Justice Alito Doth Protest Too Much

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Joe Patrice: Hello, welcome to another episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer, I’m Joe Patrice. I am joined by Chris Williams. We’re from Above the Law.

Chris Williams: So you’re reading from the script today?

Joe Patrice: I always am, but I just thought you were going to jump in there at any point, so that’s why there was that sort of pause. But yeah, no. So we’re here, that’s usual to talk about the top legal stories of the week that was, that sort of thing. But first, we have a little small talk. How are you doing? Have you been deposed by one of your friends running a private military army lately or not?

Chris Williams: I’m not legally allowed to discuss that information.

Joe Patrice: Okay, that’s fair.

Chris Williams: Outside of them, I’m doing pretty good. Outside of the existential risk of being in the United States, I’m going to go ahead — I’m heading back there. So, for the folks listening, you got a couple of more days in Cambodia. By time this is out, I’ll probably be headed to, if not, in the United States. So everyone has been waiting to hand me their fan mail, finally have the opportunity because I’ll be in the same country.

Joe Patrice: Well there you go.

Chris Williams: That’s basically my weekend. I’m really looking forward to it. I miss my bed, man.

Joe Patrice: No, yeah. Yeah no, man, I get that.

Chris Williams: Yeah, if you’re going to invest in something outside of like stocks or you have some try to insider info one, you get a good pair of shoes, you get a good bed, you spend like a 30 alive sleeping and you always walking around. So if you got a good bed and some good shoes, at least for the most the time of your life you got some comfort back then.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. I do not particularly enjoy my bed, which is why I enjoyed traveling because normally hotel beds are better. But the thing is I used to, I used to have this fantastic bed when I was an attorney, a practicing attorney and you know, it just doesn’t quite work for me right now. It’s more of a guest bed these days. I spent way too much — I felt on it at the time, but I mean I was a lawyer making big law money. So I was like, “Oh well”, the same thing you said, like third of my life sleeping. I should invest in this and I did and I felt guilty instantly after doing it and then I have not felt guilty since for years and years. That was the single most comfortable part of my life. So I will echo that you should buy.

Chris Williams: The only thing I’m saying here Joe is maybe you should be a little bit more religious because if you do it the right way, the guilt is actually part of the fun.

Joe Patrice: Fair enough. I will echo this advice though for anybody out there who is about to get there. They’re nice lawyer check. Splurging when it comes to a mattress is not a bad idea and I know that there’s all of these perfectly wonderful mattress companies that are advertising everywhere that they can send it to you in a box and it’ll be fine and those are fine. But the people who really build real mattresses with springs and everything, those are still more comfortable. So, anyway, we’ve talked about mattresses. That was not something I had on my notes for today. I’m impressed. I didn’t have fun. I’m obviously not on my notes because I don’t do — we don’t practice small talk but it wasn’t on my bingo card for the day I guess I should say.

Chris Williams: Well you know me, I always start with what mattress is.

Joe Patrice: Well I’m trying to think. Speaking of being taken to the mattresses, no, I don’t really have anything for the transition.

Chris Williams: Why don’t you sleep on it?

Joe Patrice: Oh, why don’t I sleep on it? That’s a good one. Yeah. No. Speaking of traveling and sleeping in luxury hotels, I guess let’s — that’s the obvious transition to the news about Sam Alito that has come out since the last time we recorded. There’s a lot to untangle with this story. So ProPublica, the folks who have been in the news a lot with Clarence Thomas revelations had some Sam Alito ones of their own. Alito has received stuff from rich people including this Paul Singer individual who was on a trip with him, a resort trip to a remote area of Alaska where they went fishing and were apparently cornered by bears. And they hung out with Leonard Leo and — so it was just like a nice little loving for a bunch of right-wing ideologues to have a Supreme Court Justice with them while they went on vacation. Turns out Scalia went on the same trip in his day and Sam Alito took a trip there on a private jet which he failed to disclose, and then never recused himself in cases that involved this guy.

(00:05:02)

Chris Williams: Totally normal, totally normal stuff.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. So that’s a thing. This could have bene like the Clarence Thomas revelations, a really — another black eye for the court and its ethics and another opportunity for the court to pretend that it doesn’t have an ethics problem when it clearly does, but then it got weirder, didn’t it?

Chris Williams: Always does.

