to evaluate whether you’re getting good advice. It’s more of a feeling as your questions start to fade.

Can your advisor show you a multi-year tax projection that starts today and runs through your first decade of retirement? Can they tell you what your required minimum distributions will look like at 73 — and how that affects your Medicare costs? Do they have a plan for your practice equity or wind-down, or is that outside their scope? Have they shown you what happens to your income if the market drops sharply in the early years of retirement? And can they tell you exactly where your income comes from, in what order, and why?

If any of those answers are vague, you now know what to ask for.

The Window Is the Opportunity

Two to three years before retirement is the most valuable planning window you’ll have.

The decisions you make now — on taxes, timing, income sequencing, and practice transition — have an outsized impact on everything that follows. But more than that, this is the window where financial clarity and identity clarity can develop together. Where you can stop using uncertainty as a reason to delay and start building the picture of what comes next.

Most attorneys that are stuck use it to keep billing hours and tell themselves they’ll figure the rest out later.

You don’t have to.

If you’re in that window and want to go deeper, I’m breaking down these four phases right now in my weekly newsletter, Money Meets Law. You can catch up on past editions or sign up to follow along here.

David Hunter, CFP® is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and owner of First Light Wealth, LLC, a financial planning & wealth management firm with a unique focus on serving attorneys nationwide. David has over a decade of experience helping clients build financial plans and has been featured in publications such as Attorney at Work, ThinkAdvisor, MarketWatch, Financial Planning, and InvestmentNews. David also writes weekly to attorneys in his popular Money Meets Law newsletter. For more about David, visit firstlightwealth.com/lawyers or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post Your Investments Are Ready. The Question Is Whether You Are — For Retirement appeared first on Above the Law.

I don’t think there’s going to be a huge amount of more culling unless there’s serious financial issues. I just think you’re going to see this at other firms. Paul Weiss is a very strong firm, McDermott is a great firm, and people are saying, ‘Hey, if they’re doing this, then there’s no shame in doing this.’

—  A New York recruiter, in anonymous comments given to the American Lawyer, concerning the likelihood that other top Biglaw firms will conduct layoffs in the wake of the cuts made this week at Paul, Weiss and McDermott. According to the recruiter, layoffs at other firms are likely to occur within the next three months.

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of 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 Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post ‘No Shame’ In The Layoffs Game: Industry Insider Says Next Wave Of Biglaw Cuts May Already Be Teed Up appeared first on Above the Law.

After a crazed gunman tried to shoot up the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Acting AG Todd Blanche tweeted out an indignant letter demanding that the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit to block Trump from building his tacky ballroom on the site of the former East Wing.

“Enough is enough. Your client should voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump,” huffed Brett Shumate, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Division. “If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events. We will state your position as opposed if we do not hear back from you by 9:00 AM on Monday.”

It does not seem to have occurred to any of the brain geniuses at the DOJ that the injunction had already been stayed by the DC Circuit, thanks to the appeal of Judge Richard Leon’s order. (Or maybe they knew, and they decided to tweet nonsense anyway because Trump’s DOJ is a PR shop, not a law firm.) This appeal had, of course, divested the trial judge of authority to modify his own ruling, even if he were so inclined. And so the DOJ called in the guy willing to say just about anything to satisfy his boss.

On the same day he entered his appearance, Stan Woodward docketed a shockingly inappropriate document that strongly resembled a Truth Social post tapped out by a demented octogenarian. ATL’s Joe Patrice broke down the ungrammatical screed masquerading as a motion for indicative ruling. Shorn of its multiple references to “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” the howlergram was a request for Judge Leon to tell the DC Circuit that, if he did have jurisdiction over the matter, he would see the error of his ways and rule that Trump is entitled to build Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac without input from Congress.

As it turns out, the petition wasn’t just embarrassing. It was also mendacious, according to the Trust’s response filed yesterday.

“Defendants make multiple factual representations to the Court that the Defendants’ counsel know to be false,” wrote the plaintiffs’ lawyer Greg Craig, the former White House Counsel referred to by Woodward as “the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama.”

What followed resembled a recurring Saturday Night Live skit from the 2010s that featured Fox and Friends Hosts bumbling through the news, followed by a lengthy correction reel informing watchers that “Haitian does not mean ‘half-Asian,'” and “Chef Boyardee is not the Vice President of Italy.”

No, the the National Trust was never “shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified, and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service.”

No, the Trust was not “asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built.”

It is factually inaccurate to say that “Congress has never dictated or tampered with the zoning, permitting, or architectural aspects” of any White House project.

