#action lawyers

[reasonsforhope]

"The vision

“Every lawyer has skills that can help the climate. We’ve just gotta make the connections.” — Environmental lawyer and advocate Matthew Karmel

The spotlight

“How many lawyers does it take to break a Guinness World Record?”

Matthew Karmel posed this question on LinkedIn in February, adding, “No, this isn’t a bad lawyer joke; it’s a reason for climate optimism.”

Karmel, a principal at the law firm Offit Kurman and the chair of its environmental and sustainability law practice group, is one of the organizers of the Climate Pro Bono Bootcamp, a two-day virtual conference dedicated to helping more lawyers and legal professionals figure out how to donate their time and skills to advance climate work.

When people — including lawyers themselves — think of the intersection between climate and law, their minds may go straight to high-profile climate lawsuits or other legal action aimed at holding big polluters and inactive governments accountable. But there are many other forms of legal support that climate causes might need, from simple contracts to forming a new business or nonprofit to legal defense. “There are so many attorneys working at large law firms, small law firms — attorneys everywhere who just don’t do litigation, but are still very passionate about climate change and want to apply their skills in that way,” said Stephanie Demetry, the executive director of Green Pro Bono, an organization that matches attorneys with companies, nonprofits, grassroots leaders, and others who need legal assistance to advance climate solutions.

Karmel had the idea for the conference in late 2023, after he had been working with Green Pro Bono for a few years. “I was sitting there thinking, Why isn’t everyone doing this?” he recalled. “The things I’m doing aren’t unique. It doesn’t require specialized legal skills. It requires passion, and the general legal knowledge that every lawyer has.” He approached Demetry with the idea of hosting a training to help demystify what climate-related pro bono work can entail and build up the network of attorneys interested in offering it.

They held the first bootcamp in January of 2024 and had around 700 attendees — far exceeding their expectations. After the event, Demetry said, Green Pro Bono more than doubled the number of attorneys in its network and also saw a 53 percent increase in the number of projects that got picked up.

But for this year’s bootcamp, planned for late April, they’re aiming to increase that attendance — and setting the ambitious goal of growing it a hundredfold. That’s the number that would break a Guinness World Record for the largest attendance at a virtual law conference in one week (yes, this entry truly does exist). It might be a longer-term goal, but it’s one they’re serious about. Breaking the record, Karmel said, would be a powerful way to demonstrate the growing interest in climate action among the legal community, and also an opportunity to reach thousands more attorneys, students, and others with the event’s key message: that you don’t have to choose between your day job and working for the causes you care about."

You can find out more about the climate pro bono bootcamp, which is FREE, right here. It's April 22 & 23, 2025 at 12:00pm – 5:00pm EDT

-via Grist, April 2, 2025

[hunybody]

"i can't believe eddie did that to christopher" baby eddie didn't do anything TO christopher. it was a jenga tower of insane circumstances that collapsed at the exact wrong moment. he literally broke up with her. he did not want kim in his house MUCH LESS kim with bangs on cosplaying his dead wife. unfortunately for his control issues he did not have a handle on any part of that. which will inevitably make him worse btw

[robby-bobby-tommy]

‼️SPOILERS FOR ACE ATTORNEY INVESTIGATIONS (1 AND 2) AND THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY‼️

Plus Kazuma, Phoenix ect

Add characters that you think would fit the category

(Btw I'm not justifying their actions, but man do I feel bad for them. After one point their lives became a freaking greek tragedy)

[valtsv]

Yo can I get some silt verses hot takes? Also top fave (non-val) characters

apart from VAL who is the bestest ever, i really like paige, carpenter, mercer and gage, shrue, acantha, and hayward.

my "hot take" is that everyone in tsv is a worse person than we as fans make them out to be and a better person than they personally think they are. however this is just the human condition i think. it's easier to scrutinise our own flaws than it is to hold someone else to the same absurdly high standards.

[valeisarealerslut]

did y’all know that in argentina you literally can’t be punished for just thinking about committing a crime? like… you could openly fantasize about k*lling someone, even post about it online, and as long as you don’t take any real-world steps you’re not guilty of anything. not even a slap on the wrist. nada.

it’s based on this principle called “el pensamiento no delinque” — basically, “thoughts don’t commit crimes.” which sounds kind of poetic until you realize how unhinged people can be on the internet.

and yeah, part of me is like... lock 'em up?? if you’re out here posting threats or wild shit, that should mean something?? but at the same time, you can’t arrest someone just for their potential to do harm — not in theory, anyway. argentina’s criminal law is built around the idea that you only go to jail after the damage is done. it’s kinda terrifying honestly.

