Law Review

Four months nearly to the day after Villanova University disclosed its law school had inflated grade-point averages and other admissions data, seemingly to improve its ranking in the pernicious yet all-too-closely followed U.S. News & World Report survey, the university appears to have settled on a communications strategy. And that would be to say nothing. Neither law school dean John Gotanda, who took over in January after the falsifying of data had ended, nor university spokesman Jonathan Gust is returning phone calls on this one. Although the disclosure deeply shamed the university and set off a wave of campus anxiety, Villanova has decided the most comfortable course of action is to, in a public-relations and marketing sense, plead the fifth.

As a Washington reporter for The Inquirer during the tumultuous years of the President Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings and, later, the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq, I certainly knew of Jerome J. Shestack, the prominent Philadelphia lawyer who died Aug. 18 at age 88. He had been the American Bar Association president in 1997 and 1998, and earlier had sat on the ABA screening committee that split on the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of...

It would appear that all's quiet on the western front. For law firms, the devastation that swept through the legal marketplace in 2008 and 2009 has come to an end. Layoffs have stopped or at least have been sharply curtailed, firms that suspended hiring are recruiting once again, and profits, though flat or down, have stabilized at numbers that would make average middle-class American wage earners click their heels with delight. Even the sky-high starting salaries for first-year lawyers, long the source of client frustration and complaints, appear to have come through largely unscathed.

When the legal markets imploded in 2008, and law firms started to ratchet back on hiring first-year associates and filling summer classes, it wasn't at all apparent that law schools, too, would need to tighten their belts. Some law-school administrators bravely claimed that while it was true there were fewer legal jobs, the potential uses of a law degree were so varied that graduates would find a way to land somewhere. There was, at the same time, the hope that the job-market troubles would be temporary, that the economy would revive and things would return to normal.

It has been almost two months since Philadelphia lawyer Michael Kwasnik was charged with stealing more than $1 million from an elderly Cherry Hill widow and accused in a lawsuit by New Jersey Attorney General Paula Dow of running a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors of many millions more. What comes through most from conversations with the people in the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics is just how satisfied they are with the way they have handled this matter. Kwasnik, according to the agency's own records, has been on its radar since at least 2006, with multiple allegations of fraud and misconduct.

Stephen G. Breyer is acutely, perhaps painfully, aware that the Supreme Court is the weakest branch of government. It has no police force or army, nor can it get its way by funding someone's favorite program - or putting it on the chopping block. It has only the force of its own legal reasoning and precious reserves of credibility with citizens it earns over generations by often, although not always, correctly resolving the most divisive disputes facing society. "It is the weakest branch of government, no purse, no sword - and obscure," says Breyer, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1994.

If I didn't know Lani Guinier, the University of Pennsylvania Law professor who is President Clinton's nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and I based my opinion of her on what has been written about her since her nomination, I would think that she was an irrational, racial separatist with radical and revolutionary leanings. I would think she is hellbent on overthrowing our democratic process. She has been characterized as a "quota queen," as a person who is outside of mainstream America.

C. Clark Hodgson Jr., 73, of Center City, a lawyer who spent more than 40 years in private practice, died Monday, April 15, of cancer at his home. Mr. Hodgson, who specialized in commercial and securities litigation, was former chairman and senior partner at the law firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young, where his father, C. Clark Sr., also had been a partner. In 1987, Mr. Hodgson successfully defended Shearson Lehman Bros. Inc., then the nation's third-largest brokerage, in a federal criminal jury trial in Philadelphia against charges of conspiring to launder more than $1.1 million in illegal gambling profits.

Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University, legal-affairs editor for the New Republic, and a fellow at the Brookings Institute, has been named president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center, according to NCC officials. In making the announcement Monday, Jeb Bush, the center's chairman, praised Rosen as "a constitutional scholar, journalist, and an educator. " Rosen was an adviser during the planning of the center, which opened on the July Fourth weekend in 2003, and served as a visiting scholar throughout that summer.

Esther F. Giaccio Clark, 72, of Wallingford, a criminal-defense lawyer, law professor, and the first female president of the Delaware County Bar Association, died of cancer Wednesday at Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia. Mrs. Clark was once voted "Man of the Year" by the Lawyers Club of Delaware County, a distinction, colleagues say, that reflects not only the club's 1980s sensibilities, but also Mrs. Clark's toughness as a lawyer and a career marked by firsts. Mrs. Clark worked for $40 a day as a public defender in Chester during the 1960s.

Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University, legal-affairs editor for the New Republic, and a fellow at the Brookings Institute, has been named president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center, according to NCC officials. In making the announcement Monday, Jeb Bush, the center's chairman, praised Rosen as "a constitutional scholar, journalist, and an educator. " Rosen was an adviser during the planning of the center, which opened on the July Fourth weekend in 2003, and served as a visiting scholar throughout that summer.

C. Clark Hodgson Jr., 73, of Center City, a lawyer who spent more than 40 years in private practice, died Monday, April 15, of cancer at his home. Mr. Hodgson, who specialized in commercial and securities litigation, was former chairman and senior partner at the law firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young, where his father, C. Clark Sr., also had been a partner. In 1987, Mr. Hodgson successfully defended Shearson Lehman Bros. Inc., then the nation's third-largest brokerage, in a federal criminal jury trial in Philadelphia against charges of conspiring to launder more than $1.1 million in illegal gambling profits.

More than other witnesses, it was the mother-in-law's impassioned testimony that sealed the verdict. There were reams of testimony from experts on the technical causes of the downed utility wire that killed Carrie Goretzka, a young mother of two girls, on June 2, 2009, at her home in Irwin, Pa., 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. But it was the account of JoAnn Goretzka, who spoke of seeing her daughter-in-law engulfed in smoke and flames the day the line came down, that had the most power.

If only they knew. Surely a recurring fantasy of many top corporate and transactional lawyers at private firms in Philadelphia is to peer into the minds of their customers: the in-house lawyers who head the legal departments of America's largest companies. These are the in-house counsels who make decisions on their companies' legal "spends," deciding which law firms make it on their lists of outside counsel in the first place, when a company is deciding whether to sue, settle or defend in a legal dispute, and which law firm will take the lead role in a major acquisition.

Michael J. Izzo Jr., 68, of West Deptford, a senior partner in the Cozen O'Connor law firm whose melodious tenor filled courtrooms and concert halls for four decades, died Sunday, Dec. 9, of complications of leukemia at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. When he joined Cozen O'Connor in 1973, he became only the sixth lawyer in the then-small Center City practice. The firm would grow to nearly 600 lawyers in 22 locations, and Mr. Izzo's reputation as a consummate practitioner would burgeon with it. He was known for pulling settlements of tens of millions of dollars from complex litigation, frequently involving product liability and catastrophic property damage.

John Thompson spent 14 years on death row in Louisiana's notorious Angola state prison before he was sprung by two Philadelphia lawyers acting on a hunch. Only hours after a Louisiana state judge issued a writ of execution for Thompson, a private investigator sent by his lawyers to search the files of the New Orleans district attorney found blood evidence showing that Thompson was not guilty of one of the charges. The murder conviction was overturned and Thompson won a $14 million jury award in a lawsuit alleging prosecutorial misconduct.

Like the rest of this so-called economic recovery, the rebound in the legal market is starting to feel like a grim slog. After signs of a rebound in late 2010 and last year, the reality for many law firms is that the pace of business expansion has slowed, maybe even stopped. Meanwhile, perhaps because of the presidential election, uncertainty has grown. Two new surveys by legal consultants at Wells Fargo Bank and the Hildebrandt Institute show how hard the comeback trail has been on some firms.

In a world rife with cynical self-promotion and self-aggrandizement, the Philadelphia Society of St. Vincent de Paul is a Catholic charity whose sole mission is helping others. The society provides financial assistance, food and encouragement to some of the region's poorest residents, putting biblical teaching into practice. In all, about 1,000 Philadelphia-area volunteers make home visits and provide other assistance, all to establish a personal connection with the people they help.

David M. Kozlow, an assistant federal defender in Philadelphia, was not just the frequent lawyer for a career criminal named Wayne Caldwell. Mr. Kozlow was "a very good friend," Caldwell recalled in an interview Tuesday. And that was even though Caldwell, by his own account, faced charges ranging from bank fraud to armed robbery and had been convicted twice since 1982. After being released from prison the last time, in 2005, Caldwell recalled that Mr. Kozlow "was the one who told me that 'the crime life was not the life for you.' " Mr. Kozlow convinced him that "I wasn't a good criminal, because I kept going to jail.

When the legal markets imploded in 2008, and law firms started to ratchet back on hiring first-year associates and filling summer classes, it wasn't at all apparent that law schools, too, would need to tighten their belts. Some law-school administrators bravely claimed that while it was true there were fewer legal jobs, the potential uses of a law degree were so varied that graduates would find a way to land somewhere. There was, at the same time, the hope that the job-market troubles would be temporary, that the economy would revive and things would return to normal.