You know the old addage: you gotta sanitize before you can litigate! We’re upset we missed Raskolnikov’s speech, but we did catch some recent Law School grads dancing to “Love Shack” after the ceremony.

Update: Then everyone threw their robes into a pile at the Butler security desk.

But only if you’re in the Law School or SIPA. Columbia’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs announced the complete list of Class Speakers today, and joining Attorney General Eric Holder are many other famous names to prop up the 22 various Class Day and Commencement ceremonies taking place between this Saturday (the B-School) and next Thursday (Law School and Dental School).

Among the big names: former California governor Gray Davis at the Law School graduation, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft at SIPA’s Commencement, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall at the J-School’s Class Day, New York Times medical correspondent Lawrence Altman at the Med School graduation, and senior advisor to Hillary Clinton Phillipe Reines at General Studies’s Class Day. Of course, some of the speechifying talent isn’t travelling very far: professors Jagdish Baghwati and Jeffrey Sachs will be speaking at the Ph.D. convocation and the Dental School graduation ceremonies, respectively.

Our favorite detail, though? Both J-School ceremonies are “closed to the media.” Full list after the jump. Read more…

Bored with hearing lawyers talk about law, the Columbia Pre-Law Society held a Q&A Tuesday night with Steven Chaikelson, director of the Theater Management and Production Program at the School of the Arts. Bwog’s Lawyers In Disguise Specialist James Rathmell was there to hear his story.

Though the Columbia Pre-Law Society has been pushing for a totally new direction in Pre-Law, inviting Steven Chaikelson to speak isn’t as strange as it seems. He may currently serve as director of Theater Management at Columbia’s School of the Arts, but Chaikelson’s career has been based from the beginning on the integration of the entertainment and legal profession. He set the precedent at Columbia for the dual degree in law and theater management (he obtained his MFA and JD in 1993), though maybe it would be better to keep those things apart.

The audience for Tuesday’s Q&A was small enough that Chaikelson asked everyone to introduce themselves and describe their interest in law before he introduced his own background in law and theater. Chaikelson held a strong passion for theater throughout college (he was head of BCMT, which is now part of CU Players, for two years), yet he came from a family of lawyers, who encouraged him to go into law as a stable career.  After graduating CC in 1989, he began to search for programs that offered a joint major in theater and law.

“I told my parents that I can always fall back on law as a stable career,” he said, but after graduating law school in a climate where there was little demand for lawyers, “I told my parents, ‘Don’t worry, I have the theater degree to fall back on.’” Read more…

And yet more benjamins go up in smoke. Earlier this afternoon, Columbia confirmed a Bloomberg News report that it had “uncovered” a $3 million loss in its law school endowment tied to Bernie Madoff. Madoff is currently out on bail for what many are calling the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

The $3 million is part of a 1980 gift to the law school from an unnamed alumnus who retained the right to decide how the money was invested. Columbia spokesman Robert Hornsby told Bloomberg that “only in rare circumstances in the past, and after approval by the university’s gift review committee, has Columbia accepted such a gift to be retained in another form of investment.” As for the larger “merged endowment pool,” under which most gifts are invested, Columbia has not discovered any further losses. According to Hornsby, Columbia also does not have any funds managed by Ezra Merkin‘s fund Ascot Partners.

It is unknown how much of the law school endowment is represented by $3 million, as Columbia does not break down the endowment by school. Regardless, Columbia can now join the club of schools defrauded by Madoff, which also includes New York Law School ($2 million), Bard ($3 million), Yeshiva ($14.5 million), Tufts ($20 million), and NYU ($24 million).

Come holiday season, there’s a lot of hubbub about joy and all that jazz.  But here at Columbia the first two weeks of December are decidedly unjoyous times.  With visions of forthcoming finals dancing in our heads, at this point in the year, many of us have had it with academia. 

But today, Bwog brings you a reason to be thankful for the very scholarly stuff that has gotten you down lately.  Today, December 6th, 2008 marks the 75th anniversary of the court ruling that James Joyce’s Ulysses is not obscene.  And who was responsible for this admirable endorsement of the First Amendment and freedom of press? Why none other than Judge John M. Woolsey of Columbia Law School class of 1900.  Leave it to one of our own to champion the liberation, legality and love of literature — well done, Woolsey!

