The Faculty Lounge

Call for Papers: Shutting Down the School to Prison Pipeline

Posting at the request of the organizers:

Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center and the Nova Law Review seek submissions for the Nova Law Review Symposium being held on September 18, 2015, entitled “Shutting Down the School to Prison Pipeline,” and co-sponsored by Gwen S. Cherry Black Women Lawyer’s Association, American Civil Liberties Union, Miami Dade Public Defender Office, and the Anti-Defamation League.

Abstracts are due June 1, 2015. Download more details here.

An Ethics Lesson from the Big Boys

The Alan Dershowitz-Paul Cassell-David Boies imbroglio is every gossip columnist’s dream.  But I am not a gossip columnist.  Dershowitz and Boies are, of course, two of the most prominent and accomplished lawyers of their generation.  And there is no indication that they do not fully understand the contours of the latest issue they are fighting about.  But public commentary on the latest wrinkle in the story does elicit a sigh from me in my capacity as a teacher of legal ethics.   

For those of my faithful readers living under a rock, here’s the background:  Lawyers Paul Cassell and Brad Edwards represent Virginia Roberts in a lawsuit against the federal government.  The lawsuit challenges a criminal plea agreement the government reached with billionaire Jeffrey Epstein back in 2008 involving Epstein’s proclivities for sex with underage girls.  Ms. Roberts asserts she was a victim of Epstein’s and that the plea deal violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.  The lawsuit included inflammatory allegations that Dershowitz also did bad things to Ms. Roberts when she was a minor.  (Dershowitz was never accused of any wrongdoing at the time; in fact, he was one of Epstein’s lawyers in connection with Epstein’s plea deal.)  Dershowitz vehemently denies these allegations, says he can prove he’s right, and has accused lawyers Cassell and Edwards of misconduct.  Cassell and Edwards have responded by suing Dershowitz for defamation.  (Full disclosure:  I went to law school with Paul Cassell, who is currently on the law faculty at the University of Utah, and used to be a federal judge.  We have not discussed these events, and have talked only a few times in the last 30 years.) 

Who’s right?  I have no idea.  I don’t want to discuss any of that.

What I do want to discuss is the latest turn of events.  Superstar trial lawyer David Boies and his firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, have entered the fray to represent Ms. Roberts.  This has prompted a fair amount of posturing by both Dershowitz and Boies about whether Boies and his firm can or should be involved.  Specifically, Dershowitz has asserted that lawyers with whom he is acquainted at Boies’ firm reached out to him when the dispute originally broke, expressed sympathy, and raised the possibility of representing him.  In the course of these communications, Dershowitz says, the Boies Schiller lawyers elicited, or at least received, confidential information from him—including a memo that Dershowitz had shared with his own lawyers labelled “lawyer-client confidential”—that creates a conflict of interest precluding Boies and his firm from representing Ms. Roberts.  Boies and his firm disagree both legally and factually.  You can see the parties’ public statements on the issue here.

Nothing improves a juicy sex scandal like a legal ethics issue, not least because it gives me this opportunity to redirect your gaze to the professional strait and narrow.  American Lawyer columnist Vivia Chen observes that “there's a meaty legal issue at stake: Was there a client/lawyer relationship between Dershowitz and Boies Schiller?”  While Ms. Chen is ordinarily an acute and thoughtful observer of the legal scene, and interesting issues are presented here (at least if you’re an ethics geek like me), that’s not the issue at all:  No one contends an attorney-client relationship was actually formed, and no attorney-client relationship need have been formed for Boies Schiller to be disqualified.  

Confidential communications with a lawyer in contemplation of possible representation are both attorney-client privileged and subject to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality whether or not an attorney-client relationship is ever formed, and under appropriate circumstances can disqualify the lawyer from a matter adverse to the prospective client.  (I can feel your eyes glazing over.  Bear with me.)  The parties’ public statements (here) appear to disagree about whether they had communications in contemplation of possible representation, and about whether Dershowitz imparted genuinely confidential information sufficient to disqualify Boies Schiller.  (The fact that a memo is legended “lawyer-client confidential” doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.  Obviously it doesn’t mean that it isn’t either.)  The parties also may disagree about whether the Boies Schiller lawyers elicited any confidential information that Dershowitz did impart, or whether he just delivered it unrequested and unexpectedly, which could affect the disqualification issue.  Those are interesting and potentially challenging issues, but so far as I can tell no one contends that Boies Schiller actually undertook to represent Dershowitz, or that Dershowitz thought they did.