[elftwink]

#1 internet life advice is to have fun and be yourself. #2 is stop admitting to crimes in writing

[cloudwasdead]

This shit took me 13 hours and it still looks terrible but idc at this point

Anyways COURTEMMA WOHOO

[thekimspoblog]

It's always so funny to me when critics say stuff like "The audience is seduced by Joe's narration, and so we excuse his behavior long after we should". When for me, the point of the internal monologue - all the way back to the pilot episode - was to damn Joe completely! To showcase the mentality of a hypocrite. A character like Walter White, we can see the contradictions in his words and actions, and make an educated guess on why he does the things he does, but it's not like we get to hear the exact moment Walt decides to poison Brock. Joe, we know exactly what he's thinking and feeling at all times. We know the lies he tells himself as thought crime, and the audience has a better handle on him than any in-universe jury ever could.

I feel like people kind of miss the point when they talk about Joe being a different character in the books vs the TV show: The fact that television is a visual medium allows for whole new levels of irony a novel isn't capable of. Being a TV show gives the writers more freedom to tone down Joe's unlikability while still making it clear how much of a mess he is, because we get to experience the contrast of another character's words, tone, and facial expressions with the motivations Joe ascribes to them. We are able to keep one foot in Joe's reality and one foot in something more objective, in a way that would be really hard to balance in a literary format. I'm not saying book Joe and TV Joe aren't different beasts; if nothing else, the shit that happens to them wildly diverges. But if the show version wasn't enough to convince you this character is a seething violent misogynist, all I can say is I'll pray for you. Joe's kind of a cartoon character; in both versions, the writers give you every opportunity not to fall into the trap of empathizing with him. If this show helped you recognize signs of abuse, more power to you. But to me, the point was always that we were only being given access to the sanitized, repressed version of this man's thoughts, and that that was alarming enough. That we get to know EXACTLY what Joe wants and judge him that much more harshly for still being unhappy when he gets it.

[martyr-mayhem]

Tomorrow 3/21/25 is Mahmoud Khalil’s hearing in immigration court, and we urgently need to ramp up calls to U.S. lawmakers to urge them to put pressure on the Trump administration to release him from detention immediately.

Contact your representatives and senators NOW with this form 👇🏻

On 3/8/25, ICE agents unlawfully arrested and arbitrarily detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent graduate of Columbia University. He was targeted for his role in student protests at Columbia last year, and his arrest comes on the heels of the State Department’s announcement that it plans to revoke the visas or green cards and deport students affiliated with pro-Palestine protests.

Mahmoud Khalil has not been charged with any crime.

Mahmoud Khalil is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.

Mahmoud is expecting his first child with his wife next month. He should be home right now, not held in a notoriously cruel detention facility far from his family, community, and lawyers.

[heavenb3nt]

Anyone bothered by the fact that the things that drove him insane were done to him by people he should have been able to trust. The drumbeat was put in his head by Rassilon, and while it’s not news no one can trust their leader in general, he should’ve been able to. He shouldn’t have been driven mad for the end result of being pawn in a strategy. Then the guilt of Torvics murder, which Theta did, and no one blames him for that, but he chose to give it to Koschei when he had the chance. A lapse of judgment made by a scared child which drove his best friend to insanity. He also didn’t find out that either of these were done to him intentionally for a very long time. He went his entire life thinking it was all him, he was the problem and there was something inherently bad and wrong about him. I mean, the drums and the guilt. He never stood a chance. He was doomed from the start.

[qwesty-030]

Gene does not do school work because he wants to. He does school work because he feels like HAS TO. He feels OBLIGATED to do so. Gene even states it himself: albeit he’s an academically successful student, it doesn’t mean he’s interested in learning. The end result (getting good grades) is what matters to most to Gene. To me, it’s very clear that he uses grades as external validation. He uses grades to define his self-worth and identity.

This is especially true when Gene flunked his first test bc of Finny. This flunk was a very personal attack for Gene (unbeknownst to Finny). that was the final straw for Gene. THAT was the moment he saw Finny as an enemy. THATTT was the moment Gene’s “war” truly began. and the rest is just history..,,

also not to mention he literally WEAPONIZES his academic achievement to “outbest ” Finny

[thedemonscrawler]

I'm just gonna do this to Ruin

LIKE. YES I KNOW HE DID EVERYTHING WRONG. BUT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED HOW SAD HE MIGHT BE ABOUT IT

Like aaaaa I'm cursed to only like characters when they're losing I guess, and a Pyrrhic victory counts as a loss. I didn't CARE about this guy when he was the main antagonist, and then Eclipse 3.0 chucked him in the back of a car and kidnapped him and I was suddenly interested. And NOW, when everyone is very much upset about Solar, I'm off to the side shaking this bastard around because we finally got some concrete answers to what's going on in his head.

