On this, my final law blog roundup for The Daily Record, we have breaking news — The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case on Arizona’s polarizing immigration law.

On with the rest of the news and links to love:

• John Edwards may have caught a break in his case — the 4th Circuit, whose rulings impact North Carolina, has issued a ruling affirming the role of legal experts in criminal cases.
• The Howard County school board is supporting tougher laws for people who witness child sexual abuse, in the wake of the Penn State abuse scandal.
• The key to staying organized on trial? Portable office supplies.
• The power of mentoring.
• Believe in what you do.
• The time for a discussion on law enforcement is now.
• South Florida law firm finds new life after bankruptcy, which the WSJ says is a first.

It’s been a pleasure interacting with all of you. (Yes, even you, Pushkin.)

Does Stephen Glass deserve a chance at redemption?

The former journalist sent shock waves through the  journalism world in the ’90s when it was discovered that he fabricated many of his stories (you can read all about it here). But it’s been more than a decade and Glass has been trying for much of that time to gain admittance to the bar.

He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University’s law school in 2000. When he passed the New York Bar Exam that year, he applied for admittance  in 2002. He later withdrew his application after the good people of New York told him he would likely not gain admittance because of moral character issues.

The setting has now shifted to California, where Glass applied for admittance to the bar in 2007 but was denied. The state Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear the case. A couple judges along the way agreed that Glass should be admitted to the bar, but the committee of bar examiners has appealed the decisions.

So, what say you? Has Stephen Glass rehabilitated himself enough to deserve a chance to practice law? Or do you think he won’t ever be reformed?

Good Monday to you. Here’s some legal news to keep you informed.

• Jack Johnson’s actions confuse the grandmothers of Prince George’s County. (Johnson is set to be sentenced Tuesday.)
• An unlicensed Silver Spring Lawyer has been ordered to stop lawyering.
• Second Mile will freeze its assets to settle a civil case brought by a man identified as Victim 4 in the indictment of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Local attorney Howard Janet is representing Victim 6.
• The Baltimore Crime blog is annoyed about the cast of characters paraded before a judge in Friday’s hearing in Paul Schurick’s robocalling trial.
• This one’s a little bit old, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you. The basic lesson is don’t put people’s brains in jars, OK?
• Turns out working for a rock star isn’t all champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Tommy Lee (above) is being sued for being a cheap boss.

Baltimore-born Paul B. Luskin has tangled with the law once again.

This time, Luskin, who was imprisoned in 1988 for the botched murder-for-hire attempt on his ex-wife (complete with a flower deliveryman as the shooter), has been permanently disbarred in Florida.

The Florida bar gave Luskin the boot after he posed as an attorney following his release from prison.

Luskin was released from prison in 2002 after his dramatic confession to the crime in U.S. District Court in Baltimore in 2000 persuaded Judge J. Frederick Motz to cut nearly 10 years off his 35-year sentence.

Following his release, Luskin (who is the nephew of Jack Luskin, locally known as the “cheapest guy in town” for his appliance and electronics stores) started up a Fort Lauderdale business called Federal Criminal Research. The South Florida Sun Sentinel is reporting that he was paid $1,600 to write an appellate brief for a federal inmate, which the inmate later called “worthless.”

A bar spokeswoman said Luskin had participated in the unlicensed practice of law, a big no-no.

Daily Record legal affairs reporter Danielle Ulman did some live blogging from the Defending Childhood Task Force at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

11:45 a.m.

A panel on the consequences for youth and society exposed to daily violence hit hard on some areas that might be ineffective in helping kids to turn things around.

Patrick McCarthy, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation said he finds institutions for juvenile delinquents wholly ineffective. Many youths come out of these programs with worse behavior than when they started, he said.

Sonja Sohn, an actress most famous for her work on The Wire, also started the ReWired for Change outreach program to rehabilitate at-risk youth involved in criminal activity. She told her very personal story of abuse.

Sohn’s mother was abused by her father — once Sohn witnessed her father put her mother’s head on a chopping block in their kitchen and threaten her with a knife. She said she had daydreams about killing her father, and at one time considered running away at the age of 10 to be a prostitute in New York.

But Sohn’s story is one of rehabilitation. She said her family has learned to heal from the past abuse, and her father has gotten help.

Also on the panel was student Nigel Cox, chair of the national youth board of Students Against Violence Everywhere. Cox, who is a senior in high school in North Carolina, said he tries to preach the word nonviolence.

10:25 a.m.

We’ve heard from some victims of sexual and physical abuse and while their stories are hard to hear, they are important. Both women who spoke mentioned that by speaking out they are breaking the cycle of violence, which is exactly what the task force is hoping to do.

Rosa Almond, who was physically abused by her husband (and sexually abused by her grandfather at the age of 7), finally had the courage to leave and press charges when her husband beat her in front of her children.

Jacquelynn Kuhn was abused by a neighbor when she was just five years old. Kuhn explained that the teenager who molested her was a master manipulator, and told her that if she told on him, he would do worse things to her brother and sister. Kuhn only told her parents about the abuse as an adult, after she divorced an abusive husband.

Earl El-Amin, resident imam of the Muslim Community Cultural Center of Baltimore spoke about the rise of community violence in town. He attributes a lot of the problems to what he calls the “absent daddy club.” El-Amin says “If you don’t see a man, you can’t be a man.”

9:45 a.m.

Frightening stat: Baltimore children are 8 times as likely to die from homicide than other children in the country.

