Category: Law

Below is a reproduction of my departure memo.

After seven and a half years at the firm, this is my last week at Shearman & Sterling.  It’s been an amazing run.

When I look back on my time at the firm, I realize how tremendously blessed I’ve been.

This Friday will be my last day at Shearman & Sterling.  After seven and a half years, the time is right for me to move on.

When I reflect on my time at Shearman & Sterling, I realize how tremendously fortunate I have been.

I once heard that the average length of a career at a major

It is often said that life in a Big Wall Street Law Firm is brutal, but the only time in my professional career that I wanted to cry came when I was a law clerk under The Honorable Peter E. Doyne, then the presiding judge of the chancery division in the Bergen vicinage of the

The 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution all started with a C paper.

It was 1982, and the constitutional debate du jour was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was intended to guarantee equal rights for men and women.  The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was given to the states to ratify

A couple months ago, I defended lawyers. To show that I can make myself even more lovable, today I defend my educational background, which I thought spoke for itself.  For this show of narcissism that's paralleled, y'all can thank my office neighbor, who, upon hearing the details of my academic history,  questioned whether I slipped through the

At the end of August, I will be transferring to my firm's Tokyo office.

The change is dramatic and spontaneous.

I'm really psyched.

In Japan, lawyers rank right below doctors in the list of most respected professions.  In the United States, they rank with politicians as one of the most reviled.  The difference is striking.

Part of the problem in this country is oversaturation.  Compared to Japan, where the passage rate under the old bar exam was around 3%,

I think one of the most troubling flaws of American society is its inability to distinguish "should" from "could." To put another way, we seem to have fatal flaw in saying just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should, and just because you shouldn't do something doesn't mean you couldn't.

The happiest moment of my life was when I got a 600 on SAT verbal.  You may say it doesn't take much to make me happy, but you'd be missing my point.  The statement is a reflection on my life-long struggle to achieve competence in verbalism, be it in English or Japanese.

I somehow managed to

My college professor once sarcastically remarked that I'm a collector.  That I am.  I don't just collect the popular, and the more common sensical, baseball cards or foreign money.  No, no.  I collect crap like movie stubs and hotel card keys (which I eventually stopped because I realized that's not crap, it's trash).

Then there is

Every state requires a candidate to pass two hurdles to be admitted to the bar:  the bar exam and then the moral fitness and character test.

Let me pose two hypotheticals, with variations on the second, and you tell me whether the candidate passes the moral fitness and character test.

At the end, I will state my

It's that time of the year again when college and grad school applicants are beginning to get anxious.  Law schools, with their rolling admissions, tend to decide the fate of the applicants several weeks earlier than others.

I am happy to report that the two friends I know were applying to law schools were admitted to

I received this week's issue of Sports Illustrated yesterday.  I read SI on my commute, always in the same order:  the back page column, the front page photos, and then the "Players" section, which is increasingly becoming my favorite after the departure of columnist Rick Reilly.

For the first time that I can recall, the topic

When you're an attorney, you're almost expected to be published.  In two law-related jobs that I've held, one of the first questions I was asked was "Were you on a law journal?"  I managed to survive at the law firm and with the judge despite my answer in the negative, but I could always see

While I was in Japan, I read a story along these lines about Australian sailors' efforts to stop Japanese whaling practices and an editorial in a newspaper by an European objecting to how Japan is raping their seas.

I can think of no issue that pisses me off more than the Western objection to Japanese whaling,

If this CNN article is correct, California Supreme Court is going to review, and likely overrule, Proposition 8 which amended the state constitution to ban same sex marriage.

As a social conservative, where I stand on this issue is hardly clouded in secrecy.  But the degree to which what the California Supreme Court is going to