Sean McGilvray

What Does YOUR Exam Playlist Look Like?

by Sean McGilvray November 23, 2009 Law School

As law students all across the country prepare to barricade themselves in their respective study holes and mainline Red Bull and Coffee to keep their eyes open while rereading their commercial outlines for the 8th time, I can’t help but wonder what all those playlists look like. I mean this is the 21st century, right? [...]

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Legal Researchers Rejoice! Google Scholar Provides Access to U.S. Case Law

by Sean McGilvray November 17, 2009 Legal

It’s official: All you budding legal scholars out there have a powerful new research tool, and it comes from Google. In a move that probably takes it off the Christmas card mailing list of Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw, Google has given its research portal Google Scholar the capability to search through American case law. The official [...]

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Scalia: Lawyers Do Nothing Productive for Society

by Sean McGilvray October 2, 2009 Legal

Everyone’s favorite (or at least most quotable) Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia is once again making the headlines with his delightfully grouchy take on the legal profession. When asked by a CSPAN reporter about the quality of lawyers who appear before him, Scalia gave a complimentary answer, affirming the high caliber of the lawyers he [...]

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Glenn Beck, Parody, and Trademark

by Sean McGilvray September 16, 2009 Legal

When did you stop beating your wife? When will conservative media pundit Glenn Beck deny that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? There is no right answer to either question, but a satirical website dedicated to taking the Fox News commentator down a peg or two now finds itself on the wrong [...]

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Holden Caulfield, Gay Superheroes, and the Death of The Author

by Sean McGilvray July 13, 2009 Legal Analysis

Two recent developments have raised questions about the amount of control an author has over his characters once they leave the womb of his or her creative imagination and enter the collective consciousness. There’s a fine line between the public awareness and the public domain, and just because a character has embedded itself in the [...]

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Hentai, Avatars, and the First Amendment

by Sean McGilvray June 22, 2009 Legal Decisions

In Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart gave the world the most highly quoted definition of obscenity ever to come from the bench when he said “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly [...]

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Will We Ever See a Non-Ivy League Supreme Court Justice?

by Sean McGilvray June 18, 2009 Law School

You went to a middle-of-the-road undergraduate school where the focus was more on tailgating in the stadium parking lot than schmoozing over brandy and cigars or whatever the ultra-elite do when they’re not conducting secret meetings to control the world. You got straight As, even though you decided to take the hardest classes. Your law [...]

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6 Most Evil Attorneys Ever

by Sean McGilvray June 10, 2009 The Lighter Side

Joshua already laid out the most badass attorneys of all time. But what about the just plain bad? Here’s a countdown of some of the most vile, evil, and corrupt lawyers ever to enter the popular imagination. From drug lawyers to mafia bosses, let’s just say that none of the attorneys on this list aced [...]

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