Judicial Notice (03.18.23): What A Mess
Bank bailouts, Trump troubles, more Stanford Law, and other legal news from the week that was.
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Welcome, all you new subscribers (and thanks for the boost, Stanford Law School). You’re reading Judicial Notice, the weekly legal news roundup that I provide to paid subscribers of Original Jurisdiction. I consume a vast amount of legal news, pick out what’s important, and distill it all down to a single summary, which saves my busy readers a ton of time (and to folks who bill by the hour, time is money).
I begin each edition of Judicial Notice with a short personal update. This week, I did a lot of speaking. I debuted a new talk about affirmative action in higher education—at the University of Michigan Law School, a fitting venue given the role it has played in the history of litigating this issue—and I challenge you to find a more beautiful law school library (yes, even including Yale’s). I appeared on my favorite legal podcast, Advisory Opinions, where I discussed the protest of Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School with Sarah Isgur and David French (who then spoke with Judge Duncan himself). And Zach Sandberg and I recorded a new episode of Movers, Shakers & Rainmakers, where we interviewed Michael Heise of haistack.ai about another timely topic: artificial intelligence—and how it’s transforming the legal profession.
Now, on to the news. There’s a lot to discuss, since this edition covers two weeks (because I skipped the week ending March 11, while on vacation).
Lawyer of the Week: H. Rodgin Cohen.
The Duncan drama at SLS, while riveting in the manner of a car wreck, is not a big story in the grand scheme of things. Out in the “real world,” the big story is the massive turmoil in the world of banking, which started—but hasn’t ended—with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th-largest bank in the United States.
So it should come as no surprise that Lawyer of the Week is Rodge Cohen, senior chair of Sullivan & Cromwell and arguably the nation’s #1 lawyer when it comes to financial institutions M&A (I see you, Ed Herlihy). Famously dubbed the “trauma surgeon of Wall Street” by the New York Times during the 2008 financial crisis, Cohen has had a busy two weeks.
As reported by Reuters and the Financial Times, Cohen played a key role in the $30 billion plan to rescue First Republic Bank—a critically important development, since you can think of that as a “firewall” separating the collapses of SVB and Signature Bank from the rest of the U.S. financial system. If we can avoid recession (which I’m increasingly doubtful about), or if the recession isn’t as bad as it could have been, we’ll have Cohen—and many other lawyers, including Federal Reserve Bank chair and Georgetown Law grad Jerome Powell—to thank.
Turning to younger folks (Cohen is 79), congratulations to the winners of the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Awards. And turning to the much younger, congratulations to Jimmy Chilimigras, 15, who scored a 174 on the LSAT and will be attending a yet-to-be-determined law school this fall.
In memoriam:
Patricia Schroeder, the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado, passed away at 82, of complications from a stroke. Although she was best-known for her political achievements, including passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, she had impressive legal chops: she graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964, one of only 15 women in a class of more than 500.
Donald Flexner—name partner at Boies Schiller Flexner and a “giant of the antitrust bar,” in the words of his longtime partner David Boies—passed away at 81, after a long illness.
May they rest in peace.
Judge of the Week: Judge Kyle Duncan.
The obvious Judge of the Week is Judge Kyle Duncan (5th Cir.). I’ve offered wall-to-wall coverage of L’Affaire Duncan, including a full audio recording of the protest against the judge, so I don’t have much to add here. I’ll just point you in the direction of Judge Duncan’s latest comment on the whole unfortunate episode, a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School.”
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