Minnesota Lawyer Blog

Hennepin County District Court Judge Charles Porter has turned back Larry Craig's motion to withdraw his guilty plea.

Craig, for those of you just back from Mars, is the Idaho senator who was busted for disorderly conduct in a men's room at the airport. He mailed in his guilty plea and then attempted to rescind it when the press got word.

Porter found the plea was accurate, voluntary and intelligent. The judge observed that the prosecutor advised Craig to obtain counsel and that Craig waived that right.

The full text of the opinion is available here.

In August I mentioned how Dorsey & Whitney was rated a good place for women to work.

Turns out Dorsey is gay-friendly, too.

The Minneapolis law firm scored a perfect 100 on the Corporate Equality Index, a report card on GLBT inclusiveness released last month from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

The survey rates the nation's leading businesses and AMLAW 200 firms on a variety of criteria, such as diversity training and domestic partner benefits.

Faegre & Benson also received a perfect score. Another local firm on the list was Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi in Minneapolis, which scored a slightly lower 93 after losing points in the "has employer-supported employee resource group or firm-wide diversity council" category.

Here's how other Minnesota businesses scored:

3M Maplewood — 85
Alliant Techsystems Edina — 65
Allianz Life Insurance Golden Valley — 100
Ameriprise Financial Minneapolis — 100
Best Buy Richfield — 100
Cargill Wayzata — 100
Carlson Minnetonka — 100
General Mills Golden Valley — 100
Imation Oakdale — 93
Land O’Lakes Arden Hills — 53
Medtronic Fridley — 85
Northwest Airlines Eagan — 85
Supervalu Eden Prairie — 100
Target Minneapolis — 80
Thomson Eagan — 95
Travelers St. Paul — 50
U.S. Bancorp Minneapolis — 100
Xcel Energy Minneapolis — 60

A .pdf of the complete 2008 Corporate Equality Index is available here.

Bikes – and the rights of their owners versus those of car owners – just seems to becoming a more and more prominent topic of discussion. This month’s Mpls./St. Paul has an interesting article delving into the many spokes of Twin Cities bike culture. And as Minnesota Lawyer editor Mark Cohen wrote a couple weeks back, biking seems to be at the center of more and more violent occurrences – some accidental, some not.

All that was brought home to me this morning when I was hit by a car while riding my bicycle to work. As these things go, it was pretty mild: The driver was pulling away from a stop sign, so he wasn’t going very fast when he nailed me. Other than some bruises and frayed nerves, the only damage is a bent front wheel that needed replacing anyway. I got away cheap.

But the first reaction among a number of people I told the story to was, “Did you get his insurance information? Are you going to call a lawyer?” Most people weren’t serious when they responded that way, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless that it was the default answer.

In fact, I didn’t even get the guy’s name. It was an accident, he apologized profusely, and I was mostly unhurt. Why muddy a simple situation with lawyers and doctors and bureaucrats? Life is too short.

So does that make me a forgiving soul, or a pushover? If there had been broken bones and a crushed bike involved, that would be another story. But to me, if what happened makes that driver – and me – more careful in the future, that’s reward enough.

So bikers: Be careful out there. And drivers: Open your eyes!

I too watched Clarence Thomas on 60 Minutes and found him more impressive than I expected. However, I was surprised that all these years later and having enjoyed a career not available to most people, he still has to indulge in an ad hominem attack on Anita Hill. She has responded with an editorial in the New York Times that says she stands by her testimony. Its title? "The Smear This Time"

The Wall Street Journal law blog picked it up, and what is really sad was the level of discourse in some blogger's comments. Speaking of ad hominem attacks, one blogger wonders if Hill is fun on a date. Speaking also of sexism, several comment on how "hot" she is. Come on, people.

Nothing much has changed since I went to see Hill speak at Hamline University shortly after the Thomas hearings. Young men lined up along the doorway to offer the (mostly women) attendees cans of Coke, and one seemed genuinely surprised when I called him a name I can't use here. (I too was guilty of an ad hominem attack). I thanked Hill for coming forward, and I stand by that now. Perhaps her allegations shouldn't have taken center stage they way they did, but she had written them in a private letter to the Judiciary Committee, not in a book for which she was paid a $1.5 million advance. But as Hill says in her op-ed piece, reopening the smear campaign against her will not encourage future objects of sexual harassment to vindicate their rights.

In a decision issued today, Hennepin County District Court Judge Mark Wernick granted the defendants’ motions to reopen their “stop on red” cases and obtain a refund of fines and costs paid.

Specifically, Wernick found:

-- W ith respect to those Defendant-Claimants above who pleaded guilty to violating the Minneapolis automated traffic control ordinance, such guilty pleas are hereby withdrawn and the charges are dismissed. The city of Minneapolis shall take all necessary action to decertify the convictions and refund all fines, surcharges, and law library fees.

-- With respect to those Defendant-Claimants above who paid prosecution costs as part of a suspended prosecution agreement, the city of Minneapolis shall take all necessary action to refund such costs.

The decision is Minneapolis v. Adan, et al.

One of the interesting moments of Justice Clarence Thomas' interview on "6o Minutes" last night (see post below for more on the interview) came when the justice talked about the difficulty he had finding a job after receiving his J.D. in 1974. Despite having gone to an ivy-league law school (Yale), Thomas could not find a Big Firm willing to hire him.

In debt and jobless, the future justice came to view his law degree as not being worth 15 cents. In fact, to this day he keeps the degree in storage with a 15-cent price tag on the frame. (It bears mentioning that Thomas came to be of the view that affirmative action programs had diluted the value of his degree in the eyes of Big Firm employers.) Thomas did, of course , eventually land a job, but it wasn't a position at a Big Firm. Instead, Thomas was hired as an assistant attorney general in Missouri at $10,000 a year.

Thomas' experience raises several issues. One we have blogged about here before -- the problems more and more law students are facing in servicing their ever-growing debt loads when, for whatever reason, they don't wind up in a lucrative job at a Big Firm. (See "Are lawyers job prospects dimming?") It's a very important issue facing the profession and one that will be explored more fully in a future edition of Minnesota Lawyer.

Much has been said of the silence of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the bench. Last term he did not utter a word during oral arguments (see "Ever-taciturn Thomas is in a quiet spell.") So I was eager to see what the quiet justice would say when given the chance on an exclusive interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."

I actually thought the supremely silent justice did very well. He came across as intelligent and well-spoken. One can certainly disagree with Thomas' personal, political and legal views, but there is apparently much more to the man than the caricature that has been generally presented. Given the eloquence he showed in the interview, it's a shame that Thomas does not speak up more often. Silence is not always golden.