Joe Patrice: So it got weirder and we actually didn’t hear the story from ProPublica at first. The story was originally brought to light by Sam Alito publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal complaining, pre-rebutting basically the ProPublica article that was going to happen. ProPublica asked him for comment on their story rather than respond to that comment or just ignore it. He intentionally published a response to it ahead of the deadline that ProPublica had given him. He was trying to scoop their own story with his narrative. What do we have to say about this?

Chris Williams: Well my thing is, there’s a dumb story for when I was in high school. So I had a bunch of friends and I was like sitting in a window as one does and they threatened to push me out of it. So I was like at least –.

Joe Patrice: No wait, were you actually friends with Vladimir Putin back in the day?

Chris Williams: I’m not legally allowed to discuss this.

Joe Patrice: Right.

Chris Williams: But yeah, so I’m on the window and I’m going to get pushed out of the window. So I’m like, “Hmm, I could just leave the window myself.” So I get out the window. I’m going to start meditating on the roof because I’m like, “If this is going to hit the fan, at least I’m the one that’s like starting it so I can have some sort of taking control of my narrative.” So I’m generally a big fan of — people are like, “I’m about to get exposed. Let me say what’s happening first, it’s damage control.” But the thing with that is you don’t want to make the way that you’re trying to take control the narrative worse off for you.

Joe Patrice: Well that is an excellent point and that is certainly what Alito managed to do here. Putting aside that he — well let’s actually we won’t put this aside, we’ll start here. So it’s fair to say that the ProPublica report was out there and being written and Sam Alito leaked it, which might be a trend for this guy. So he goes to the Wall Street Journal and writes this — let’s start with the leaking issue, one of the — there’s a lot wrong with his response, but one aspect of it that folks have zeroed in on is did he just kind of admit that he’s the one who leaked the Dobbs decision? Which is of course, what he and Ginni Thomas are like the most likely people to have done it.

So this has been kind of assumed, but the decision to go to the Wall Street Journal this way and leak it beforehand in an effort to get control of it certainly shows that he has kind of a modus operandi here, but he also chose to go to the Wall Street Journal which eagle-eyed observers pointed out immediately after this came out. The Wall Street Journal, even though Política is the one who ultimately would publish the leaked opinion first, The Wall Street Journal had been making some comments about what was going on with the Dobbs deliberations in the weeks before the leak came out that were weirdly prescient of what was going on.

They were saying stuff like, “We believe there’s a majority for overturning Roe” but a couple the justices are being wooed to another side. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re worried that they might do that. All of these statements get the narrative that if Alito leaked that opinion in order to lock in justices and prevent them from looking like hypocrites and pulling back on it, which is the most likely interpretation of what happened, the fact that he goes to the Wall Street Journal with this more or less — and knows that they’re the people he can call on a moment’s notice to get something published, suggest that he has a pre-existing relationship with those folks to publish his thoughts internally. It makes you rethink all of the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s coverage of the court and whether or not they’ve been basically a pipeline for his opinions all along.

Chris Williams: This is why you diversify your portfolio, people.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, nice. I get the classic reference, two points. So that said — so there’s that. There’s also the making it worse part, bizarrely rather than deny that he went on this trip or anything which is not the he really could. He admits to doing it and admits to taking the private jet travel and not disclosing it. His response to that is to put a bunch of definitions from Webster’s and Black’s Law Dictionary, you know two sources that literally no lawyer would ever actually look at.

(00:10:12)

Puts them in this Wall Street Journal thing to say, “Look, technically, I wasn’t required to disclose private air travel because it’s a facility.” And planes are like facilities based on these definitions. These definitions, of course, are not the definitions in the statute itself or the regulations surrounding it, which means, well, it just kind of underscores the level of bad statutory analysis that this guy does. So, he doesn’t disclose. He then claims that it’s all okay because otherwise this plane would have had an empty seat. That’s not really how bribery works. That’s like saying that “I had to take the briefcase, otherwise the briefcase full of money would have just sat there.” So that’s not really a defense. It’s weird. It also set up — well, this is the other thing.

Let’s talk about getting ahead of the narrative because I think you’re right that that’s generally a good idea. But in this instance, the thing that I wrote, this story was brutal for me just as a personal level, because story broke in the evening. I worked on it, got a draft finished right around midnight, and that’s when ProPublica, because they had been scooped on this, they accelerated the release of their report and they put it out so, I then ended up working till about 2:00 or 2:30 in the morning to get the article adjusted to include their stuff.

