Judicial Notice (05.14.22): Grinding It Out
A settlement in the Surfside condo collapse, Kirkland raids Cravath (again), and other legal news from the week that was.
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The leak of the Supreme Court’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs continues to dominate the headlines—and probably explains the spike in my readership. But this post, unlike most of my recent stories, isn’t about Dobbs.
Instead, it’s an installment of Judicial Notice, the time-saving summary of the week in legal news that I send out over the weekend to paid subscribers of Original Jurisdiction, allowing them to catch up on an entire week of news in one sitting. And because I’ve written extensively about the Dobbs leak in prior posts, including an explainer on the topic and a fictionalized op-ed by the leaker, I’m declaring this space a Dobbs-free zone.
I begin each installment of Judicial Notice with a brief personal update. This week, I don’t have much to report because I barely left home. Harlan is sick (not Covid), and we kept him out of school. As the parents among you know well from the past two-plus years, trying to work while watching your kid doesn’t leave much time for anything else—and leaves you very, very tired at day’s end.
I did record a new episode of Movers, Shakers, and Rainmakers, the Biglaw-focused podcast I host with Zach Sandberg of Lateral Link. This week, we interviewed Viet Nguyen of Wilson Sonsini about the importance of understanding business considerations as a lawyer and what it was like to make a lateral move in 2021.
Now, on to the (non-Dobbs) news.
Lawyer of the Week: Alvaro M. Bedoya.
On Wednesday, the Senate confirmed Georgetown law professor Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”). This might not sound terribly exciting, but it falls under the “boring but important” category, so bear with me.
Like a growing number of nominees, the 40-year-old Bedoya had “a Twitter problem” (which is the millennial’s answer to “a Nannygate problem”). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described Bedoya’s tweets as “the rantings of a far-left activist with no aspiration to ever receive Senate confirmation.” (I didn’t find Bedoya’s tweets that bad; he suggested that former president Donald Trump is a white supremacist and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a “domestic surveillance agency,” which is like… a Tuesday on Twitter.)
Despite the Republican attacks, no Democrats defected, Vice President Kamala Harris broke the 50-50 tie, and Bedoya will soon join the FTC. This will have significant consequences for the agency’s work—and American consumers.
Many folks have been looking for vigorous antitrust enforcement in the Biden Administration. While the Justice Department has been aggressive, maybe even too aggressive, the FTC has been less active than expected—even though it’s chaired by Lina Khan, the brilliant young antitrust scholar with an ambitious agenda.
There’s a reason for that. The five-member, bipartisan commission has been down a member since fall 2021, and the resulting two-two, partisan deadlock has tied the FTC’s hands in many important matters. For example, it prevented the agency from blocking Amazon’s acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in March. But with Bedoya in place, Lina Khan will have the three votes she needs to execute her agenda, including bringing cases against technology giants and implementing new regulations to govern the digital economy. Many of those regulations are expected to cover privacy—and Bedoya, founder of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, will be especially helpful in that realm. Big Tech, watch out.
In other nominations news, President Joe Biden announced a bipartisan slate of seven picks for the U.S. Sentencing Commission: Judge Carlton W. Reeves (S.D. Miss.), nominated to serve as chair; Laura Mate, director of Sentencing Resource Counsel; Claire McCusker Murray, former principal deputy associate attorney general; Judge Luis Felipe Restrepo (3d Cir.); Judge Claria Horn Boom (E.D./W.D. Ky.); former judge John Gleeson (E.D.N.Y.), now at Debevoise & Plimpton; and Candice Wong, an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., where she heads the Violence Reduction and Trafficking Offenses Section. As you might recall, a certain Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (D.C. Cir.) served on the Commission, and we all know where she’s going—so watch the careers of the two youngest nominees, Murray and Wong, who I wouldn’t be surprised to see as judicial nominees someday.
Finally, in other news of lawyers landing new jobs, congratulations to David Yellen, the next dean of the University of Miami School of Law, and some guy named Jerome Powell, confirmed to another four-year term as Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Yes, Powell worked as a lawyer before moving into finance, and he had an impressive early career: editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal, Second Circuit clerk, and Davis Polk associate.
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