No, the Trust’s aesthetic standing isn’t based on a random woman “walking her dog in the vicinity of the White House.” In fact Alison Hoagland is the “former senior historian at the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service, the former Vice President of the D.C. Preservation League, the author of six books on American vernacular architecture, and a regular visitor to President’s Park.”

And, despite the histrionics of Woodward’s motion, construction has not been delayed at all, thanks to repeated stays by the trial and appellate courts.

Craig was not petty enough to point out that Woodward was also fudging the truth when he claimed that the ballroom is being “given FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!” But we at ATL suffer from no such scruple: Republicans just added $1 billion to the bill to end the DHS shutdown, earmarking the funds for security improvements to the ballroom.

“All of this may be standard fare for a social media post. But in a federal court filing, it is neither appropriate nor permitted. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b); D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3(a)(1),” Craig wrote. “Nor was the filing submitted by a junior attorney: it was signed by three of the most senior attorneys at the Department of Justice (although notably, not by any attorneys who had appeared previously in this case).”

The motion ended with a request “that the Court decline to enter an indicative ruling, and grant any further relief it deems warranted.”

We have not lived a good enough life to see a court impose Rule 11 sanctions on the the top three lawyers at Trump’s DOJ. Although if there’s any jurist out-of-fucks enough to do it, it’s Judge Leon.

Fingers crossed!

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:

The post Trump DOJ Courts Rule 11 Sanctions In Ballroom Case appeared first on Above the Law.

Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina… all actively redrawing their maps behind closed doors to strip Black voters of meaningful suffrage. Virginia sent their maps to the electorate, and after it passed, the state supreme court scrambled to rewrite the rules to erase the whole election.

Which, honestly, tracks for a state with a “state song emeritus” about a slave wanting to be brought back to his plantation.

Reading the majority opinion, reverse engineered to secure its political objective, really makes you appreciate the U.S. Supreme Court’s enthusiasm for the shadow docket. Sometimes trying to come up with a quasi-coherent justification is just downright embarrassing.

From Madison’s era to the present, political parties of every stripe have offered if-by-whiskey arguments supporting partisan gerrymandering. Since that time until today, these arguments have been criticized by thoughtful jurists and legal scholars. “[P]artisan
gerrymanders,” Justice Kagan has observed, “deprive[] citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.” Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684, 721-22 (2019) (Kagan, J., joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, JJ., dissenting).

Note that Kagan was “dissenting” there. As in “she lost.” In reality, Rucho held — and Callais removed all doubt — that this is the opposite of the law of the land. Justice D. Arthur Kelsey does not mention Callais at all in this opinion. One might think that ChatGPT or whatever he used for his legal research hadn’t been updated yet, but the opinion is all around bereft of legal authority, preferring to traffic in hypotheticals and linguistic gamesplaying.

Kagan was correct, for what it’s worth. Partisan gerrymandering is corrosive, but given that the Supreme Court resoundingly rejected that opinion, the majority’s hand-wringing over the moral importance of standing against gerrymandering reads like a child pleading “but Timmy’s parents don’t make him go to bed until 9.” Which, is why the Virginia court soon makes a hard pivot from “isn’t Justice Kagan so wise?” to the state constitution. They need to get as far away from SCOTUS caselaw as they can.

In tossing the results of the election, the majority asserts that the constitutional amendment authorizing the new maps wasn’t properly on the ballot to begin with. Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution sets up an idiosyncratic, two-step process for putting an amendment on a ballot:

Any amendment or amendments to this Constitution may be proposed in the Senate or House of Delegates, and if the same shall be agreed to by a majority of the members elected to each of the two houses, such proposed amendment or amendments shall be . . . referred to the General Assembly at its first regular session held after the next general election of members of the House of Delegates.

Essentially, an amendment only goes to the public if a state legislature is so confident in it that it passes two different sessions.

Did the Virginia legislature follow this procedure? Absolutely. The 2025 legislature proposed and passed the amendment proposal. The new legislature, taking office in 2026, voted for it too. But neither facts, nor text, nor gloom of night will deter bad faith actors from their appointed task.

In this case, voting in the general election for the House of Delegates began on September 19, 2025, and ended on Election Day, November 4, 2025. The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.

The U.S. Supreme Court just redrew maps in the middle of an election. Virginia is quibbling that the first amendment vote happened after early voting started, without undermining the fact that a second session still had to vote for it. But Virginia’s robed GOP activists embraced the Opposite Day role, jettisoning several years worth of Republican messaging that “early voting is fake” and “elections mean election day!” to pronounce with a smirk that as soon as early voting begins, nothing a legislature does can be “before the election.”