Chris Williams: It was brutal for me to — I just want to say because if Alito is right and the only thing that made him have to take the flight was that there was an empty seat, I was just as qualified. So, when I’m finding out that I’m missing out on free six figure travel, it hurt. I would say I lost sleep, but I had a great mattress.

Joe Patrice: He is always coming back. So the problem with, and I put this in my original draft before ProPublica followed up, was that I at the time said I worry that this is not a particularly smart strategy to try and pre-rebut ProPublica because ProPublica throughout the Clarence Thomas thing has looked like they understand how to deliver the sandbag to deliver the pain. Remember they first put out some allegations about Clarence Thomas getting some stuff from Harlan Crow. Clarence Thomas’s defense of himself was, “Oh, that’s all covered by the personal hospitality exception, and that’s why I didn’t have to disclose it.” And that’s when they dropped the “Oh, except your mom gets free housing and your nephew gets free tuition, which can’t be personal. Now, can it, Clarence?” So, they understand how to hold back stuff to drop the hammer after somebody makes the expected response.

So all Sam Alito did was basically lay out his strategy and allow ProPublica to hit immediately, which ended up happening because his defense was, he barely knows who Paul Singer is other than going on this trip, which, well, turned out not to be true and ProPublica was able to bring a bunch of receipts of the many contacts between him and Paul Singer, including a contemporaneous Above The Law article from 2009, which was kind of fun to dig up. I mean, I didn’t work Above The Law back then, but, yeah, it popped up in the ProPublica report, and I read it. And in 2009, David Latt attended the conference I believe it was a FedSoc conference where the two were joking around about their buddy-buddy trips.

Chris Williams: Hearing this, I got to say, and this is pushback against you, I think that Alito is the one been feeding information to Wall Street Journal, while likely true, is the wrong angle. The right angle is who the fuck is feeding ProPublica info? Because they got this shit going back two decades. One, what has legal journalism been doing for the last 20 years to not be tabs on some of the most out their jurists? And two, how do they keep getting this information on these people? If it’s Sotomayor, like, shouts out?

Joe Patrice: They’re good reporters, I think is a big part of this. They have an article up explaining kind of like the oral history of how this report came together, and they talked to the private plane pilots from that trip and everything. They really went in depth to get all of this together. But you raised an excellent point. I did see some social media traffic that isn’t wrong. That was like, this must be a really embarrassing moment for not to call out a specific person, but people like Nina Totenberg, who have kind of crowned themselves the go to sources on everything, inside or Supreme Court.

(00:15:06)

And they were always about like, we know exactly what’s going on. And you got to wonder if, well, this has been going on for 20, 30 years. We had to wait to hear about it from ProPublica. What in the world were you doing that whole time? It is a bad time.

Chris Williams: It’s weird in real time to have the suspicions that you’ve taken a propaganda branch as real reporting. And there are points where the role of propaganda isn’t always just like straight up lie, because then people will be like, “Oh, well, we’re always lying to it. You occasionally sprinkle some truth.” So, I do think that it is interesting to see the angle of why one, yes, this is a controversy, but it’s a controversy because all this has been happening for 20 years. People have been sitting on these cases for decades that they’ve clearly been implicated in and during this time, have been able to make these claims about how they’re, like, not partisan hacks, what have you, with little pushback.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, we didn’t necessarily know that he had been flown there on this plane until the ProPublica report. But what the 2009 Above The Law report shows, even though it was not written as an expose, it was more just covering the event. But if you read between the lines of it, you knew that he had gone to Alaska with this guy on a trip. At that point, you can look at the financial disclosures and see that that hadn’t been disclosed anywhere. So that should have raised a red flag. He ends up being —

Chris Williams: There was a presumption that he paid for his own ticket. Do you need to disclose if he pays for your own trip?

Joe Patrice: Well, right, yes. You do not need to do that. So, there can be that presumption. But I think you at least have to raise the question when you’re talking about expensive vacations with billionaires, whether or not, they shouldn’t really be in the same tax bracket, right?

Chris Williams: True.

Joe Patrice: He should be staying at a different hotel.

