Welcome to the first Monday in November, which makes tomorrow, well, you know the rest. Here now some news items to get your week started.

– What ever happened to that lawyer who argued for the respondent in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld?

– What is your answer to one of the great questions of our time?

– It’s never too early to have a legal battle over ballots.

– “Girls Gone Wild” case reaches the Georgia Supreme Court.

When you think about election season,  you often think about debates, political ads — and, of course, litigation.

Enter the Federal Judicial Center, the research and educational agency of the federal judiciary. It published 80 case studies on emergency election litigation in federal courts and interviewed several dozen federal judges. Among the topics covered: litigation relating to registering voters, absentee and early voting, campaign activities, and poll hours.

One of the white papers, Keeping Polls Open Because of Weather, seems particularly timely. The weather in Ohio was nasty when the state’s presidential primary was held in March 2008 and a number of locations were experiencing ballot shortages. So then-Sen. Barack Obama sued to keep the polls open until 9 p.m., an extra hour-and-a-half, in three counties.

A judge granted the request with respect to polling places in Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland). All votes received after 7:30 p.m. (the normal closing time) were to be put aside as provisional ballots. The report, however, noted that some polls covered by the order had already closed when they received the order and some did not reopen.

Maryland state Sen. Jamin B. “Jamie” Raskin, D-Montgomery, wants voters heading to the polls to remember that the president has the authority to make appointments to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts — and that Robert Bork is among the legal advisers to the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Raskin, an ardent supporter of President Barack Obama, warned in Wednesday’s Huffington Post that a “Romney-Ryan-Bork court would lead to the uncorking of bottles of champagne throughout the boardrooms of America’s largest and most right-wing corporations.”

Romney appointees to the federal courts would lead to “an acceleration of all of the worst trends already ravaging the prospects of justice for ‘natural persons’ in America, including the destruction of what is left of campaign finance and disclosure laws as corporations assume all the political free speech rights of the people, a dramatic change ushered in by Citizens United in 2010,” Raskin added on the post’s Politics blog.

Raskin has been quite prolific recently, having written an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week calling for a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court ruled that “the government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether” under the First Amendment.

But Raskin, a widely respected constitutional law professor at American University, might need to brush up on his history.

In the Huffington Post piece he referred to Bork as as “the right-wing polemicist and former Bush Supreme Court nominee so extreme that he was rejected by a bipartisan coalition of Senators in 1987.”

“I think somebody must have changed that,” Raskin said of the error. “I very well know that Ronald Reagan is the one who made that mistake.”

Asked: Our weekly question to the In-House community

The general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board is under fire this week.

General counsel Lafe Solomon participated in talks on the board about Wal-Mart’s social media policy and its legality. The catch? Solomon also held stock in Wal-Mart at the time.

Though Solomon owned only about $18,000 in Wal-Mart stock, the agency’s inspector general is investigating the matter at the urging of Republican members of Congress.

“As a general counsel and career attorney, Mr. Solomon should know federal statute well enough to know when to recuse himself from a possible conflict of interest between his own finances and his work,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wrote in a news release.

Though Solomon sold the stock at the end of February, he participated in meetings on the Wal-Mart issue in January. Solomon’s defense argues that he received no financial benefit from these dealings.

So, here’s our question for you:

What action should the NLRB take against Solomon? How would your company deal with a situation in which a general counsel had a financial conflict of interest?

Leave a comment below or email me.

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Welcome to Monday and the start of the political convention season. Here are some things you probably will not hear during the next several weeks:

Mr. Romney will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you; I just did.

I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Romney on a horse.

Now for some news items before the conventions are called to order:

– Motorcycle-windshield inventor revs up constitutional challenge to patent law.

– Man wrongly convicted of rape wins release in what is becoming a Texas trend.

– Foreclosure-mediation proposal takes the spirit out of mortgage lenders in St. Louis.

– Is there a constitutional right to track down Justin Bieber for a photo?