But wait, there’s more.  (I know; I know—isn’t Professional Responsibility fantastic?)  Even assuming that Dershowitz supplied Boies Schiller with confidential information, the law firm still needs to be in a position to misuse those confidences in a manner that is sufficiently “adverse” to the confiding party (Dershowitz) in the engagement the lawyers are taking on for the confidences to be disqualifying.  This is a considerably more unusual and difficult issue.  Remember, the only party Ms. Roberts is suing is the federal government; there is no current indication that Boies intends to take any part in defending Dershowitz’s defamation case against lawyers Edwards and Cassell.  And Dershowitz recently won a procedural victory in persuading the court handling the Crime Victims’ Rights Act case to strike the allegations concerning him.  Now, that doesn’t mean that Ms. Roberts won’t try to raise issues regarding Dershowitz’s alleged conduct in the course of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act litigation (the link, if there is one, appears to be that Dershowitz was one the lawyers who advised Jeffrey Epstein in reaching the plea deal back in 2008 that is the subject of the case).  But it’s no longer clear that she will try to inject those issues into the case, that Boies Schiller would be involved in any effort to do so, or that the court will allow her to raise those issues if she tries.  So we might expect to see Boies Schiller argue that, in addition to and regardless of anything else, they don’t propose to act “adversely” to Dershowitz. Will it work?  We’ll see.

Now those are some genuinely interesting Professional Responsibility questions.  Given the quality of the lawyers involved, we can expect to see them addressed with verve and skill.  I’ll take that over a sex scandal any day.

--Bernie

Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar: Strict Scrutiny Strictly Considered

     In Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, the Court, 5-4, upheld a Florida bar rule prohibiting judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign funds.  Florida, of course, elects judges.  A plurality applied strict scrutiny but upheld the ban because the state had a compelling interest – preserving the integrity and perception of integrity of judges – and concluded that the ban was narrowly tailored to accomplish that end.  The Court left no doubt that judicial candidates are not ordinary politicians, and that regulation of campaign finance in judicial elections might survive strict scrutiny. But how strict was this scrutiny?  However indeterminate the process of identifying compelling  interests may be, I agree that preservation of an impartial and incorruptible judiciary is an objective of the highest order, and I agree that states may take prophylactic actions to ensure that the public’s perception of the judiciary is that it is impartial and incorruptible.  
    I part company with the majority when it comes to narrow tailoring. Consider what the Florida rule permits: personalized thank-you notes from judicial candidates to donors, formation of campaign committees to raise money for the candidate, personal conversations between candidates and donors (so long as there is never a request for money), and disclosure of the identity of donors to the candidate.  It strains credulity to think that a ban only on the person-to-person request for funds will have any material impact on either the perception or the actuality of judicial integrity. By saying, in essence, that Florida could take “one step at a time” the majority disposed of narrow tailoring and substituted a close kin of rational relationship.
    On the facts of the case, Williams-Yulee was apparently an amateur campaigner, as she asked for funds from family, friends and associates.  Yet, a professional campaign could organize a committee, raising tons of cash, tell the candidate who ponied up and who didn’t, and thus present a greater risk to judicial integrity than Willams-Yulee’s effort.
    I’m not a fan of judicial elections, but diluting strict scrutiny in free speech poses a greater threat to democracy than does either judicial elections or raising campaign funds for judicial elections. 

