This week, billionaire hedge fund owner Raj Rajaratnam was convicted of insider trading. He faces nearly 20 years in prison. Now, attention turns to Rajaratnam's decision to use his limitless financial resources to hire a pricey counterfeit Johnnie Cochran-esque lawyer.

President Obama had "two teams of specialists" at the ready after the Osama Bin Laden mission: "One to bury Bin Laden if he was killed, and a second composed of lawyers, interrogators and translators in case he was captured alive." (Or so "senior officials" tell The New York Times.) If he had been captured alive, he'd have been taken, in order "to preclude battles over jurisdiction," to a Navy ship — the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, most likely — where he would have been interrogated. (Even so, "the mission," officials say, "was always weighted toward killing.") The question remains: Did the interrogators have six-packs? Was there a dog with the lawyers? Did it have titanium teeth? Because otherwise, seriously, bo-ring. [NYT; image via AP]

Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist always wanted to be president, and was in the hunt to be John McCain's vice presidential candidate in 2008. Then the Tea Party emerged and threw his 2010 moderate-Republican campaign for Senate off the tracks. Now he's just another liberal plaintiffs' attorney plugging personal injury services, in Florida. Watch his TV ad and cry! [via RealClearPolitics]

Law school is a huge ripoff—a catch-all haven for slackers and the existentially aimless, where you'll go into a huge amount of debt in order to surround yourself with beer pong-players and cute little dogs, and emerge unemployable, with nothing to do with your worthless new skills except sue to try to get your law school tuition back. Now, we can add to that list: they'll bait-and-switch your ass out of scholarship money, on purpose!

Police say that Brooklyn barrister Barry Bondorowsky invited a vacuum-cleaner saleswoman to do an in-house demonstration for him earlier this week—and then proceeded to grope her, shouting "I don't need a vacuum, I need a woman!"

The many perils of law school—how we love to cover them! As does the Lamestream Media. In fact, competition for stories about law school is now so strict among media outlets that the New York Times—once considered a "prestigious" news outlet dedicated to matters of public import—has written and published an entire story about how law students can borrow a dog to play with for 30 minutes at a time.

Not to be immodest, but our research (reading the newspaper) indicated long ago that going to law school was a sucker move, for suckers. Why go to law school? All it is is racist beer pong and racist emails, and when you graduate your worthless degree won't get you a job, and you get all bitter and eventually find yourself in the comments of a Gawker post about law schools, telling me to fuck off for making fun of lawyers, because do I even appreciate what all the lawyers in history have done for the advancement of human freedom while I just sit around making jokes about something I don't even understand, asshole?

Oh, cool: at the University of Virginia law school there's a "Feb Club" that hosts themed parties throughout February. Then they put up party pics on their blog. Here's one from their latest bash: note the awesome Confederate flag beer pong tables.

Yes, we admit, there's been quite a bit of bad news recently for those ambitious young pups entering the field of law. Well, trying to enter the field, I guess. Buck up, underpaid young strivers: at least someone is successful in your field!

It's a well-known fact that someday, all of New York will be reduced to a smoldering, hellish wasteland, a post-apocalyptic desert so bad it will make The Road look like Sex and the City, a badland consisting of the ashes of a once-mighty city felled by war, disease, terror, or Zu'ul. Luckily, we've got an official legal manual!

Julian Assange's Wikileaks has hired torture-loving, Obama-concern-trolling Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz to advise it on how to combat the Justice Department's effort to wrestle data about its online behavior from Twitter.

We've long known that the gap in wealth and earnings between the haves and the have-nots has the potential to undermine the very foundation of American society. We're referring, of course, exclusively to attorneys. The young bottom-of-the-food-chain document reviewers toiling for a meager pittance can scarcely behold the salaries of their superiors. And it's getting worse; the WSJ reports that "traditional notions of pay equity are falling by the wayside."

F. Lee Bailey—remember him? O.J. Simpson's defense attorney, yea! Well, big news: he says he has evidence that O.J. was innocent all along. He just didn't bring it out at the trial because it was too long.

Famed Democratic lawyer Lanny Davis, who was paid $100,000 a month to represent President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast, quit yesterday, probably because it's hard to defend a murderer like Gbagbo, who lost his reelection bid last month.

The indignities heaped upon our nation's young attorneys continue to pile up like snowdrifts on the bleak city streets. Consider the plight of today's humble barristers: having spent the year confined to an office, they emerge to find...a bonus nightmare.

In 2003, Monserrate Luna boarded a flight in NYC headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico. When she bit into her chicken meal, she says, there was a lizard in it. She sued. We got a copy of her insanity-inducing deposition.

John Yoo, the lawyer who drafted the Bush Justice Department's "torture memos," compares George W. Bush's decision to waterboard suspected terrorists (based on his legal advice) to a driver's decision to go the full speed limit.

Someone used the make-your-own-animation web tool to create this scathing (and commendable) video. "You know there are more people in law school right now than there are lawyers on the entire planet? Think about that." - St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

An anonymous third-year student at Boston College Law School has sent an open letter to the school's dean offering to leave school after this semester in exchange for a full refund, because the job scene is so bleak. Seems fair?

An advertisement for a Florida law firm: "If you and your spouse hate each other like poison and want to get out of the hellhole you call a marriage, you've come to the right place." Not pulling any punches here!