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.

One of the law schools being sued over its employment statistics just had its motion to dismiss denied Wednesday, according to Above the Law. Jesse Strauss and David Anziska, the New York
lawyers behind the suits, told the legal gossip blog today that Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s motion to dismiss got tossed.

They also announced that they plan to sue 20 additional schools. Team Strauss/Anziska, as Above the Law has dubbed the litigators, has filed suit against 14 law schools so far. Above the Law has the list of the 20 additional schools. None are in Georgia.

Emory University School of Law ranked 24th in the U.S. News & World Report study of law schools, the highest among Georgia law schools. The University of Georgia School of Law ranked 34th; Georgia State University College of Law ranked 58th; Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law ranked 110th; and Atlanta’s John Marshall School of Law was unranked.

Yale Law School was ranked the highest in the country. The full list can be seen here.

New York Magazine has an interesting story profiling the three lawyers behind the suits accusing New York Law School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School and a dozen other schools of making misleading claims about job placement rates for their graduates. More suits are in the offing. The teaser says it all:

Whereas, many legal degrees are no longer worth the paper they’re printed on; and whereas, the institutes issuing those J.D.’s might be inflating their job-placement rates; and whereas, a lot of unemployed graduates feel cheated out of the lives they thought they’d been promised; now, therefore, be it resolved: They had no choice but to sue.

Our colleagues at The National Law Journal have identified 50 “go-to law schools,” referring to schools that placed the highest percentage of their 2011 graduates at the country’s 250 largest law firms (a.k.a. “The NLJ 250″).

To be sure, not everyone wants to work in a big law firm, but here are the schools of local and regional interest that made the list.

No. 8: Duke (40.64% of 2011 graduates work at NLJ% 250 firms)

No. 10: University of Virginia (39.79%)

No. 17: Vanderbilt (22.05%)

No. 26: Emory (12.44%) Read more »

Law School Transparency has fired another salvo in its battle to make law schools more accurately report job placement information for their graduates. The group, founded in 2009, charged that “the vast majority of U.S. law schools are still hiding critical information from their applicants” in a study assessing the job placement information posted by the 197 ABA-accredited law schools on their websites.

The study, released Jan. 17, charges that law schools are providing job placement information that is often misleading:

–Only 17 percent of the 197 schools specify whether new graduates with jobs are employed full-time or part-time and only 10 percent say whether the jobs are long-term or short-term, the study found.

–Only 49 percent of schools provide salary information—and 78 percent of those provide it “in ways that mislead the reader.”

–Fully 51 percent of schools do not indicate how many graduates participated in their employment survey and returned a questionnaire. Since unemployed graduates are less likely to respond, this skews actual employment rates.

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Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School will open a Savannah branch next fall.

The American Bar Association has approved its application for a branch campus to be called the Savannah Law School. The target enrollment is for 95 students: 60 full-time and 35 part-time, according to an announcement from John Marshall.

John Marshall will begin hiring faculty and staff in the spring and is applying for provisional ABA accreditation. It has not yet announced a location for the branch campus.

The school will offer full-time and part-time tracks in its day program as well as a part-time evening program, which the announcement said is aimed at doctors, retired military, paralegals, law enforcement officers and others interested in a legal education.

This is not John Marshall’s first foray into Savannah. The school operated a branch campus there in the 1970s and early 1980s.

With the new Savannah Law School, students from the Savannah area and throughout the Atlantic Coastal Region can begin their legal careers closer to home, said Richardson Lynn, the dean of John Marshall and the new Savannah Law School.

Georgia has five ABA-accredited law schools: Emory University School of Law, Georgia State University College of Law and John Marshall in Atlanta, Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law in Macon and the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens.

The Savannah Law School is accepting applications beginning Dec. 15. Further information is available at savannahlawschool.org.

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This article from The Washington Post tells how George Mason University law school is using puppies to help stressed-out students during exam period. Enjoy.

The study of law and of business are growing more closely entwined, according to a Financial Times story that says universities are offering more joint JD-MBA programs and Masters of Laws or LLM degrees focused on business. “As the big law firms increasingly behave like large global businesses, and the legal framework in which international businesses operate becomes increasingly complex,” says the Financial Times, interest in joint studies in law and business is increasing.

A Notre Dame law professor writes in Slate today that when a student in his torts class asked about Penn State’s potential liability in the sex abuse scandal, the professor decided to confront his own history: “So here it is: I am a victim of sexual abuse.”

Professor Mark McKenna’s article makes a particularly interesting point: “[I]t is a mistake to characterize Jerry Sandusky as some kind of subhuman monster. The inclination to do so is entirely understandable, for his behavior was unequivocally monstrous. But to describe him as a monster shields us from the reality that human beings have the capacity for tremendous evil.”

The article can be found here.