Affleck's Ancestor and the Trust for Slavery

It's not often that people are interested in the history of trusts.  But this week is different.  Brandy Zadrozny over at the Daily Beast broke the news that Ben Affleck's ancestor who's at the center of the PBS-Gates-Affleck story held about twenty-three people in trust for the grandsons of his mother-in-law.  That is, Affleck's great-great-great grandfather, Benjamin L. Cole, served as executor of the estate of his mother-in-law, who owned about 23 people at the time of her death -- and that Cole served as trustee of a trust set up to provide for her three grandsons (which I'm figuring this correctly were Cole's nephews by marriage).  Cribbing now a little from Zadrozny's article: 

The legal difference between owner and executor is clear. An executor is someone who is appointed by a will to dispose of the deceased’s estate, as William Wiecek, professor of public law and legislation emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law [and I want to add one of the greatest legal historians in operation today], explained in an email to The Daily Beast. “You won’t own the property; you will distribute it to those who do.”

A trustee—as Cole was for Norton’s grandchildren—has “the control power, but not ownership,” Wiecek said. “Your legal duty would be to administer the property according to my directions, and distribute the income or profits to the beneficiary.”

The article also quotes another historian of nineteenth-century American law (wink) to the effect that the Daily Beast's finding "shows how deeply the institution of slavery penetrated American finance [and] how deeply the United States law is implicated in the sins of slavery.”  I figure I need to enjoy this while it lasts because its not likely to happen again anytime soon.  Then again, we live in a world that worships wealth and is increasingly interested in slavery, so perhaps we'll have more people talking about trusts and the role they served in facilitating management of enslaved humans.

Breitbart's been following up on Zadrozny's story, too.

If you're interested in more on testamentary trusts to manage enslaved people, I have a couple of papers on this -- both with former students.  One is on Greene County, Alabama; the other is on Rockbridge County, Virginia.  And coming soon are papers on slaves and trusts in Petersburg, Virginina, Wilcox County, Alabama and Montgomery, Alabama....

Call for Abstracts: Constitutional Challenges to the Regulation of Food, Drugs, Medical Devices, Cosmetics, and Tobacco Products

At the request of the organizers, I'm passing on the following:

The Food and Drug Law Journal is pleased to announce a forthcoming symposium—Constitutional Challenges to the Regulation of Food, Drugs, Medical Devices, Cosmetics, and Tobacco Products—to be held at the Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) on Friday, October 30, 2015, and co-sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute and GULC's O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 1, 2015. Download more information about the symposium here.

LSAC Data and Predicting Number of Applicants for Fall 2015, Part 16

The LSAC is now reporting that "As of 4/24/15, there are 317,748 fall 2015 applications submitted by 47,577 applicants. Applicants are down 2.5% and applications are down 4.6% from 2014.  Last year at this time, we had 90% of the preliminary final applicant count."  If this year's applicants follow last year's pattern, there will be approximately 52,863 applicants this year.  The last post in this series is here.

Also, Mike Spivey (the man who broke the U.S. News rankings this year) has data on the regional changes in the law school applications.  The southeast is among the regions with the biggest decline.

Chapman Law Review Symposium on Cybersecurity CFP

I received an email recently announcing the Chapman Law Review's symposium on Cybersecurity.  Cribbing now from the CFP:

Cybersecurity has become a critical national security and corporate security problem in the last fifteen years. Examples include hackings of the Pentagon, SONY, Target, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, various universities, and hospitals. A lively debate is now raging in Congress, academia, and in the corporate world over what steps should be taken. Attorneys are at the forefront of the problem in advising clients and securing confidential information. What duties do attorneys and corporations have to prevent a cyberattack? What duties do attorneys and corporations owe to their clientele? What actions should attorneys and corporations take to mitigate a cyberattack once it occurs? What steps should the U.S. Government take to protect its public and private entities? How can the U.S. Government respond to attacks on private entities?

 The Chapman Law Review will explore these and other questions at our next symposium on January 29, 2016, to be held at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.  We invite interested scholars and practitioners to submit abstracts for papers to present at the symposium on the topic of cybersecurity, focusing on cyberattacks, corporate hackings, available government responses, and attorneys’ corresponding ethical duties.

 Submission Information

We are looking for papers between 10,000 and 15,000 words. If you would like to apply to participate in the Symposium, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by June 22, 2015. The deadline for the completed paper will likely be in October 2015.  Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Chapman Law Review in approximately April 2016, and the authors will participate in the 2016 Chapman Law Review Symposium on Friday, January 29, 2016.

