History buffs may find an upcoming seminar in Savannah an appealing way to stock up on continuing legal education credits.

The seminar, set for May 24-25 at the federal courthouse in Savannah, will cover the city’s legal history. Presented by the Georgia Legal History Foundation, sessions will include reflections on the early life of Justice Clarence Thomas from his boyhood friends and remarks on the legacy of Eleventh Circuit Judge Phyllis Kravitch and her lawyer father, the late Aaron Kravitch. Old war stories as well as more recent controversies, such as the Troy Davis death penalty case, are on the agenda.

The seminar carries 9.5 hours of CLE credit—including an ethics credit. Those interested can use this registration form.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s Judicial Nominating Commission today put out a formal call for names of would-be state Supreme Court justices.

Today’s posting marks the official beginning of the process of picking a successor to Presiding Justice George H. Carley, who announced in October that he will retire from the state Supreme Court on July 17. The departing justice has urged Deal to have an appointee ready to be sworn in right away, promising he would have his office cleaned out.

Per the JNC’s usual practice, attorneys can nominate themselves or others, and non-lawyers can submit nominations, as well. The names should be sent to the Judicial Nominating Commission, c/o Dana McGuire, 600 Peachtree Street, N.E., Suite 5200, Atlanta, Ga. 30308-2216, by fax to (404) 962-6919 or by email c/o dana.mcguire@troutmansanders.com.

To move forward in the process, nominees must complete the JNC’s application package, which can be found on its website. In a departure from the commission’s recent practice, in which there is some gap between the nominations deadline and the application deadline so that last-minute nominees can complete their submission, the two deadlines for the Supreme Court vacancy will be the same: May 25.

The commission will conduct interviews on May 31 at the State Bar’s annual meeting in Savannah. Today’s announcement says the commission will recommend to Deal a short list of up to five people.

Governor Deal signs HB 954 into law as the bill's supporters watch.

Today was sensitive social issue day at the governor’s office, with Gov. Nathan Deal signing into law bills addressing abortion and assisted suicide.

HB 954 generally prohibits abortion after 20 weeks from the date of fertilization. An earlier version of the bill made exceptions to the ban only to preserve the life of an unborn child or to “[a]vert the death of the pregnant woman or avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”

In a last-minute compromise, lawmakers added an exception for “medically futile” pregnancies, in which the unborn child “has a profound and irremediable congenital or chromosomal anomaly that is incompatible with sustaining life after birth.”

The final version of the bill signed by Deal still specifies that a woman’s mental or emotional health, including the prospect of suicide, cannot be a basis for meeting the mother’s health exception.

Opponents of the legislation argued that the bill violated Supreme Court precedent on the grounds that the 20-week mark is prior to fetal viability (a premise challenged by the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Doug McKillip, R-Athens) and that the women’s health exception is too narrow. But most of the similar laws passed by other states in recent years have not been challenged in court.

HB 1114 bans assisted suicide, making it a felony to help someone take their own life. The legislation was proposed after the Georgia Supreme Court in February struck down as unconstitutional the state’s statute that made it a felony to help someone end his life after first publicly offering such assistance. Noting then that assisted suicide wasn’t banned outright, the court said the old statute impermissibly targeted free speech.

The state’s appellate judges are getting out of town.

Tomorrow, the state Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Thomasville Municipal Building, built by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration under the New Deal.  Beginning at 10 a.m., the court’s going to hear a murder case and a lawsuit over the death of a prisoner.

The court usually hears off-site arguments a few times a year. This time, the justices will have an extra duty/honor: They’ll serve as honorary grand marshals for the annual Rose Show and Festival tomorrow night in downtown Thomasville.

The justices will ride in a red trolley. According to a release by the Supreme Court, the festival, a tradition since the 1920s, is the longest-running rose show in the country.

In a somewhat rarer trip, three state Court of Appeals judges will travel to Monroe next week to hear two civil cases there. The occasion is the Walton County Bar Association’s observance of Law Day, events around the country to celebrate the rule of law.

Judges Sara Doyle, Gary Andrews and Michael Boggs will hear arguments beginning at 11 a.m. Wednesday in the county’s historic courthouse (opened specially for the event—current court facilities are in the county’s government building).  They’ll answer questions from area high school students after the legal business is done.

It’s not too late for law offices to sign up for the state’s inaugural Legal Food Frenzy—and possibly be the one to put the pool over the 200 mark.

More than  190 firms and other legal organizations have signed up for the food and fund drive competition, sponsored by the Office of the Attorney General and the State Bar in partnership with with the Georgia Food Bank Association. The two-week competition kicks off Monday.

Entrants will compete to win the Attorney General’s Cup, to be awarded to the firm or legal organization that collects the most pounds per firm employee. (In addition to food collected, each dollar donated will be counted as four pounds of food.) Additional honors based on firm size also will be awarded.

But the real winners will be area food banks and those they serve. The food banks are preparing for the summer months,
when they experience a spike in demand due to some children losing access to free meals at school. As a point of comparison (and competition), Virginia lawyers claim to have gathered more than 7 million pounds of food since they began their similar annual event in 2007.

Information on how to sign up—and the most needed food items—can be found here.

They didn’t win the case, but last week a crew of Emory University law students had the thrill of receiving a hat tip from a Supreme Court justice.

