Year in Review
Dive into our favorite long reads of 2024
The end of the year will hopefully bring you some downtime for leisure reading. We’ve curated a list of some of our favorite web and print long reads from 2024. (Image from Shutterstock)
The end of the year will hopefully bring you some downtime for leisure reading. We’ve curated a list of some of our favorite web and print long reads from 2024. There’s a mix of popular features and some under-the-radar stories that you may have missed. In keeping with the theme, it’s a long list.
In 1991, personal injury lawyers Zachary Bravos and Todd Smith took on the strangest medical malpractice case of their careers—a case that led them to tales of satanic cults, child abuse and cannibalism.
As anyone who pays attention to current events knows all too well, Taylor Swift has become ubiquitous. And in at least two law schools, she’s the subject of a class available to students wanting to gain practical knowledge about the law by studying her various legal entanglements and how she emerged stronger.
There are law firms in which Carrie Garber Siegrist, a senior associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Goodwin Procter, might have had to be secretive about her diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. But at Goodwin Procter, Garber Siegrist says, she feels embraced and supported.
The Kentucky Derby has long been known as “the fastest two minutes in sports,” but the 150th Run for the Roses on Saturday will take place without Muth, a horse some say may have been the fastest in the field this year.
Pete Pontzer’s story is a reminder that lawyers can have meaningful and fulfilling lives after retirement. However, as Pontzer quickly admonishes, there are some important steps to take long before leaving a full-time legal career.
Serious injuries have occurred when exuberant football fans engaged in the time-honored revelry of making goal posts a trophy of a significant or improbable win. Some of those harmed have sought to lay blame and seek compensation. In several such cases, it took referees in black robes to sort it out.
Now in its 25th year, the esteemed literary magazine’s weekly competition features a wordless single panel cartoon. Contestants submit a caption for the image. The publication’s editors choose their three favorites from the 5,000 to 10,000 entries. Online public voting—with generally more than a half million votes cast—determines the winner. There is no cash prize for winning, but the bragging rights are priceless. Wood is the contest’s most successful participant—by a lot.
An increasing number of law schools around the country are offering cannabis law courses, but some professors think that even more are needed. “We’re still playing catch-up.”
Many public service attorneys had an overwhelming feeling that massive student loan debt would travel through life with them. But many of those attorneys got relief in the past year, thanks to recent changes to the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Critics argue that “excited delirium” has no medical foundation, and that its origins are plagued with racism. The term’s role in high-profile police misconduct cases has prompted major medical organizations to repudiate its use.
There has been an explosion of AI-generated music featuring the living or resurrecting the dead. But as artists push the limits of parody, fair use, right of publicity, infringement and authorship, there is one overarching question: Is any of this stuff legal?
Immigrants coming to the U.S. face legal uncertainties along with difficult living conditions and the pain of family separations. Yet a hope that opportunities will outweigh the travails is strong with many new arrivals. That’s something lawyers who help immigrants understand well—including those who are immigrants themselves.
Each state sets its own rules for formerly incarcerated people who want to practice law. In Kansas, Mississippi and Texas, for example, no one with a felony can practice law. But even for those who live in less restrictive states, there are other hurdles to overcome.
“People are like, ‘Why did you go to law school?’ I tell them, ‘I’m setting up a joke that I’m going to tell in 14 years. I’m a planner,’” Liz Glazer says.
While progress has been made in the past 25 years, members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities continue to be underrepresented at the highest levels of the legal profession.
Most dog moms and cat dads accept the hard truth that they will likely outlive their beloved animals. But what happens when pets outlive their humans?
Millennials are more willing than prior generations to switch jobs to achieve a work environment that fits their needs. However, they can “run up against a wall” with billable hours.
Innocence clinics usually don’t work with clients convicted of minor offenses. They focus on more serious crimes where the stakes are much higher: people on death row or those serving life sentences for murder or sexual assault.
Netflix’s Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, released in December 2023, sounds like a cheesy 1980s slaughter-fest horror film. Sadly, the events relayed by the documentary are far from fiction.
It isn’t often that a bipartisan group of U.S. solicitors general gather in public to discuss their unique role in the legal system and even gripe a little about the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s what happened recently in a packed hotel ballroom before the ABA 2024 Litigation Section Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