Chris Williams: I think in defense of people from 2009 and this is kind of to your point, I think the assumption is that, of course, a Supreme Court justice isn’t taking gifts from multimillionaires or billionaires. So maybe there’s just a baked in good faith assumption that they’re paying for their own trip.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. Although, I mean, query whether it’s okay even if they are paying for their own trip. But it’s at least something somebody could have questioned. And then you add on to this trip having happened and that you know contemporaneously that it happened, you have the cases involved that are run by this guy where he has business before the court that Alito is adjudicating. And now Alito’s defense of that in his op-ed is his name isn’t on it. It’s just like NGL, I can’t remember. I think it’s that NGL Capital Securities, LLC. How would I have known that that was him? Putting aside that that’s how corporations work. And so, if his argument is, unless I see a person’s actual name on something, I don’t consider it a conflict, that is a scathing like admission as to whether or not the Supreme Court has any ethical rules of value at all. But also, because he locked into that answer, ProPublica was able to bring receipts into their initial report pointing out that you had to live under a rock not to know that that was the company this guy ran. He was actually writing his own editorials in major newspapers talking about how he was the person behind this case so, there was no way to really not know that without raising even worse questions about whether or not Sam Alito is smart enough to be on the court. That’s something you knew at the time. You knew at the time he was participating in a case that was this guy’s personal hobby horse case, and that you knew that he had gone on vacation with him. You may not have known that he’d been flown there. You may not have known that he hadn’t paid for anything, but you knew that his buddy’s case, that he went vacationing with was being determined by the court, and he was not recusing himself.

Chris Williams: Fair game. It’s hard to —

Joe Patrice: Yeah, and that’s something that Supreme Court reporters could have pieced together at the time if they were focused on it. Above The Law, we dabble in Supreme Court stuff. We obviously do analysis of decision stuff, but we don’t hang out at One First Street like some folks are able to do. We’re also out covering other things so, it’s not like — I don’t blame Latt for not digging through a bunch of financial forms back in the day.

(00:20:03)

But there are people who really, really should have been on this anyway.

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Joe Patrice: All right, we’re back. Let’s talk about weed. Yes, right? And more about judges and ethics and weed and so on, go.

Chris Williams: Oh, I thought this was an extension of small talk. I was going to ask what’s your favorite, if you had a favorite strain(ph). Yeah, it was an interesting case coming out of DC. Two parties is usually some guy and some person who live near. And she was complaining that the weed he was smoking was giving her all sorts of health problems and she sued the guy in court worth $500,000.00 in damages. None of that happened. And by that, I mean she wasn’t able to prove that she had actual health problems and she didn’t get money for it, but the judge decided that he could no longer smoke in his own home, because him smoking interfered with her right to enjoy her property and that he had to go like say 20 feet to 25 feet away from his own house to smoke; which he did, because he had a medical license. So, he was at least presumably able to prove that his use of marijuana was for some medical reason.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. So, now this is interesting. So, now my take on this case was it is problematic that people can do inside their own home. That said, it really speaks to a weird situation that we’re in where this happened for marijuana, I don’t know as though this would’ve ever happened for tobacco, which actually we have documented ways in which that can cause health problems for second hand consumers.

Chris Williams: And there are instances where there have been like public housing, has been restrictions and so on, being able to smoke cigarettes in public housing. This was a private affair. These are private home owners. And I really don’t get the way how some assuming this makes sense is if there’re some prejudice against marijuana use specifically. Because if it’s just the issue of like battling property rights, he has the right to enjoy — how do you really balance his right to enjoy his property against hers if there is some sort of skew against the object? Because when it’s cold out and it’s winter and he’s like I don’t know, let’s presume he has joint pain, not only does he have joint pain, he has to then go outside to smoke. Of course he can have edible, to have tincture or some other thing, but that’s beside the point. The issue is why were his neighbors’ property rights, the right to enjoy, prioritized over his when his neighbor had not clear showing of a health issue, but he had a clear showing of a health issue? I didn’t get it. It didn’t make sense to me.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. I think there’s definitely something that wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t marijuana. Like we don’t think it would necessarily have happened with tobacco. No way he can as he point out.