When it comes to defending same-sex marriage, one Washington, D.C., lawyer is no chicken.

Attorney Ted Frank, who also blogs, has come up with a way to support same-sex marriage and consume controversial Chick-fil-A chicken.

The country has been abuzz about the Georgia-based fast-food chain in the past few weeks after its president, Dan Cathy, told a Baptist newspaper in an interview that he only supports marriage between a man and a woman.

Since then, each side of the political spectrum has jumped into the issue. Opponents of same-sex marriage declared a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” and encouraged those supporting Cathy’s views to head to their nearest Chick-fil-A and order a chicken sandwich and waffle fries. Those in favor of same-sex marriage responded with Chick-fil-A “Kiss-Off” day, where same-sex couples smooched outside chicken chains across the country.

Frank has found himself, like many Americans, facing a conundrum: he loves Chick-fil-A food, but dislikes the company’s stance against same-sex marriage. So Frank decided to take a stand — all for the love of chicken and same-sex marriage.

Frank started the website, Chicken Offsets, where people can donate every time they eat at Chick-fil-A. The money will then go to a number of LGBT nonprofits. Every $1 donated equals an offset of one chicken sandwich, and $6 is worth 10 chicken sandwich offsets, according to the website.

As Frank explains on the website:

Chick-fil-A sells $4,100,000,000 of chicken a year and donates about 0.04% of that to Christian organizations that are only anti-gay in a collateral sense. Buying a chicken offset does far more for gay rights than boycotting the chain because someone asked a business executive so religiously Christian that he insists that the stores be closed on Sunday what he thought about gay marriage and people are pretending to be surprised by the answer.

At least 90 percent of the money donated goes to the It Gets Better Project, which focuses on helping LGBT teens, and The Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law that researches gender identity and sexual orientation law. Only a small amount of money is kept by the website for operating expenses.

Frank launched the website Saturday night and reportedly had raised $100 by late Monday.

So now, thanks to Frank,  gay rights supporters hankering for a spicy chicken sandwich bathed in signature Chick-fil-A Sauce can consume the 630-calorie meal guilt-free. Well, morally, anyways.

The local law world is going Hollywood this week.

The Baltimore office of DLA Piper was featured in the season premiere of the new HBO show, “Veep,” which premiered Sunday night. The show stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, best known as Elaine on “Seinfeld”, as the vice president of the United States.

The comedy follows Louis-Dreyfus’s character, Selina Meyer, and her staff as they navigate the inroads of Washington, D.C. Meyer spends the pilot episode trying to assert herself in her new role. There are many bumps along the way for Meyer as she tries to carve out a place as second-in-command.

She organizes a meeting to push for green initiatives, which no one attends. She is forced into making a speech at a fundraiser in place of the president, during which she makes a series of bad jokes and a political gaffe. Throughout the episode, she repeatedly asks her secretary if the president has called, to which the answer is always “No.”

In one scene, Meyer goes to a senator’s office to lobby for a green initiative she is working on to replace plastic forks in government buildings with ones made of cornstarch. The scene was filmed at DLA Piper, whose offices are at The Marbury Building, 6225 Smith Ave.

About 100 members of the cast and crew showed up to film for the day; a wing on the second floor of the law offices was transformed to look like a fictional Nevada senator’s suite.

The cast and crew only filmed at the law offices for a day. When filming went late into the night, the crew had to shine lights into the office from outside.

The show also filmed in DLA Piper’s hallway as Meyer and her staff are leaving. The same hallway was used for a scene in the 2005 movie, “Syriana,” starring George Clooney.

A month and a half ago I wrote about the addition of a young but high-profile lawyer to the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s office, Leo J. Wise.

When U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told me Wise, who policed Congressional ethics for the past couple of years, would prosecute white-collar crime as an AUSA, the bribery case against state Sen. Ulysses Currie (D-Prince George’s) and a pair of Shoppers Food executives immediately came to mind.