 If you have questions about the Symposium, please contact Alexa Stephenson, Senior Symposium Editor, at steph156@mail.chapman.edu. 

A Rash Prediction

    Two and a half hours of oral argument in the same-sex marriage cases produced the expected division between the four liberals and the four conservatives.  So, as anticipated, the fulcrum is Justice Kennedy.  Kennedy expressed some misgivings about a judicial redefinition of marriage but also indicated his sympathy with the plaintiffs’ arguments.  He was quiet during the argument concerning whether states have an obligation to recognize same-sex marriages that were validly entered into in a sister state.  From these scant threads comes my rash prediction: Kennedy will join the four conservatives (perhaps in an opinion concurring in the judgment) finding no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, but he will join the four liberals in an opinion holding that states must recognize same-sex marriages created in jurisdictions that allow such marriages. By doing so he will adhere to his federalism inclinations and still advance the cause of same-sex marriage.  The effect, of course, will be to spur legislative action in the states to permit same-sex marriage.  While not the result LGBT activists desire it will give further momentum to the movement to accept same-sex marriage.  But for politicians hoping that the Court will take the issue off the political stage it will be a disappointment, as it will likely add steam to the adoption of state RFRA statutes that seek to preserve religious objections to participating in same-sex marriage rituals. In June, we'll see how wrong my prediction machine may be.

Savannah Law Review Symposium CFP: "The Walking Dead"

This is the season for planning symposia for next year, it seems.  I've just received the Savannah Law Review's call for papers for their September symposium, called "The Walking Dead."  Cribbing now from their CFP, the symposium

will survey academic topics about how death, and fear of death, affects the law of the living. What better situs for this topic than Savannah, Georgia—a city both haunted and charmed by the dead, where spectral imprint often trumps that of the living.

 The Walking Dead Colloquium will provide a forum to discuss the “shadowy” legal interpolation of the dead on the living and explore both its positive and negative ramifications in an effort to strike a pluralistic balance between the law of past, present, and future.  Thematic examples may include legal recognition of the dead’s wishes affecting real property and intellectual property; regulation of pandemics from yellow fever to Ebola; constitutional analysis relying upon views of the dead—the Framers—versus a “living” Constitution; and other myriad examples of the dead influencing law: the death penalty; desecration laws; the Right to Die Movement; posthumous evidentiary privileges; wrongful death and rights of survivorship; regulation of corpses, organ donation, and burials; stigma harms to real property inhabited by ghosts; and post-apocalyptic justice.

 Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words by August 1, 2015, to be considered. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from students, professors, and practitioners. Selections for participation will be announced on a rolling basis. For participants also selected for publication, a completed paper will be due by September 15, 2015. Savannah Law Review’s Spring 2016 Issue will include selected written submissions to The Walking Dead.

 The Walking Dead will take place at Savannah Law School on September 18-19, 2015, with a variety of roundtable presentations and speakers. We look forward to receiving submissions and hosting this exciting event.

 Please send submissions to lawreview@savannahlawschool.org with The Walking Dead in the subject line. 

Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, author of Immortality and the Law, will present the keynote address.  Unsurprisingly I hope there will be talk about access to cemeteries on private property and the constitutional significance of cemetery dedication addresses.  This topic calls out for a paper on the dedication of post-Civil War cemeteries in the south and the south's response to the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The image is Savannah Law School.

In Memoriam: Greg Lastowka

I am incredibly sad to report that a wonderful colleague of ours in the Philadelphia area - Professor Gregory Lastowka, of Rutgers-Camden Law - has passed away.  He was 46.  Greg died after a year of battling cancer.  In addition to being a remarkable scholar, Greg was an amazingly kind and gentle man.  He is already missed.

Same-sex Marriage, Polygamy, and the Constitution

In a column online at the New York Times, Adam Liptak discusses the different ways in which the Supreme Court might rule in favor of same-sex marriage—a narrow decision requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, a broad decision recognizing a right to same-sex marriage on the grounds that same-sex marriage bans discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and deny same-sex couples a fundamental right, or a middle of the road decision.

