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My Badge of Honor: “Deselected” by Bush’s Department of Justice (pdf) by Lewis & Clark Law School alum Jamie Saul.

Background:

On Tuesday, June 24 the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility published their report on the improper use of political and ideological affiliations to reject applications to the DOJ.

The scathing report, An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring in the Department of Justice Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program (pdf, 115 pages), provides numerous examples of the Justice Department illegally weeding out “leftist” candidates for nonpartisan career attorney positions. This New York Times article, Report Assails Political Hiring In Justice Dept. , has a good overview of the findings.

Turn to page 86 of the report (this link should get you there) and you will read of a candidate for the Honors Program from Lewis & Clark Law School. A member of the top 10 percent of his class, he was “deselected” due to his work with the Law School’s Northwest Environment Defense Center, Earthjustice, and his position as articles editor for Environmental Law:

The candidate indicated in his essay a strong interest in working in environmental law, including that he wanted “to serve as part of the team charged with enforcing the world’s most comprehensive environmental laws, and with defending the crucial work of our environmental and resource management agencies.”

Elston commented that while he did not know anything about the organizations that the candidate worked for

the impression I’m left with after a quick look at this is that this is someone who had come to the Environment Division . . . with an agenda, not with an open mind as to the best way to enforce the environment, environmental laws. . . . I had a negative reaction to that. So, I may well have voted with Esther on that one.

Investigation, p. 86 & footnote 55

The candidate, left unnamed in the report, was Jamie Saul, a 2007 graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School. Saul is a Staff Attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates, a non-profit environmental law center in Wisconsin.

Jamie Saul has written a piece describing his reaction to the report, and to discovering that he was one of the candidates deselected for political reasons:

I have been advised by friends in the legal field to wear this rejection like a badge of honor, and that’s what I intend to do. It’s reassuring to know that my views on environmental protection don’t quite line up with those of this administrations policymakers (that’s an understatement, folks), and now I find myself working at the wonderful Midwest Environmental Advocates in Madison.

BoleyBlogs! appreciates Mr. Saul sharing My Badge of Honor with us. He provides a valuable perspective which, we trust, will shortly also be appearing in local and national newspapers.

Read My Badge of Honor: “Deselected” by Bush’s Department of Justice (pdf) by Jamie Saul.

Fans of open access to law (and unless your name rhymes with Bromson-Loiters or HexisBexis, who isn’t?) will be pleased with this morning’s news that Oregon is backing away from enforcing its copyright claims on key elements of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS).

As you may remember, back in April Oregon sent cease and desist letters to Justia and Public.Resource.Org which had been posting electronic copies of the ORS. See our post from the time for the details. As Professor Bojack illustrates, stripping out the elements in which the state was asserting copyright leads to rather unfortunate results.

However, in a hearing yesterday the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee recommended and the Senate agreed that Oregon would no longer be enforcing its copyright on the statutes.

via BoingBoing:

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Justia and Public.Resource.Org were invited, along with Karl Olson our counsel, to testify before the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee. We were joined by a public panel of wikipedians and open source advocates.

The process was incredibly well organized. There was a comprehensive briefing packet prepared for the committee, the members asked lots of intelligent questions, and then Dexter Johnson the Legislative Counsel recommended to the committee that they waive assertion of copyright on their statutes. The Majority Leader placed the motion, the President of the Senate called the vote, and the vote was unanimous. This was democracy in action and was great to watch.

OPB News told the story in brief this morning (though they have not posted it online), and those in attendance have yet to post more than a brief but welcome update (thanks Tim!), but keep an eye on Public.Resource.Org’s The Oregon Question, Justia’s Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog, and Oregon Legal Research for the rich details. You can also read the prepared statements of Tim Stanley, Karl Olson and Carl Malamud.

For a detailed and educational analysis of the issues involved see this timely essay, Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer, by New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann. [htsg]

Update: Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has let us know that video of the hearings is now available online.

Sources: Legal Research Plus

The latest Lewis & Clark Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series has now been posted. The series, part of the SSRN Legal Scholarship Network, presents papers accepted for publication and working papers of the Lewis & Clark Law School faculty.

Volume 2, Number 3 of the Lewis & Clark Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series contains these articles. Follow the links to view abstracts and download the full-text articles:

• Arbitration of Shareholder Claims: Why Change is Not Always a Measure of Progress
  Jennifer J. Johnson, Lewis & Clark Law School
  Edward Brunet, Lewis & Clark Law School
• Healthcare Reform in the United States: The Role of the States
  Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 199, 2007
  Arthur B. LaFrance, Lewis & Clark Law School
• What History Teaches Us About Copyright Injunctions and the Inadequate-Remedy-At-Law Requirement
  Southern California Law Review, September 2008
  Tomas Gomez-Arostegui, Lewis & Clark Law School
• Summary Judgment is Constitutional
  Iowa Law Review, Forthcoming
  Edward Brunet, Lewis & Clark Law School
• The Pope’s Copyright? Aligning Incentives with Reality by Using Creative Motivation to Shape Copyright Protection
  Louisiana Law Review, Forthcoming
  Lydia Pallas Loren, Lewis & Clark Law School

Subscribe to receive announcements of all new papers in the Lewis & Clark Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series.

New L&C Law Scholarship is a regular feature of BoleyBlogs! Here we announce new content from the Law Reviews of Lewis & Clark Law School, along with the latest publishing ventures of our own faculty, students and staff.