The case was Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, a civil rights lawsuit brought by a man who was strip searched following an erroneous arrest on an outstanding bench warrant. Ruling on April 2, the high court divided 5-4 against the plaintiff, rejecting his proposal that new detainees not arrested for seri­ous crimes or for offenses involving weapons or drugs be exempt from invasive searches unless they give officers a particular reason to sus­pect them of hiding contraband.

The Emory students had effectively sided with the plaintiff, filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Medical Society of New Jersey, the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights and other medical professionals. The brief was filed by the Emory Law School Supreme Court Advocacy Project, which is the brainchild of Emory 2L Kedar Bhatia. Emory students Audrey Patten and Michael Burshteyn, a co-founder of the Emory Supreme Court project, were co-leaders of the brief team, and counsel of record was listed as David Bederman, an Emory law professor who died in December.

The brief argued that a proposed justification for giving corrections officials broad powers for invasive searches—to prevent the spread of disease—was flawed because the average jail intake employees isn’t competent to identify things like staph infections. The students’ brief was cited by Stephen Breyer in his dissenting opinion, when he wrote that there is no connection between health concerns and the “genital lift” and the “squat and cough” to which the plaintiff allegedly was subjected.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit this week began posting its argument calendars on its website.

The calendars will be posted four weeks in advance, according to the site. The posted calendars do not list the members of the three-judge panels assigned to hear the cases.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution story in November highlighted the court’s failure to post its calendars online, saying the court was alone on that score among the nation’s federal appeals courts. Georgia’s state appellate courts had long posted their calendars on their websites, but people interested in the Eleventh Circuit had to obtain calendars directly from the clerk’s office.

Carving out a career at the state Law Department is seen as one of the better ways for a Georgia lawyer to obtain the often-elusive opportunity make an argument before the nation’s highest court.

Marietta lawyer John C. Jones, who was with the attorney general’s office for 30 years, had once second-chaired a Supreme Court argument as a lawyer for the state. But it wasn’t until he left the office that he got his big chance, making oral argument in a case this term that led to a unanimous win.

“I got to argue now that I’m in private practice—real unusual,” Jones said today, on the heels of Monday’s win by a unanimous vote.

Jones represented Doughterty County district attorney’s office investigator James Paulk in a civil case that alleged Paulk lied to a grand jury. Plaintiff Charles Rehberg’s claimed that Dougherty County authorities improperly pursued a criminal investigation against him as a political favor to Albany’s Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. Three times Rehberg, an accountant who had sent anonymous faxes criticizing the hospital, was indicted on various charges, including making harassing phone calls. But three times the charges were dismissed.

Rehberg’s suit also had named former Dougherty DA and 2010 Democratic attorney general nominee Ken Hodges as a defendant, as well as then-Houston Circuit DA Kelly Burke, who took over the matter after Hodges recused. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided Hodges and Burke should have immunity on all of the claims against them.

The Eleventh Circuit also ruled that Paulk – who Jones has said didn’t make any false statements – was entitled to immunity for his grand jury testimony. But on Rehberg’s request, the high court agreed to revisit the immunity question. At arguments in November, Jones faced off against Washington attorney Andrew Pincus, whose profile on Mayer Brown’s website boasts of 23 Supreme Court arguments and notes he’s co-founder and co-director of Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic.

Rehberg had pointed to Supreme Court case law that said a “complaining witness” is not shielded by absolute immunity. But Monday’s opinion by Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said those cases involved law enforcement officials who submitted affidavits in support of applica­tions for arrest warrants. Alito said it was clear that a “complaining witness” cannot be liable for false trial testimony, and the court saw no reason to treat grand jury testimony differently.

Jones said he got help on the matter from lawyers at his old firm, Freeman Mathis & Gary, including partner Philip W. Savrin, who made a successful argument at the high court in 2007.

The state Court of Appeals has upheld by a 5-2 vote a Cobb County judge’s decision to quash an indictment against former Cobb EMC CEO Dwight Brown on the ground that it had been read in the county’s new Superior Courthouse the week before the building officially opened to the public.

The appeals court’s majority—Judges Charles Mikell, Anne Elizabeth Barnes, Yvette Miller, Harris Adams and Stephen Dillard—said Judge Robert Flournoy was right to kill the indictment because it was not returned in an open court as required by the law.

The indictment was returned in January 2011, when the courthouse had limited accessibility to the public while court employees were moving into it. One of Brown’s attorneys, Cameron Tribble of the Barnes Law Group, has said he had to be escorted through the courthouse by  the court’s administrator and missed the return of his client’s indictment. Brown was charged with racketeering and theft for his actions as CEO of the nonprofit electrical membership corporate and its for-profit subsidiaries.

Cobb District Attorney Patrick H. Head appealed, saying Flournoy’s findings on what determined a court to be open could affect hundreds of other cases.

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The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has released its questionnaire for Jill A. Pryor, nominated Feb. 16 by President Barack Obama for a slot on the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Pryor, a partner at Bondurant Mixson & Elmore in Atlanta, details her business litigation experience, as well as her efforts as a prior member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia’s legal committee, a leader in the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers and other bar groups, and helping on the re-election campaigns of Georgia judges.

In response to a question about pro bono work, Pryor cites, among other activities, helping former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr prepare for a 2008 en banc argument before the 11^th Circuit. Starr won the case on behalf of the National Geographic Society, which was in a copyright battle with freelance contributors to the society’s magazine.

The Judiciary Committee had hearings on several judicial nominations scheduled for this afternoon, but no date for a hearing on Pryor’s nomination has been announced.