To what extent might the justices be influenced by their concerns about the implications of a right to same-sex marriage for a right to polygamous marriage? If traditional ideas about marriage are not sufficient to justify a ban on same-sex marriage, are they sufficient to justify a ban on polygamous marriage, especially since polygamy bans arose out of anti-Mormon animus?

Laura Rosenbury Named Dean Of Florida Law

Pr0fessor Laura Rosenbury of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law has been named the new Dean of University of Florida Law. She has previously been vice-dean for research and faculty development at Wash U.  Rosenbury holds a JD from Harvard.  

CJ Roberts and the Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2015

(Cross posted on The Legal Ethics Forum)

With one glaring exception, every judicial system in the United States has adopted some version of the Code of Judicial Conduct – and they did not have to be coerced into doing it.  The outlier, of course, is the United States Supreme Court, which has steadfastly resisted promulgating any rules of ethics, ever since the concept first arose in the 1924, under the leadership of Chief Justice Taft.  Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) thinks that the situation is ridiculous and he recently introduced a bill that would require the Supreme Court to adopt written ethics rules within 180 days of the law’s enactment.  Importantly, the proposed Supreme Court Ethics Act does not specify the content of the necessary code, leaving that to the Court itself.  “There is absolutely no reason why Supreme Court justices shouldn't be subject to the same code of conduct as all other federal judges,” said Murphy in a press release, adding that the law would “make the court more accountable and more transparent.”  Co-sponsor Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) agreed, explaining that “it doesn’t make sense that members of the highest court in the land are the only federal judges exempt from the code of conduct.”

Rep. Slaughter went on to detail some of the many times a justice’s ethics have been questioned in recent years, predictably focusing on the alleged faults of the conservative majority, some of whom, she said, had “allowed their names to be used to promote political fundraisers.”  In fact, however, complaints about Supreme Court justices are bi-partisan.  Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, for example, has called for Justices Kagan and Ginsburg to recuse themselves from this week’s argument in the gay marriage case, claiming that they are compromised because each has officiated at a same-sex wedding. 

None of that is going to matter to Chief Justice John Roberts, however, who regards all such questions as outside interference.  In response to an earlier version of the proposed Supreme Court Ethics Act, he flatly rejected the idea that his court, or the public, would benefit from written rules. 

Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Future of Legal Education

Dean Andrew Morriss of Texas A&M Law has a piece up with the above title at Library of Law and Liberty.     Brian Tamanaha,   Sam Estreicher, and Ken Randall offer responses.  A pretty thoughtful discussion though probably nothing that faithful readers have not already considered and argued about elsewhere.

Kathleen Boozang Named Dean Of Seton Hall Law

Professor and Associate Dean Kathleen Boozang of Seton Hall Law has been named the school's new dean, taking over from longtime dean Patrick Hobbs this summer.  She has a JD from Washington University in St. Louis.

AALS Section On Law & Sports Seeks Award Nominations

This just in:

The AALS Section on Law and Sports is pleased to announce the inaugural AALS Section on Law and Sports Award to recognize an individual that has made a substantial and significant contribution to scholarship, teaching, and/or service in the area of law relating to sports. Section members and other individuals are eligible for the award, but law schools, institutions, and organizations are not eligible to receive the award. A committee comprised of section members will consider all nominations and select a deserving recipient for recognition at the 2016 AALS Annual Meeting.

Please email nominations – and any supporting information – to Professor Dionne Koller at dkoller@ubalt.edu. In your nomination, please provide an explanation as to how the nominee meets the criteria for the award. Nominations are due by August 1, 2015.

What Do the Best Law Mentors Do?

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Professors Terri Beiner, Kelly Browe Olson, and Kelly Terry, and Dean Michael Schwartz are launching a study of the best law mentors in the country.  Cribbing from a letter I received today, they "are looking for attorney mentors who transform junior lawyers’ careers and even lives, study those mentors in depth, and understand why they are so effective. Based on this research, we will identify and describe a set of behaviors, attitudes, and habits that are characteristic of the best law mentors.   We hope to produce a work that is a manual for attorneys who aspire to be transformative mentors, a benefit to legal employers for hiring and training mentors, and a tool more junior lawyers might use to find good mentors.  Thus, anyone (you, your colleagues, or your alumni) who contributes to our study by nominating a mentor will both honor a great colleague and help move the profession forward by improving lawyer mentoring.