In other words, under the Commonwealth’s view, the four-day period (which included a weekend) was the “intervening” period during which Virginia voters could find out what the proposed amendment actually said, whether their preferred candidate supported or opposed it, and whether they wanted to use their vote to express a view on the subject.

Well, technically, under the Commonwealth’s view the amendment was passed by two different legislatures — one that proposed it, and another whose members were elected afterward — which is all the state constitution provides. So much for textualism! Instead, the majority grasps at historical hearsay that the purpose of the rule is to allow voters to make a single-issue vote for their next representative based on the possibility of a ballot measure. The reasoning strains credulity, and if it didn’t strain your credulity, the majority — inexplicably — inserts an amateur play to drive home how stupid this is:

With that perspective, imagine one of the over one million Virginians who had voted in person before Election Day in 2025 walking into a polling place. The voter says to the officer of election, “I am here to vote in the election.” The officer of election responds, “we are not conducting an election here.” “But that’s why I am here,” the voter replies. “Maybe so, but let me explain,” the officer of election insists, “you can vote in the election, but we are not conducting an election today. Elections are only conducted on Election Day.”

No, any of the million Virginians who voted early would say, “right, I’m not an idiot, I understand I’m just casting a ballot that will be counted on election day, do I look like a state supreme court justice or something?”

Not for nothing, if we’re digging into the rationale behind the state constitution, the fact that amendments require a statewide vote is there because hinging everything on voters making a single-issue, indirect vote is farcical.

There’s an extended drag about how, historically, colonial era elections took place over time, counted ballots well after “election day,” and employed ballot farmers — an armchair historian account that must have been bittersweet for Sam Alito.

The date certain in Article IV, Section 3, when considered in the context of the provision and the verb phrase “shall be elected,” describes the time of the final act in an election. In legal argot as well as common speech, a wedding can last for hours, but the bride and groom are not lawfully wed until the officiant declares them so at the end of it. Equally so here. A general election can take place over many days, but it culminates and ends on Election Day. The successful candidate “shall be” lawfully deemed “elected” no earlier than Election Day, the last day of voting in the election.

Except, if someone cared about having a legitimate baby, no matter how long that wedding lasts, all that matters is the baby popping out at the couple’s “first regular session held after they say, ‘I do.'” The constitutional text is straightforward — the amendment is referred to the legislature “at its first regular session held after the next general election of members.” It was passed before the next set of members were elected. That’s the “I do” moment. Honestly, this opinion would be harder to mock if the majority could stop including these terrible asides.

Though, maybe the right conclusion is the simplest one offered by the three dissenting justices:

By focusing on the legislative history, dictionary definitions, and how legal scholars might interpret the term “election,” the majority fails to apply the most basic tenet of interpretation of constitutional provisions: looking to the language of the constitution itself.

Thirty pages of distraction instead of just reading the plain text. Unswerving adherence to text is not a great judicial philosophy. But generally speaking, it’s best to check the text first before throwing a kitchen sink of excuses into the mix.

Especially when the only excuse that matters is the one the majority won’t say out loud.

(Read the full opinions on the next page…)

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 or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

The post Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Election Because Redistricting Isn’t Legal Unless It Disenfranchises Black Voters appeared first on Above the Law.

But as people who have followed our salary and bonus coverage have surely noticed, going to a smaller firm no longer requires taking a smaller paycheck. In fact, a number of small, boutique, and midsize firms pay the same as — or even more than — their Biglaw competitors. Not surprisingly, a growing number of talented law students and young lawyers are choosing to start their careers at smaller firms, bypassing the few years in Biglaw that traditionally represented the dues that had to be paid before moving on to work at an elite boutique.

But how can you find the small, boutique, and midsize firms where you’d actually want to work — and where you’d be paid handsomely? Luckily, there’s a Vault ranking for that. The Top 150 Under 150 ranking “recognize[s] outstanding small and midsize law firms that deliver big results.” Here’s the methodology Vault used:

To determine the Top 150 Under 150, Vault first developed a list of the best-known and most sought-after U.S. firms with 150 attorneys or fewer. Our editorial and research teams pored through Vault survey data, news stories, trade journals, and other legal publications; spoke with lawyers in the field; and reviewed other published rankings. Vault editors also assessed each firm for prestige, quality of life, and professional growth opportunities and then narrowed down the results to come up with a list of 150 law firms known for providing top-notch service and delivering big results.