Just! This whole thing-- this is an exceptionally Moon thing for him to have done. To go 'I'm going to completely and totally remove this possible threat from ever occurring, and I'm fine with being the bad guy to do it'? That's some Old Moon kind of thinking. This wasn't a plan he came up with in the past few months, this took him years.

And speaking of years! Fifty years of playing pretend! Of acting like you enjoy hurting people, that you don't care as your body literally falls apart around you. I'm not a fan of the idea that he was never infected, I like the perspective better that he was infected, it just wasn't as responsible for his behavior as he made it out to be-- but still. At some point he had to have gone numb to it for the sake of his own survival.

What does that do to your mentality? Your outlook? What's it like knowing that your whole world was brought to its knees by your creator? What's it like being the only semi-stable person you know for half a century? What's it like realizing that you're also changing, and not for the better?

He's just... so painfully isolated, in a way that Eclipse doesn't even come close to touching.

And! And even after being 'cured'! He's still isolated! Like it was a good thing he WAS up to something-- can you imagine how crushing it would be if he'd been genuinely not doing anything, and he was still treated with suspicion for a solid like 4 months? By probably the most consistent group of animatronics he's had to talk to that weren't infected with a weird virus?

Like, the man didn't get repaired until 3 months after being cured, after Solar made a blueprint in his spare time. He didn't get a bed until Moon felt guilty about rummaging around inside his head-- and tbh I don't know if he ever got to actually use that bed. He let them call him Ruin.

Ruin never had a home in 'our' dimension.

And hhhhngh like I'm not even sure he cares, because he's past the point of caring. He's got one of Sun's worst traits as well, "There's no point in sharing what I'm thinking because no one is listening". He could have approached Moon and Solar with like "Hey okay so I started on this plan to do this thing like 10 years ago, I would like some input" and maybe an alternative could have been found!

But he didn't, because he's alone. He came up with the best plan he could, weighed the risks, and acted on it, all by himself. A single weird Eclipse against 5,000 Creators, because he felt like that was the greatest threat.

And like, lets be real-- Solar's death was 100% a narrative necessity. Otherwise we the audience wouldn't really care that Ruin had wiped so many dimensions from existing, it'd just be a number. That thing of like, you gotta make it personal to have impact. Very good storytelling right there.

(Though from a in-universe perspective, man it must have been an unpleasant shock to learn that of course the only other dimensional refugee was from one of the worlds you had to destroy. Like, come on, what are the odds)

He did something horrible. A multi-dimensional catastrophe to prevent a multi-dimensional catastrophe. He probably accepted the ramifications of it ages ago. He just... utterly lacks any hope, you know? No hope of forgiveness, no hope of improvement. He survived his world long enough to do this thing, and he has nothing else going for him.

He's just waiting for them to finally kill off his body, because he already died years ago.

Anyway I'm desperately trying to find an angle that can be used to maybe pull him out of his coffin here and so far I'm not seeing one qq but maybe future eps will give me something to work off of.

[anxiously-going]

I know I'm late to the party, but I only watched live action Beauty and the Beast like a month ago and while I do understand everyone's complaints about The Dress being underwhelming and all that, I think probably my biggest visual gripe is that they cut out all the dandelions.

There are supposed to be dandelions all over the field while Belle sings about wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere because she's making a wish. She was making a wish, disney, where are my dandelions?

[imarson404]

Is the death note 2015 drama good?

I’d say yeah, actually. It really was! 8, maybe 8.5 out /10.

i have to be real, I seriously loved watching this series, particularly the second half. I’ll do a spoiler free review first, but I do think I need to make it clear that I did not watch this in the conventional way let’s just say. My sibling and I watched this through a nearly 200 video long playlist of 2 minute clips on YouTube, in Japanese (duh) with Portuguese subtitles- note that neither of us speak Portuguese, nor Japanese, and are only vaguely competent in Spanish and French respectively, so my experience of the series may be a little skewed to how it may come off in its original or properly subbed versions. I cannot speak on how the writing was for the dialogue, for example, but I can talk about the plot, characterisation, etc.

if you want to watch any live action adaptation (that’s not the musical, because GO WATCH THAT) it had better be this one.