We will solicit nominations, gather evidence of nominees’ excellence, and pare the list to the most extraordinary legal mentors. We will then study the mentors where they work, interviewing both the mentors and focus groups of current and former mentees.  We also hope to observe mentoring interactions.  We will sift through the information we gather, identify what the best mentors have in common and areas of important difference, and organize the book by the common themes identified through this process. We plan to finish our research over the next three years and complete the book, What the Best Law Mentors Do, by January 2019."

The book will be published by Harvard University Press.  You can learn more about the book project here.   They are soliciting nominations here.

Infilaw Holding Off On Seeking Charleston Acquisition

According to news reports, Infilaw appears to be backing away from acquiring Charleston School of Law.  The proposed acquisition of Charleston stalled after Infilaw withdrew its application to the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education lasat June.  At the time, Infilaw indicated that it would resubmit the application - presumably after addressing concerns surfaced by Commission staff - but the company now says it has no plans to resubmit.  And Charleston students are now in limbo.  

H/T Richard Gershon

LSAC Data and Predicting Number of Applicants for Fall 2015, Part 15

The LSAC is now reporting that "As of 4/17/15, there are 315,777 fall 2015 applications submitted by 47,172 applicants. Applicants are down 2.6% and applications are down 4.7% from 2014.  Last year at this time, we had 89% of the preliminary final applicant count." If this year's applicants follow last year's pattern, there will be approximately 52,968 applicants this year.  The last post in this series is here.

What does this mean for law schools?  It looks like the precipitous, year-over-year declines in applicants are over and we're reaching some stability, though I wouldn't expect an increase in applicants next year (fall 2016).  I'm thinking that we're going to chug along with somewhere in the neighborhood of 36,000 first years next year.  There's still a lot on the table in terms of what the curriculum will look like going forward and the cost of attending law school.  

Now that the applicants seem to be stabilizing I'm guessing that the story for law schools for the next few years will how they adjust to smaller revenue.  I'm thinking the very limited hiring that we've seen this year will continue into next year.  I'm also thinking that faculty size will shrink through retirements and perhaps some more buyouts.  For those schools lucky enough to be able to hire, my guess is that their needs will be focused in areas of greatest curricular need, which I would expect will be business law and experiential learning largely.

Way back in spring 2009 I predicted that teaching loads would rise and that publication requirements would fall.  The first was correct; the second, given the wild over-supply of people who want to get into the academy may turn out to be wrong.  That is, in times of decline, the productivity we expect of workers may increase across the board -- from teaching to service to scholarship.

Paul Campos Compares Law School Defenders to Holocaust and Slavery Deniers

There are no printable words I can summon that would adequately express my disgust at Paul Campos' latest post comparing people who disagree with his and other's critiques of law school with holocaust and slavery denialists. 

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/04/law-school-denialism

Update:  You can read Paul Campos' response in the comments thread. 

Update #2:  As reported by Brian Leiter at http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/, Campos' primary target in this matter, Michael Simovic, is the grandson of holocaust survivors which makes the reference to holocaust deniers even more gratuitously offensive.  Seconding one commenter's comment, is there any doubt that smearing opponents with references to the holocaust and slavery has no place in the legal education debate?   Among other defects, it is absolutely insulting to the survivors and victims of those tragedies to compare their suffering with that faced by law school graduates.  Even with the qualifier that it's not "as bad" as that.

Update #3:  Paul Campos has posted another response way down in the comments thread.  If that's too far to scroll for the average reader, I think a fair summary of his response is that since only one person objected in the comments thread on his original LGM post, his references to holocaust and slavery deniers should not be considered offensive. 

Update #4:  This thread has officially gone off the rails.  Everyone please enjoy the weekend, I am suspending comments.  (I will unlock and update if the info about the IBR and marriage is incorrect.  If there is no update, that means the info is still valid to the best of my knowledge).  We now have an update, see the last comment by me.