Law.com Legal Blog Watch

Victoria Pynchon, California arbitrator and prolific blogger at Settle It Now, last week raised the issue of gender diversity among "neutrals" in the Alternative Dispute Resolution world. It is a long, thoughtful, well-supported post, delving fairly deeply into the factors leading to the relative paucity of female arbitrators and mediators outside the "Pink Ghetto," which is not a lesbian bar, but, in the context of the ADR world, a term used to refer to the kinds of cases that are commonly thought to require more emotion than reason -- family law, employment law and trusts and estates. ...

The U.S. Supreme Court may have spoiled the plans of many people who wanted to watch a Web broadcast of California's high-profile Proposition 8 trial on the legalization of same-sex marriage, but that is not stopping two creative producers in Los Angeles. Via this post on the South Florida Lawyers blog I learned that two producers have been "airing" the trial in a unique way: "by staging elaborate reenactments with real actors playing the judge, lawyers and witnesses, and posting it all on YouTube." SFL reports that the two Los Angeles men (John Ainsworth, an actor, and John Irelandare, a ...

A Russian court yesterday denied a request by two women to force a Moscow registry office to marry them. The women went to court after the registry office refused to endorse their marriage last May, citing a Russian law that described marriage as a "union between a woman and a man." Irina Fedotova-Fet and Irina Shipitko had asked the judge to overrule the registry office. They argued that nothing in the Russian Constitution or in Russian family law prohibits same-sex marriages. They also cited the European Convention on Human Rights, which supports same-sex marriages. The couple's lawyer, ...

As a graduate of Boston College Law School, I was disappointed to read about BC Law Professor Scott T. Fitzgibbon's starring role in an anti-gay marriage TV ad targeted at voters in Maine. Now that I've watched the ad and read more about it, I find it even more disappointing for the ways in which it distorts some of the underlying issues. By way of background, Maine last May became the first state to legalize gay marriage through legislation rather than court action. No sooner was the legislation signed into law than a coalition of gay marriage opponents mounted an effort to put a ...

A year ago, I posted here about a group of law professors that decided to boycott the Association of American Law Schools' annual meeting at the San Diego Manchester Grand Hyatt as a protest of hotel owner Douglas Manchester's financial support of the Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriages. Taking a lesson from the professors, California lawyers similarly challenged the California Bar Association's decision to hold its annual meeting at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, reports SanDiego6.com. But the California Bar determined that it was not possible to move the convention so it opened ...

Other posts worth your attention today: The lawyer who blogs anonymously at Mommy on the Floor explains how lesbian sex works -- in Haiku no less. Blawg Review #222 is hosted by Duncan Bucknell Company. Feminist Law Professors wonders why the April issue of The George Washington Law Review includes not a single female author. Futurelawyer offers advice on how to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. For all the buzz about online networking, Larry Bodine suggests we not overlook the power of face-to-face communications. There are two sides to every story, as Carolyn Elefant illustrates at ...

In 2007, transsexual Ava Cordero was the sweetheart of the gossip pages -- and the gossip bloggers -- when her high-profile New York lawyer boyfriend William J. Unroch sued the even higher profile billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein alleging that he pressured the then-16-year-old into sex in exchange for promises that he would help her get modeling work. Soon, Cordero was the plaintiff in a second lawsuit, this time for libel against the New York Post after it reported that she was a he. The gist of her suit was that the Post, by quoting a MySpace page in which...

It was the battle of the Internet porn sites at the World Intellectual Property Organization as two California companies sparred for rights to the domain name "virtualsex.com." In one corner was the company that claimed to have coined the term...