SPOILER FREE REVIEW STARTS HERE

first off, the changes. Boy were there changes. Practically the entire plot takes a hard left right from the start, and it keeps on going from there. Vague outlines, like Yotsuba and misa and Mikami and yellow box warehouse remain, but the circumstances are all vastly different. i adored the changes to both Watari and L’s relationship, and both of theirs with near and… Mello. I don’t think it really spoils much for me to say that for some reason known by only the writers of that series and god, Mello is made an alter of Near’s that is represented by a ventriloquist dummy. i also will never be the same after this version of soichiro and Light’s relationship. The fact they seem closer yet more distant, and the parentification of light drives a wedge and brings them together at the same time. As much as I LOVE the original version of them, there is something just more utterly devastating about these two here. The mock execution for example ends with light clinging onto his father while they both sob, and I’m not even joking when I say that it brought me to tears.

speaking of parentification, the reason for that is Dead Mom Trauma. Yeah they killed off Sachiko (which I’m not counting as a spoiler because it’s revealed within the first episode and has no plot relevance other than giving light MORE motive). I’m not too sure why this was necessary, and it’s this type of slightly contrived writing that drops its rating a bit for me. This didn’t need to happen

on the topic of light, he is a VERY different character in this. He’s messier, a nervous wreck half the time, smart but not so infallible as anime or manga light. He panics with raye penber, panics with light, IS A MISA MISA FAN and has a job. He has a best friend and a bully. He’s more average, and knows loss, and his decline is less of a sharp drop off than it is a slow painful descent into utter madness and evil. He’s a babygirl until suddenly you see a flashback and realise he’s not that guy anymore

Ryuk is great. An annoying bastard who watches on through the end.

Misa is also pretty good. She’s pretty similar to the source material tbh, but has a little more agency, and has Mikami as her lawyer, or at least the lawyer who told her her parents murderer was going free, which is interesting

speaking of Mikami, he is a secondary character pretty much the whole way through, and we get to see his build up of resentment towards the criminals who go free despite his efforts, which I very much enjoyed. I always felt like he came out of nowhere a bit in the anime, so this was a welcome change.

before I completely move on from light and miss, btw, light and his friend genuinely go to about 5 SEPARATE ICHIGO BERRY CONCERTS OVER THE SPAN OF LIKE 4 EPISODES?? Ichigo berry is misa’s group in this, and I find it hilarious that light was a fan before even the death note showed up

aaaaand for L. He’s really damn good. His characterisation is widely different from the anime, he’s more optimistic and suave in a way, he smiles and lounges in his chair instead of crouching, and wears white button down shirts and trousers and hands Watari clearly empty pieces of paper to which Watari declares ‘another wilful request!’ And goes on to do some task for him. He has a screensaver on every computer in this hotel room designed as task force hq that changes at night to a nighttime version. He's hot. He’s gay. He’s autistic. He’s totally different to the L we all know and love but at the same time is recognisable as L and loveable in his own way. overall, the plot was pretty good although it was very messy to begin with, raye penber is like,, a main antagonist, for the first 3 eps??? The Shinigami cgi is awful, the fashion is painfully mid 2010s and the characters are very clearly not the same as in the original. if you go into it expecting a perfect 1-1 of the anime, just LA, you’re bound to come back disappointed. If you go into it looking forward to seeing an alternate take on the world of death note, another universe where everything is a little to the left, you’ll thoroughly enjoy it. The emotional beats hit hard, and given it’s a tv drama, the story focuses far more on the characters and their emotions than the mind fuckery we’re used to. What does remain, however, is the Lawlight, to such an extreme degree where I find it plausible that they knew what they were doing. They knew that their relationship could come off as romantic, and played it up. now onto the spoilers!

SPOILERY STUFF STARTS HERE!!!

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I LOVE THIS DAMN SHOW ICL

Light killing his bully and trying to erase the names??? Otoharada almost killing Soichiro??? THE CAMERAS STILL BEING THERE WHEN MISA ARRIVES???!!?!!

gahhh where do I even start. I’ve got FEELINGS about L’s death and Soichiro’s, FEELINGS about the dad friendship of Watari and Soichiro, FEELINGS about the lawlight of it all.

