Excerpts:
http://volokh.com/posts/1199298272.shtmlActing D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has fired the city lawyer who had been preparing to defend the longtime District ban on handguns in the high-stakes Supreme Court case this spring.
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Alan B. Morrison, who has argued roughly 20 cases before the high court, was asked to leave his post as special counsel by the end of this week, Morrison said today. Morrison had been hired by former Attorney General Linda Singer, who resigned two weeks ago, and put in charge of arguing the handgun case.
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Singer cited frustration that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) had relied more heavily on Nickles, who had been his general counsel, to make key legal decisions. Upon Singer's resignation, Fenty replaced her with Nickles, a former high-powered corporate litigator at Covington & Burling and friend of Fenty's family.
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Nickles met with Morrison on Dec. 21, but did not tell him that he would be fired, Morrison said. Last week, Nickles asked Deputy Attorney General Eugene A. Adams to inform Morrison of his decision.
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Morrison had taken an active hand, along with a team of lawyers from the city and two private firms, in writing the 15,000-word brief that is scheduled to be filed with the high court on Friday. It is not clear whom Nickles will select to replace Morrison.
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David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law School, said Morrison's departure would be a major blow to the D.C. team that has been preparing the case.
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"In addition to needing a good lawyer and appellate advocate, you need someone who has immersed himself in very complex historical sources. Alan has been doing that for two or three months by now. Whoever takes over this case will start many, many, many laps behind where we ought to be."
Excerpts:
http://armsandthelaw.com/archives/2008/ ... s_he_1.phpTony Mauro reports on an interesting development in the District of Columbia v. Heller, the pending Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court. Despite his work on the District's primary brief, Alan Morrison has been fired by the city, apparently because he was seen as a "loyalist" of ousted D.C. attorney Linda Singer. Morrison is an excellent lawyer, so I find the District's actions hard to fathom -- but I suppose it's also a bit of bizarre good news for the gun rights side in the case. (Hat tip: How Appealing.)
Excerpts:
Normally I'd find that subverting the organization's goals in favor of personal grandstanding and organizational politics to be a bad thing, but in this case... I could make an exception.I don't know quite what to make of it. A guess: the DC Atty General, a friend of the Mayor, wants the argument for himself? That's quite a feather in the cap. A justice on the AZ Supreme Court once told me that Sandy Day O'Connor said Supreme Court argument were on average inferior to those she heard in the AZ Court of Appeals. Reason was that every AG wants to take the argument for himself, and they're politicians, not litigators. In the Court of Apps, she said, she heard underprepared attorneys; in the Supreme Court she heard underprepared politicians, and she'd put her money on the underprepared attorney.
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I'd bet Morrison is NOT happy. The brief must be filed Friday, which means it's now in final form and at the printer's (Sup. Ct. briefs have to be printed, as in printing press). So they waited until he got the brief written and then popped it on him. But then this is DC, where backstabbing is normal business.
elb
