Senators resumed questioning Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan right on time Wednesday morning. Check back at ABAJournal.com throughout the day for news developments. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy indicated he'd like to complete Kagan's testimony today. This would give senators the opportunity to attend memorial services for Sen. Robert Byrd, who died this week. Today's news highlights included: Serious and silly repartee between the senators and the nominee. (Los Angeles Times) VIP lawyers make the list of hearing attendees. (Blog of Legal Times) Why does it sometimes seem as though the country's first black justice, rather than Kagan, is the…

An Oklahoma grandmother claims in a federal lawsuit that police violated her civil rights by Tasering her while she was in her bed, hooked up to an oxygen machine. The woman, Lona Varner, was 86 years old at the time, according to Koco.com and the Oklahoman. Police had been called to Varner’s home in El Reno after her grandson called 911 and said he feared she wanted to end her life. According to police reports, Varner pulled a knife from beneath her pillow and threatened to stab a police officer if he tried to take her away. The suit says…

Gucci America’s mistaken belief that its former top lawyer had an active license to practice law isn’t enough to shield documents from discovery based on attorney-client privilege, a magistrate judge has ruled. Magistrate Judge James Cott of New York City denied Gucci’s motion for a protective order Tuesday, the New York Law Journal reports. Gucci is seeking to prevent disclosure of documents prepared by former chief in-house counsel Jonathan Moss in a trademark infringement suit it has filed against Guess. Gucci fired Moss in March after learning that he had been on inactive status with the California bar since beginning…

Partial interrogation videos of a former partner at Arent Fox and two of his housemates are now online after their acquittal Tuesday in an obstruction case brought over the unsolved murder of a lawyer at their Washington, D.C., townhome. Prosecutors had accused former Arent Fox partner Joseph Price and two of his housemates of cleaning up blood from the crime scene to cover up the murderer’s identity; the defendants claimed they didn’t know the intruder who killed their friend, lawyer Robert Wone. The Washington Post has the videos. The Price clip begins with an ad and then shows police asking…

A lot of press accounts have focused on the constitutionality of Arizona’s new law requiring police to seek proof of a person’s immigration status if they have a reasonable suspicion the person is in the country illegally. But a different immigration law designed to combat illegal immigration in Arizona is back in the news now that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a pre-emption challenge to the measure. The court granted cert Monday, according to stories by the Associated Press, the Christian Science Monitor, the Arizona Republic and SCOTUSblog. Under the law, Arizona employers are required to use…

Positive psychology expert and lawyer Dan Bowling has a hypothesis: Happiness among law students can’t be explained by who will graduate with a high-paying job or who will earn a degree without a mountain of debt. Indeed, Bowling says, a lot of evidence suggests that the least happy lawyers are associates in big law firms making a lot of money, although there’s no “gold standard” study of the issue. Bowling believes that the law students with the best sense of well-being understand their own personalities and character strengths and pursue careers that will tap those strengths. He’ll get a chance…

Reversing a lower court, a federal appeals panel has given the government a green light to prosecute a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi for posting a juror's name and publicly available address information on the overthrow.com website after the unidentified man helped convict a fellow white supremacist. Whether William White intended to encourage potential violence against the foreman of a Chicago jury by doing so is a question of fact for the jury in his own case to decide and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech doesn't prevent the prosecution of the case, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.…

Corrected: Just be yourself. That’s what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., urged U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to do late Tuesday afternoon. “First, you are dancing a bit—maybe you should be on Dancing with the Stars,” Coburn said lightheartedly as he began his questioning. “I want Americans to know who you are. I don’t know what a liberal progressive is. I know what a liberal is, and I think you’re a liberal. It’s not wrong to know what you believe in.” Coburn proceeded to characterize Kagan as pro-choice on abortion, in favor of gay marriage, and a supporter of citing…

Without admitting wrongdoing, the Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to pay $755,000 to settle a former staff lawyer's wrongful termination whistle-blower suit. Gary Aguirre had contended that he was abruptly fired in 2005 because of his investigation of a potential insider-trading case against a giant hedge fund, Pequot Capital Management, and its co-founder, Arthur Samberg, the New York Times reports. The settlement is largest ever disclosed by the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which oversees such cases, the newspaper says. For more details, read the full Times article.