It used to be a running joke among the Supreme Court bar that the scariest sentence a high-court advocate could write in a petitioner’s brief was “the decision of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should be overturned.” Such was the rarity of disagreement between the conservative high court and the like-minded appellate panel.

But this accord between the courts has been decreasing gradually during the past few terms. The justices, in their October Term 2006, disagreed with the 4th Circuit in one of the two appeals they heard; in the October Term 2007, the number was two out of three.

And during this Supreme Court session, October Term 2008, the justices rejected the 4th Circuit’s decision in all five written opinions they issued in appeals from the Richmond, Va.-based court. The high court reinstated a firearms conviction (United States v. Hayes); overturned an order for arbitration (Vaden v. Discover Bank); reversed a felony drug conviction (Abuelhawa v. United States); vacated the denial of an asylum seeker from Cameroon’s motion to stay a federal removal order (Nken v. Holder); and vacated the sentence in a drug conviction (Nelson v. United States).

In a sixth case, the justices issued an order vacating the 4th Circuit’s decision upholding the continued detention of a suspected Al-Qaida agent without trial in the United States and dismissing the case as moot. The high court took the step at the request of the Obama administration, which told the justices that the suspect, Ali Al-Marri, will face trial on federal charges of conspiracy and providing support to terrorists.

Anyone who delights in predicting how the Supreme Court will rule should take heed.

Hat tip: SCOTUSBlog.

NALP has done a survey of lawyer starting salaries and has discovered that the median salary for new lawyers in 2008 was $72,000 and the mean was $92,000. This tells us… approximately nothing.

Almost nobody is actually making these salaries. Instead, starting salaries are clustered around $50,000 and $160,000, giving NALP’s accompanying graph the look of a weird stylized two-humped camel. (You don’t see it? Not even a little?)

2008 actually had the widest bimodal salary distribution of any previous year, meaning that the pay gap between those working at white-shoe firms and those doing almost anything else was bigger than ever.

As the National Law Journal points out, this graph may look different next year. While in 2008, the going rate for a first-year associate at a top firm was $160,000, in 2009, many big firms have scaled back pay in a nod to the terrible economy. In Maryland alone, DLA Piper, Miles & Stockbridge, McGuire Woods and Venable have all decreased starting salaries, and I’ll be shocked if some of the other big firms here don’t follow suit.

Of course, there’s a limit to how much the look of this graph will change from this year to next. While the big firms are lowering salaries, they’re not really going below $120,000 or so, and you can bet other entry-level lawyers are not seeing their salaries increasing.