Chris Williams: And there also could have been lessened truce of ways. I think the judge has some creativity here. He could’ve mandated that a filtering system be put in or they could’ve done something to better balance the interests of both parties rather than just deciding to side with one.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. I also feel like this crosses into it and I hate to sound like a fed soc person here, but this seems like it crosses into using courts to do what should be handled by political branches. Like if marijuana or tobacco or whatever it is, if it is legal, it can be consumed in your home. And if it causes impacts for somebody in a different home, then that’s up to congress to make it illegal to consume in your home. Like that’s not a place where the courts should be going and saying, “Well, we’ve decided you can’t use tobacco in your house even though everybody has allowed it to be legal. We’ve decided no.”

(00:25:02)

Like that feels like it’s going a bridge too far toward a regulation that should be handled by somebody who is actually qualified to do regulations. I don’t know, even if I am sympathetic to the idea. Like if you’re in an apartment where things leak over, I wouldn’t necessarily worry like I have nothing about whether it’s marijuana or tobacco if that’s going on. Like that seems there should be some sort of redress to it. But like you said, filtration systems seemed like a much more appropriate answer. Or if it was like rental, then the land lords could get involved or something. But yeah, it’s problematic.

Chris Williams: I agree. We have a system for reason. You need to do the legwork of befriending billionaires who have bought the congress people that make the laws to do things in your favor. You can’t circumvent it and then go to the judges who are bought by the millionaires.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. Just because it’s cheaper to buy one of nine than it is one of 538 like come on.

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Joe Patrice: All right. So, the long awaited Above the Law, law school rankings are out. That was a big news from last week. We do our own law school rules.

Chris Williams: You got to have a drum sound roll for that or drum roll sound.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Above the Law’s law school rankings are out. There you go. So, yeah, we do our own law school rankings. Obviously, the US news rankings have been beset by controversy this year but bunches of people boycotting and causing all sorts of nonsensical results and delays and whatever. Ours are out and people should check them out. As usual for those who aren’t familiar with how our rankings work, we began as a response to US news. And US news is engaged in some reform of their methodology in response to this over the years but when we started it, it was because US news was fixated in school inputs. Large portion of the rankings were who has students with the best GPAs and undergrad GPAs and the best LSAT scores.

And we thought that the appropriate metric of judging a law school should be on the backend how many of these people are getting real jobs, how many of these people are getting high paying jobs. Because it’s one thing to be able to say, “I got a job,” but if that job isn’t covering your student loans, then that’s not really a good outcome.

Chris Williams: I got to say I do think that that is a very interesting non-lawyery take on law school rankings, because I think baked into the tradition of the vocation, there’s strange fantasization of prestige. And the decision to focus on outcome rather than incomes, I think reflects a more prioritization of use of these schools rather than the special aura associated with them.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. And one thing that was surprising about it when we did create these rankings is we assumed in some ways that it would still reflect prestige, because theoretically the prestige is being built by the outcomes. Prestige isn’t coming from somebody who had a good GPA coming in. It’s built by, “I work with somebody who graduated from there for 20 years and they’re super smart.”

Chris Williams: My thing is and I still assuming a lot of the prestige still comes from whatever school has had the best sports teams in 1800.

Joe Patrice: Fair.

Chris Williams: Because a lot of IDs were college sports.

Joe Patrice: Like Yale, Harvard, yeah.

Chris Williams: Yeah.

Joe Patrice: But it turned out that when we started focusing more on outcomes, obviously, the schools at the top are still elite schools, but it is not exactly the elite schools that you would think based on the US news rankings like Duke basically dominates our rankings. So, they’ve been first or second over the last four or five years. They repeated as number one again. That is very much an elite private school.

(00:30:00)

But it is not in law school terms, Yale or Harvard and yet because our system takes into account those outcomes, the quality of those outcomes and puts a lot of weight on how much the tuition and debt is that you come out with, Duke comes out better. And that’s, look, don’t take all any ranking as you know perfectly gospel and just like choose Duke over somebody who is number two or three, because well they’re one and not three. Like use them for a lot of different reasons. Dig in to the numbers, think about it, take all the information into account, but it is interesting that when you strip away the reliance on how smart the kids are coming in, and by smart, obviously in heavy quotation marks, how accomplished they were as undergrads coming in, you get a different picture and it’s very interesting to see how that plays out year over here.

Chris Williams: Besides Duke were there any interesting schools on this list this year? Well, at least placements?

Joe Patrice:  Not, no I mean, well, Yale continues to drop. In our first articulation —

Chris Williams:  Yale was 15 this year.