Vault’s Top 150 Under 150 list is not numerically ranked, but alphabetized, so we’ve picked out a few recognizable firms that made the cut:

• Axinn
• AZA
• Bartlick Beck
• Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors
• Clement & Murphy
• Desmarais
• Edelson
• Elsberg Baker & Maruri
• Greenberg Glusker
• Harrity & Harrity
• Hecker Fink
• Herrick Feinstein
• Holwell Shuster & Goldberg
• Hueston Hennigan
• McKool Smith
• MoloLamken
• Otterbourg
• Reid Collins & Tsai
• Selendy Gay
• Tensegrity Law Group
• Wilkinson Stekloff
• Yetter Coleman

Although they’re not Biglaw firms, these names should all be familiar — some for their Supreme Court and appellate practices, some for being incredibly successful spinoffs, some for their firm culture focusing on attorney happiness, and others for offering salaries and bonuses that compete with or blow their Biglaw brethren out of the water. For the full list, click here.

Congratulations to Vault’s Top 150 Under 150. When it comes to law firms, bigger isn’t always better.

Top 150 Under 150 (2027) [Vault]

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of 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 Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post The Top 150 Under 150: Vault Ranks The Best Small, Boutique, And Midsize Firms (2027) appeared first on Above the Law.

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog, the Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing.

“Did This Appeals Court Go Rogue on Abortion Pills? The Fifth Circuit, reversed more than any other appeals court, has a reputation for taking extreme positions.” Adam Liptak has this new installment of his “The Docket” newsletter online at The New York Times.

“Rule of Law 2, Trump’s Tariffs 0; The Section 122 border taxes go down, his second big legal defeat”: The Wall Street Journal has published this editorial.

“Abortion pill fight brings volatility of post-Roe world back to SCOTUS; Doctors, drugmakers, policy experts and advocates flooded the Supreme Court’s emergency docket with warnings of imminent danger that could come from the latest fight over abortion care before the justices”: Kelsey Reichmann of Courthouse News Service has this report.

“There’s an Obvious Reason Why The Republican Justices Sound So Nervous; Persuading the public that a Republican-controlled Court issuing Republican-friendly decisions is not a Republican body has never been more difficult”: Madiba K. Dennie has this essay online at Balls and Strikes.

“Prosecutors Suggest Goldstein Gambled While on Pretrial Release”: Holly Barker of Bloomberg Law has this report.

“What really won the trillion-dollar Supreme Court case”: You can access Neal Kumar Katyal’s new TED Talk video via this link.

The post How Appealing Weekly Roundup appeared first on Above the Law.

“NYU Law is in an exceptionally strong position,” McKenzie noted. “Perhaps good manners would counsel against saying that so boldly, but it is the reason I feel good about this moment.”

NYU Law is, by any honest accounting, a top-five law school. It sits on a pile of endowment, a bundle of Manhattan real estate, and a gaggle of alumni who answer the phone. McKenzie’s tenure delivered 18 new full-time faculty hires, six new research centers, a record application cycle in 2025-26, and the second-strongest fundraising year in school history, with more than $300 million raised across his four years. All that after taking the job right as COVID tapered off.

And now he gets to leave right before hantavirus arrives!

But of all the advantages McKenzie leaves for his successor, the biggest perk might be the 14-month heads-up he’s given the school. We’ve seen law schools invite chaos without a smooth transition period.

Not that the next dean won’t face challenges. The Trump administration will, theoretically, be on its last legs at that point, but the damage its done to the cash cow international LL.M. business will still be an obstacle. The fact that no competent lawyer wants to touch federal service with a 10-foot pole has left the elite firms more flush with talent than normal, a development that hasn’t necessarily impacted summer hiring, but presumably changes the calculus eventually. And we’re already confronting layoffs.

The whole nature of legal education may need a revamp as well. Assuming the AI hype machine hasn’t run head first into the shell game economics of data centers, 2028 feels like the year law schools will start to confront a hiring landscape where firms seriously curtail the number of brute force juniors they hire. NYU will always occupy a better position than most law schools as an anchor of the New York market, but the school will need to seriously contemplate how to keep its students ahead of the game when summer classes start to shrink.

McKenzie, for his part, gets to do what every law school dean privately fantasizes about: ditch the financial merry-go-round and go back to teaching.

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 or Bluesky 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.

The post NYU Law School Dean Stepping Down, Opening Up Plum Leadership Position appeared first on Above the Law.