My sibling and I are both staunch supporters of both the Good Dad soichiro and Good Dad Watari perspectives, and we were FED. I scrumpt many screams at just how fed we were getting, that’s how good it was. i guess I’ll start with that. The conversation between soichiro and Watari about their ‘kids’ was genuinely moving, and it was adorable to hear them both talk about how much they love their children.

that made it all the more heartbreaking when soichiro died. At that point, L was dead (which I will get to) and near/Mello was on the run, which left Watari utterly alone. The only person using hq at that point was light, who was fully Evil and he knew it. I screamed so loud it started everyone around me when soichiro said Light’s name while he was monologuing. That is EXACTLY how I wanted a confrontation between them to go down. Soichiro seeing through lights acting and lies and being so distraught that it was true, his son was Kira, and it was obvious the whole time when you knew where to be looking. The way he never took his eyes off of him after L’s death, and the way that that allowed him to see all the little glances and ‘that Kira face you make’ as Ryuk put it. He saw under the mask, and was disgusted by what he saw. When he screamed lights name as he tried to weasel his way out of it like he had done for L’s death, I’d like to think it was the first ounce of fear he’d felt since L had died. And of course he denied denied denied right up until Soichiro tried to burn the note, and THAT was when he screamed and fought and begged, not when his father was writing his own name in the note which he had sworn was a fake. He let his father die, but drew the line at the book being burned.

he pried the notebook out of his own father’s dead vice grip.

without a single ounce of a joke, that was my favourite scene in the series. One of my favourites in DN as a whole. As I said in the non-spoiler section, this contrasted with the mock-execution scene is just so devastating, yotsuba!light loved his dad so damn much, and Kira just watched him kill himself, knowing full well he could stop it.

In tandem, L’s death was so underpinned by the friendship between L and Light as well. They don’t just pretend not the despise each other, they genuinely tolerate, or even get along. Of course I could point out the obvious, like the shower scene or ‘I wish we could have met another way’ ‘this is the only way we could have met’ but i actually want to bring up some smaller points. First off, that moment where Matsuda asks him why he still calls L Ryuga instead of L or Ryuzaki, and he tells him that it’s because he’d rather have Ryuga the friend than L the detective. And even just prior to the ‘I wish we could have met…’ scene, when light thinks he’s about to kill L he sobs as he tells him that all he wanted is to show L his new world, and that he wants to be his friend forever (‘friend’ yeah ok dude). He screams and kisses(?) his head when he does die, and rocks him as he lies there, and holds him close until he’s taken away. And L’s final posthumous video. The one where he says, even though he admits the chance that he was wrong and this video needs to be shown is slim, that he was sorry for doubting Light and that he’s glad to be his friend, and that he would be good enough to come and work with him and Near someday. And Light never gets to see that video.

the scene where L comforts near/Mello after his death is so tragic it hurts. Watari is crying, and he hugs near despite the fact that they seemed pretty detached from each other prior. They’ve lost family, and even Wammy’s in this version are allowed to let emotion overcome them.

somethings I wasn’t too big a fan of included:

raye penber being SUCH A MAJOR ANTAGONIST?? why was he a bigger threat than L for so long. Why was his real name actually Mark Dwellam or something. Why didn’t Naomi exist (well I know we got Himura/Lidner but still) why did light take such a big risk instructing him to write the names IN A CAFE?? He almost killed Light. He figured it out before anyone else really, and it’s so ridiculous that this man really did All That.

also, Yostuba was anticlimactic. The whole arc lasted barely an episode and a half, if that, and I really loved this version of mind wiped light and Misa, so that was a real shame. They figured out about Higuchi so quickly it was hilarious. The CGI when light was pricking his finger to write with was glaring obvious and bad, and duh I didn’t expect the actor to actually do it but it broke immersion a bit when this blob of blood looks so clearly edited in. You can really tell he just pressed the side of the needle into his finger and that made me laugh a bit. The good thing about the bad things is at least they’re funny and not just frustrating.

my final major grievance was just with the pacing. I feel like they hit the sweet spot between episodes 8-10 and then fell flat in the last one a bit. It feels pretty rushed but also like it dragged somehow. The first few eps definitely dragged, while the middle section flew by. also, ichigo berry performs the same song every time.

To conclude, this is a totally different show to the original and the characters reflect that. Light is a nervous wreck far longer than he’s the psychopathic god of the new world, and L is a cool guy who eats fruit pouches(?) and tbh they should kiss cos of that. Light as a clearly gay-coded make up designer slayed. Goodnight all.

[bottan-blobbington]

🌹

A flash of light, screech of tires, then a bruising impact to his right kidney. Loki was lifted off his feet and smacked into the windshield of the bright-orange Audi R8. He recognized the car before the shocked-looking driver: Tony Stark, the man they were suing. Stark pumped the brakes and Loki unceremoniously rolled off the side of the hood and fell, face first, onto the wet, dirty pavement of December’s Manhattan. He wheezed and made eye contact with a very pale Darcy. He gestured for her to move, and with a silent thumbs-up, she disappeared behind a dumpster.

(Act 1 of hallmark_frostiron_au_V02.odt)

[pilonciillo]

lol didn’t think someone giving money would give me anxiety