Well, Wise entered his appearance in Maryland’s federal court for the first time this week, and, sure enough, one of the two (sets of) cases on his personal docket is the Currie-Shoppers prosecution.

Presumably, no one will disassemble the U.S. Attorney’s office (as certain members of Congress reportedly have suggested re: the OCE) before trial in the case next summer…

Of course, Rosenstein’s office’s other major political corruption prosecution (and ongoing investigation) also involves Prince George’s County, and there was attorney news in that cluster of cases, too, this week.

In case you’ve been asleep for the past month, County Executive Jack B. Johnson and his wife, Leslie, were arrested Nov. 12 after the FBI overheard the couple scrambling to hide nearly $80,000 in cash and a check for $100,000 in, um, various places.

Prominent defense attorney William R. “Billy” Martin, who has defended people like Michael Vick and the mayor of Atlanta, seemed an appropriate person to represent Jack Johnson, but few had heard of Leslie Johnson’s counsel, Owings Mills attorney Roland N. Patterson Jr.

Apparently the county councilwoman-elect decided she needed a little more heft to protect her from federal prosecutors because this week a big-firm attorney, whose office is in the Watergate building no less, entered her appearance on behalf of Mrs. Johnson. Perhaps not coincidentally, Shawn M. Wright is a partner at Martin’s old firm, Blank Rome LLP.

So, dear readers, do you think these these personnel moves will significantly impact the evolution and outcome of these cases or were these politicos’ looking at jail time regardless of any clever attorney’s maneuvering?

Alaska Elections Division Director Gail Fenumiai, right, and Assistant Attorney General Sarah Felix look over a ballot Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010, in Juneau, Alaska.

Maybe it’s the journalist in me, but I have a low tolerance for spelling mistakes. Sure, we all make the occaisional mistake, but between dictionaries and spell check on computers, the errors should be few and far between.

I’m especially paranoid about when it comes to spelling people’s names. I had the fear of God put into me in college, where a misspelled proper name in a journalism class meant an “F” on the assignment, no questions asked. Plus, my story might be the only time a person’s name appears in the paper, so it’s the least I can do to make sure John Smith doesn’t spell his name “Jon Smythe.”

This brings me to Alaska’s contested U.S. Senate race. For those not familiar, incumbent Lisa Murkowski was defeated in the Republican primary by Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. Murkowski then decided to run as an independent, write-in candidate; as of Wednesday night, “Write-In Votes” leads Miller by more than 10,000 votes.

This is where the fun begins. Alaska election officials are now reviewing all of the write-in ballots, with Murkowski named in almost 90 percent of them as of Friday morning. “Murkowski” might become the “hanging chad” of the 2010 election season. So far, officials have seen “Murkowsky,” “Morkowski,” “Mirkowsky,” “Murkrowsky,” and “Marcouski” despite the candidate’s general election campaign devoted in large part to the spelling of her surname.

Personally, I think if you can’t spell correctly the name of a longtime Alaskan legislator who is also the daughter of a longtime Alaskan legislator, you need to pay more attention to current events. But my point is, expect lawsuits aplenty over the ballots and voter rolls in addition to the challenges already being made.

And, remember, should we get to this point, there is no hyphen in “recount.”

… Because they sure didn’t vote at lunch time.

“As of the 1 o’clock numbers, we had 6 percent of the voters coming out, which is 22,660,” Abigail Jones, administrative officer at Baltimore City Board of Elections, told reporter Brendan Kearney.

Jones said the turnout was “scattered” and wasn’t heavy in any particular part of Baltimore.

“It’s quiet all over the city,” Jones said. She attributed the low turnout to both the lack of a presidential contest and the number of incumbents running unopposed this year.

Checking back at 3 o’clock, we found turnout had risen –  to 8 percent.

Meanwhile, Brendan continues to cover the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s race. Look for his updates on The Daily Record’s website tonight.