Joe Patrice:  Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williams: Yale was in the top 14 which was, and again, 14 is a weird number, again like —

Joe Patrice:  It’s completely arbitrary.

Chris Williams:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it was cool to see, you know, like look at that, look at that lower half a top-20, take that.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, and we’ve gotten flak in the past for the idea that we privilege the high-paying jobs and this is part of actually the Yale complaint against US News was US News was going to like they were complaining about it from the perspective of US News starting to consider debt loads. They were saying, oh, well, that’s going to privileged people who are rich going into rich, whatever. It was all dumb. Well you can read all about how stupid it was in our coverage, however we have gotten flak for hyper privileging big law jobs and big law salaries, because hey, that down plays public interest work, which is unfortunate. We don’t necessarily want to suggest a law school isn’t as good if everybody’s going into public interest work at a high level too. That said, our logic is there’s not a particularly — to defend the methodology our logic has always been, there’s not a really good way of saying this is a quality job and this isn’t, vis-à-vis all the jobs that everybody gets out of law school and keeping track of everyone at whatever.

But we can say that if the law school is producing a lot of people who are going to big law firms that are paying the top salary, that tends to suggest that the student body graduating is in high regard in the industry and even if folks who are coming out of that law school or choosing to go into public interest work, they’re probably going into the higher level public interest work too.

We think of it more as a proxy then we just think that it’s important to go to big law. Sound like we’re saying that that’s the end-all of the industry work, but we would think it’s a proxy. We wish we could come up with an easier way to be able to say that this public sector job is better than this public sector job, but that’s fraught with a lot of issues. So the salary is easier.

Chris Williams: It’s a lot easier to say this school is employing students that go to a firm that plays them 180 to start and this one is employing students that go to a firm that starts at 210 and then to say, well, this school is employing students like they will have a public interest job where they are saving the polar bears and over here they’re going to public interest whether they are fighting the prison industrial complex. Like it’s a lot harder to weigh, it’s a lot harder to weigh that qualitatively.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. And like what not for nothing. There’s public sector people doing what I would consider bad public sector work, you know, they’re people who are taking jobs, you know, working for nonprofits to make sure that gay people don’t have rights and that is awful. But Nonetheless, a publicy job to this that they are going to work for some nonprofit. And you know, how do you deal with that, they’re probably, what does that say about the law school’s ability to get, to place the student in a job that they want, that’s what we’re doing. That’s still means to matter too.

And so, like looking at how the schools place, how the schools position their graduates to get the best is what we want and a good proxy for that is how many because most people aren’t going to go into public sector work, how many of them are going to higher paying jobs than lower paying jobs is that proxy whatever. But anyway, defending our methodology a little bit because that is definitely the criticism we get the most for it. That’s why.

(00:35:00)

All right. Well we’ve gone on for a while. We should wrap up. Thanks everybody for listening. You should be subscribed to the show, that way you get all the new episodes as soon as they come out. You should give us reviews. I know it’s annoying to do the review thing. Most people just listen to podcasts and never get around to doing the reviews. It takes a few seconds, just give the stars and move on, or better give the stars and write a couple of sentences just like love the show, it’s great, they’re fun, yadi yada, that helps the algorithms. View that as engagement and then they recommend the show to more people and then more people can join our fun little crew here.

Chris Williams: You can even spike Joe and literally write yadi yada. We just want the engagement.

Joe Patrice: Well, I don’t know about yadi yada but you can definitely, you can definitely spike me by saying that you like everybody else better, who knows, whatever. Anyway, you should be doing all that. You should be checking out Above the Law, so you could read these and more stories as we write about them every week. You should be following us on social media. The blog is @atlblog. I am @josephpatrice. I am Joe Patrice on BlueSky. I need to be doing better job about that. Chris is @WritesForRent, as in he is writing, as he is a writer, Writes for Rent, and you should be listening to the other. You should be listening to The Jabot, which not here this week, but Kathryn Rubino, our usual other host, that’s her show. I’m a guest on the Legaltech Week Journalist’s Roundtable, for those of you into legal tech, you should be checking out the other shows on the Legal Talk Network, and I think that brings us full circle and we can be done.

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Oh, no. More important announcement, we are not going to be here next week for anybody who was hoping to hear our 4th July episode, but I believe it’s 4^th of July and so we’re not going to be here, but we’ll be back the week after.

[Music]

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