At the end of 2019, I attempted to look ahead to what to expect in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020. Of course, the most important stories—the COVID-19 pandemic and how it changed the court, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett—could not possibly have been foreseen.
The U.S. Supreme Court was thrust to the forefront of public attention this fall, from arguments in major cases on religious rights, the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. census, to repeated emergency applications involving state COVID-19 restrictions and the presidential election.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 400,000 women lawyers in America today, and women comprise more than 36% of practicing lawyers. Women are working at all levels of practice and in every specialty area. They are smart, competent, thorough, dedicated and much more. But that does not mean it is easy for any of them.
Everyone, I am sure, will be glad to bid farewell to 2020 and looks forward to better things in 2021. As the year draws to a close, the COVID-19 pandemic is surging with a catastrophic loss of lives and serious illnesses, but there is the hope of vaccines soon becoming widely available. What were the most important stories about the U.S. Supreme Court during this plague year?
No matter how you look at it, 2020 has been a year to remember. It began with the Australian bushfires (remember those?). Then over the span of just a few months, Kobe Bryant died in a fiery helicopter crash, President Donald Trump was acquitted of impeachment charges, and Harvey Weinstein…
One of the initiatives that Ari Kaplan Advisors launched in 2020 was a periodic Zoom-based CEO roundtable to discuss trends, challenges and objectives with market leaders.
“Do you have a minute?” In my job, the answer to that question has to be “yes”—almost always. No one arrives in your office with a pained look on their face, unless it involves something that needs to get done now. Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of a practice crisis or emotional emergency, but the lawyer across from you wants to complete this task right away.
When the pandemic first hit, I felt about as comfortable as could be expected. I have always been one who neurotically washed his hands, so hand-washing has never been an issue for me. I’m not nearly as social as I was in my youth—and my mother, father and sister live out of state—so I don’t spend time with too many people other than my wife and son. Like many other folks, I imagine, the strangest thing to me was not going out to dinner.
I tell Joe Lieberman that I want to start out by playing “Joe Lieberman trivia.” The former longtime senator from Connecticut laughs. He’s up for it. In 1968, Joseph I. Lieberman was a second-year lawyer. He and two colleagues at New Haven’s Wiggin & Dana, represented a party before the…