Before we get to the honors, let’s review the winners of years past:

• 2009: University of Virginia
• 2010: Northwestern
• 2011: Boston University
• 2012: Columbia
• 2013: West Virginia
• 2014: NYU
• 2015: Columbia
• 2016: University of Texas
• 2017: Columbia
• 2018: NYU
• 2019: Columbia
• 2021: NYU
• 2022: University of Texas
• 2023: University of Virginia
• 2024: GW
• 2025: GW

So which law school will go on the list of champions and forever be remembered in the pantheon of Law Revue greats? Let’s consult the votes:

With 63% of the total votes cast, GW is the winner! Congratulations to George Washington University, which prevailed with its excellent Dear Evan Hansen “Sincerely Me” parody, “Held 6-3.” For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the winning entry:

CAN YOU SAY THREE-PEAT?! Out of all of GW’s fantastic law revue entries over the years — from Drunk Cases to Justice Roboto — this is the school’s third win, and a back-to-back-to-back win at that! Good things come with time, and GW finally cracked the code to win this competition. Yay!

Please email us regarding your prizes for winning this year’s contest.

Congratulations again to GW, and to the rest of the finalists.

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of 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 Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post Law Revue Video Contest 2026: The Winner! appeared first on Above the Law.

When the DOJ unsealed charges against 30 people Wednesday in connection with a decade-long insider trading ring centered on Yale Law grad and serial Biglaw firm-hopper (Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins, Cleary Gottlieb, and Goodwin Procter) Nicolo Nourafchan, we noted that the indictment referenced unnamed co-conspirators who worked at Biglaw firms as recently as this year. Turns out some of those names were hiding in plain sight, in separately unsealed documents.

Meet Gabriel Gershowitz. A former Willkie Farr & Gallagher counsel, Gershowitz is one of the 30 people charged, but additional unsealed documents reveal he and eight others had already pleaded guilty and are cooperating with the government. Gershowitz isn’t a mystery figure. The SEC identified him in its parallel civil suit as one of Nourafchan and Yadgarov’s recruits, a college classmate of theirs who went on to Columbia Law School and subsequently worked at a number of large firms, including Weil Gotshal & Manges, DLA Piper, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

The details of his alleged participation are specific and damning. While at Willkie, Gershowitz was staffed on the Enstar deal because his firm was advising Sixth Street on its roughly $5 billion acquisition of Enstar. He shared news of the deal with his former classmates, who told him a few days later they had purchased between $2 million and $3 million in Enstar shares. After the deal was announced, Gershowitz was allegedly due a $30,000 kickback (though he received a smaller amount because he owed Yadgarov money he’d borrowed for apartment renovations).

Due to his ongoing cooperation, prosecutors have agreed to recommend a sentence of two years for Gershowitz.

There’s one more wrinkle worth noting. After Reuters reported on the Gershowitz court filing, which had been unsealed along with the rest of the case documents on Wednesday, the document was quietly removed from the public court docket in Gershowitz’s case. No explanation has been offered for why a document that was made public was subsequently pulled.

Willkie responded with a statement, “Willkie is aware that a former employee is alleged to have engaged in conduct that would constitute a severe violation of our clear and well-defined compliance policies, which we take seriously and enforce across the firm. There are no allegations of wrongdoing against the firm, which has and will continue to cooperate fully with the investigation of this matter.” Weil Gotshal, another of Gershowitz’s former employers, also weighed in, noting that the former employee “has not been associated with the firm for over six years and the transaction involved dates back to 2019,” adding that Weil was “among the victims of the alleged scheme” and had cooperated fully with prosecutors.

Then there’s Wachtell. Among the co-conspirators described in one of the indictments was a Yale classmate of Nourafchan’s who worked at the firm that advised Anadarko Petroleum on its $55 billion acquisition by Occidental Petroleum in 2019 and Tim Hortons in its $11 billion takeover by Burger King in 2014. That firm was Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz. For a firm that built its entire identity on institutional discretion and handling the most sensitive deals in American corporate life, having a former attorney named as a co-conspirator in a scheme to monetize exactly that access is not a great look. Wachtell’s statement was unsurprisingly terse, “The responsible party left Wachtell Lipton over four years ago. There are no allegations of wrongdoing against the firm. Wachtell Lipton has cooperated fully with the US Attorney’s office and will continue to do so.”

What the fuller picture reveals is a scheme that was essentially a corruption of the old-boy network that already pervades elite law — the same college friendships, the same law school pipelines, the same firm relationships, turned toward the systematic monetization of client confidences. Nourafchan and Yadgarov didn’t recruit strangers. They recruited relatives, friends, classmates, and associates, people they trusted, people who trusted them, people connected through elite institutional threads.

As U.S. Attorney Leah Foley put it: “The trading on unannounced financial news alleged here not only violated the securities laws, but it also took advantage of the special access and ethical duties that come with a law license.”

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 or Bluesky @Kathryn1