Joe Torre just opened up to the group about his experiences as a child with abuse. He never was personally abused, but he watched his mom get abused by his father, who was a police officer. Torre said he kept it to himself because he was embarrassed by it and thought he was the only one experiencing it. Now, Torre says children need to know that violence should not be a secret.

There are some very interesting voices on the task force, including Sarah Deer, an assistant professor at the William Mitchell  College of Law, who is focused on violence on Indian Reservations. According to Deer, reservations have the highest rate of violent crime in the nation.

Then there’s The Rev. Gregory Boyle, who runs Homeboy Industries in L.A., helping gang members from rival gangs to work side by side. Another interesting stat: his group offers 10,000 laser tattoo removals to gang members each year.

Attorney General Eric Holder has called the work of protecting children from violence “a priority” for his department, which has lots of other weighty issues on its plate.

Other big names on the roster for today are  Joe Torre, co-chair of the Safe at Home Foundation. The foundation’s Margaret’s Place is a tribute to Torre’s mother, which provides children with a safe place to talk to each other and counselors trained in domestic violence intervention.

The Wire’s Sonja Sohn (who played Detective Kima Greggs) will also be speaking today.

Happy Thanksgiving week. Here’s a little taste of what’s going on in the legal world in this shortened work week.

• This one’s a doozy: A Georgia woman has been arrested for administering illegal silicone injections into the hips and rear ends of strippers. The FDA began its probe into Kimberly Smedley’s work after a Baltimore stripper became ill following the injections.
• On the injection front, here’s another story of an arrest made after a “doctor” used a mix of super glue, cement, oil and tire sealant to enhance a woman’s backside.
• Defendants win their fourth victory in four months under the Fourth Amendment in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now to find a four-leaf clover…
• Maryland and D.C. lag in reporting mental health records to gun-check databases.
• A Louisiana court has affirmed a ruling that citizens can make DUI arrests. (I’d love to see one of those arrests go down.)
• It could take 21 years to sell all of Maryland’s foreclosed homes.
• Add this to Wesley Snipes’ debts: American Express says he owes them $29,300. Snipes is serving a three-year sentence for tax evasion.

Welcome back to work on this sunny Monday. Check out the links below to brighten your day.

• University of Maryland School of Law students are proposing stronger measures to protect children who are bullied in schools.
• For couples who can’t agree, getting a divorce in Maryland is easier now.
• DLA Piper’s Frank Burch has denied reports that his firm is set to merge with Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain. Earlier this year, Burch told The Daily Record that DLA planned to make a move into the great white north.
• Prince George’s County had the most civil trials in Maryland last year.
• Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has hired a D.C. lawyer, King & Spalding’s J. Sedwick Sollers III, to represent him in the child sex abuse scandal that erupted last week in the wake of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s arrest. Paterno is not charged with any criminal wrongdoing in the case.
• A North Carolina lawyer is bugging out over sharing an Air Tran Airways flight with some cockroaches.

It’s a sleepy Monday morning following the Ravens’ late-night win last night, but we’ve still managed to round up some interesting law tidbits for you below.

• Do nursing home lawsuits solve the problem of abuse and negligent care?
• A look at who is using Legal Aid these days.
• U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings is not pleased with a New York foreclosure law firm that held a pretty tasteless Halloween party last year where its employees dressed up as homeless people. The  New York Times published pictures last week.
• Kelvin Sewell, a former Baltimore homicide detective hopped the pond to visit Glasgow, Scotland to compare crime levels there with ours in Charm City. (HT: Baltimore Crime)
• Study finds media distorts the public’s perception on jury awards. (Turns out we only like to publish the big ones.)
• Oh, good. A law firm hires a consultant, learns it (the law firm) discriminates against women but decides not to change its system.
• 11th Circuit tells Cubans to get to the party on their own.

The folks over at Hodes, Pessin & Katz like to get into the Halloween spirit every year with a pumpkin decorating contest.

This year, the firm’s litigation associates decided it would be a hoot to decorate pumpkins in the litigation partners’ likenesses with a litigation partner pumpkin patch.

What followed can only be described as revenge. When partner Patricia McHugh Lambert found out, she created an associate patch of her own, and the associates were not pleased.

Per associate Alex Moylan: “This is an annual tradition at HPK and we wanted to do something creative because our clients really enjoy seeing the pumpkins each year. We maintain the position that the revenge pumpkins submitted by the partners should not be considered, as they were submitted beyond the contest deadline.”

Take that, partners.

Litigation partners: Back row, left to right: Mairi Pat Maguire, Brian S. Goodman, Steven A. Allen. Front row, left to right: Natalie Magdeburger, Barry Bach, Patricia McHugh Lambert and Catherine Steiner

Litigation associates, left to right: Kimberly Longford, Alexandra Moylan and Kimya Behbahani

Photos courtesy of Hodes, Pessin & Katz P.A.

Apparently, law school admissions folks are pretty nosy.

A survey from  Kaplan Test Prep found that 41 percent of law school admissions officers use Google to dig up dirt on applicants. That’s compared to 27 percent of their business school counterparts and 20 percent of people handling undergraduate college admissions.

Beyond Google, 37 percent of admissions folks deciding whether a student is worthy of entering their law school also check up on applicants through Facebook or other social media sites (hint: that’s where those privacy controls come in handy.)

Even worse is that when completing these searches, admissions staff find more damaging details about applicants to law school than they do for applicants to any other type of educational institution, such as business school or undergrad.

Best to clean up your digital trail, dear applicants. At a minimum, make your social media accounts accessible to friends, otherwise that high LSAT score might not cancel out photos of you doing (insert absurd/illegal action here).