So as you slog through your annotated Ulysses tome today in Butler (Bwog’s completely dreading Kitcher‘s final too), remember and relish the liberation of this fine text!   

Did you know that John G. Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was at the Law School a few days ago judging the final round of the Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition? Neither did we.

But he was! Roberts and three other appeals court judges heard two cases presented by law students. The Times calls Roberts an “acknowledged master” of appellate argument, which Roberts explains as when “the judges are debating among themselves and just using the lawyers as a backboard. One of the real challenges for lawyers is to get involved in that debate.” (Bwog’s still fuzzy on the details.)

After Roberts finished critiquing the students, the other judges took their turn critiquing Roberts. “Two of the appeals court judges said the Supreme Court might work a little harder to establish clear principles.”

The article is a bit technical and hard to follow if you’re not law school-bound, though the law school’s own recap is not as jargony and features lots of photos. Imagine all this, right under our undergraduate noses.

Bwog editor Pierce Stanley weighs in from the Egyptian Ambassador’s visit to the Law School.

While the Egyptian nation-state has been a sleeping giant in the game of international relations as of late, choosing to remain remarkably low-key in a region known for its instability, the Egyptian ambassador to the United Nations, Maged Abdelfattah Abdelaziz, has always exhibited a fiery charisma quite unlike that of the general malaise that has characterized Egyptian politics in recent days. An official who is known to speak his mind and act as he pleases, just months ago, Ambassador Abdelaziz was arrested by secret service agents outside of the UN for jumping a barricade without identifying himself and allegedly spitting on an agent as he resisted arrest. Indeed, the ambassador’s diplomatic career has been defined by such moments of candor, charisma, and awkwardness. Read more…

Today we celebrate Constitution Day, a new fake holiday the venerable Senator Robert Byrd (right) created in 2004 when he slipped an extraneous rider onto an appropriations bill. Under Byrd’s guidelines, all students and government employees are legally required to set aside some time to reflect on the power of “the foundation and the guardian of our liberties.” Because, you know, they’re not too busy cramming for standardized tests or keeping this old ship running or anything.

At the Law School, however, professors took Byrd’s stipulation at face value; they would discuss the Constitution, but primarily in light of the historical and modern disregard for its laws.

And so, Jack Greenberg, who argued for Brown v. Board of Education back in the day(he’s in his 80′s and yet owns and flaunts a swanky PDA), discussed the legacy of racism in Supreme Court decisions. Sarah Cleveland neatly dismantled the Bush administration’s legal basis for denying Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus. Suzanne Goldberg deplored the state of gay equality, and Katherine Franke, who urged the assembled students to become section 1983 lawyers with her, noted that while New York and national crime rates have fallen, the number of reported cases of police brutality has skyrocketed. As far as what changes in Washington and the Supreme Court could bring in the near future, Prof. Greenberg commented, quoting Humpty Dumpty and then shaking his head, “we’ll just have to stay tuned.”

-KER

We here at Bwog were literally convulsing with excitement when we heard t
hat a Columbia alum was nominated for Attorney General (Princeton you  are soooo wiretapped…). If you’re like us, you can pass your congratulations along to mmukas@law.columbia.edu –Mukasey was a lecturer in the Law School, and team-taught a seminar on Advanced Trial Practice in the Fall of 2006. Could his teaching tell what to expect during his upcoming 18-or-so months as the nation’s top law enforcement official? Law students?

And yes, this is the least grainy picture we could find of him online.

What? You’re not already sick of the amateur parodies of SNL’s “Special Christmas Box” that have been pollinating YouTube for months? You want to see law students pretend they have an iota of creativity by donning fake beards and Orthodox Jewish outfits to present you with boxes full of…Bagels with Lox? That’s the theme of the featured hit for this year’s Law Revue (get it?), “A Special Finals Care Package” (keep them coming…)

For those who haven’t caught on, the Revue is a sort of V-Show equivalent bred among the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Jerome Greene’s claustrophobic library (Bwog enjoys waving to them enroute to EC, hoping to get some response). This year’s title (referencing said library, and indicating writers who just can’t seem to pun enough): “Arthur Diamonds are Forever”.  

-CJS