Viewers of Fox and MSNBC in the Washington, D.C., area will soon see a new ad that calls for greater Supreme Court transparency, the ABA Journal reports from various news sources. The six-figure campaign unveiled today by a group called Fix the Court criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court as the “most powerful and least accountable branch of government. The ad campaign has five goals: for the court to report reasons for recusals, to post detailed financial disclosures online, to adhere to the code of ethics governing federal judges, to disclose public appearances and generally allow media coverage, and to broadcast live oral arguments and opinion announcements.

Venita Marie Martin was temporarily suspended from the practice of law today (Nov. 13) for failing to respond to the Board of Professional Responsibility regarding a complaint of misconduct. View the BPR notice.

On Nov. 13, R. Sandler Bailey was reinstated to the practice. Bailey had been suspended by the Supreme Court of Tennessee on Aug. 18 for a period of 60 days. View the BPR notice.

The Tuesday death of Mike Faulk, the 3rd Judicial District's newly-elected Circuit Court judge, has created a vacancy that will be the first addressed by the Governor's Council for Judicial Appointments, the Greeneville Sun reports. The 11-member body was formed through an executive order on Nov. 6, immediately following the election in which voters approved a constitutional amendment establishing a new method for selecting judges. The council, which is so new that its members have yet to be appointed, will select three nominees for Gov. Bill Haslam's consideration to fill the vacancy.

The Nashville Lawyer Chapter of the American Constitution Society will host a discussion with University of North Carolina Law Professor William Marshall about Town of Greece v. Galloway, a case in which the town’s practice of opening its board meetings with a prayer was found not to violate the Establishment Clause. The Nov. 17 program will be held from noon to 1 p.m. at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in Nashville. It will also address early school prayer cases and their extension to more recent cases, including prayer at school commencements and football games. RSVP to nspringer@acslaw.org.

State education chief Kevin Huffman is leaving his position for the private sector. As commissioner of education, Huffman oversaw the department while the state saw improvements in several key academic assessments, but consistently drew the ire of Common Core critics, the Tennessean reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court has lifted a temporary stay and is allowing same-sex marriages to proceed in Kansas, the ABA Journal reports. The order vacates a stay issued Monday evening by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who handles emergency appeals from the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Kansas Supreme Court had stayed same-sex marriage in the state pending proceedings before the court, but a federal judge later ordered the state to begin issuing marriage licenses, a decision that was “a de facto circumvention” of the state litigation, the state argued in its emergency stay application. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have granted the stay application, according to the order.

New research shows that no matter where you earn your graduate degree, the prestige of your undergraduate institution continues to affect earnings. Joni Hersch, professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt Law School found that college graduates who earn their undergraduate degree from a less prestigious university and a graduate degree from an elite university earn much less than those who attend both an elite undergraduate and graduate school. Additionally, the type of graduate degree a student earns is strongly related to prestige of the undergraduate institution. The study found that among male graduates of Tier 1 schools, nearly 11 percent have law degrees compared with the less than three percent of male Tier 4 graduates. Among female Tier 1 graduates, nearly eight percent have law degrees compared to the one percent of female Tier 4 graduates.

According to Altman Weil’s 2014 Chief Legal Officer Survey, the dwindling availability of legal work and demand for services are continuing and show no signs of abatement. The study revealed that in-house legal departments are keeping more legal matters for themselves and are demanding heavy discounts for the work they give to outside counsel. Of the 186 CLO’s to respond to Altman Weil’s survey, 40 percent of them had shifted work during the past year away from outside counsel in favor of keeping the matters in-house. Meanwhile, more than a quarter of responding law departments said they would decrease their use of outside counsel in 2015, compared to only 14 percent that are planning an increase. The ABA Journal has the story.

As many as 179 convicted East Tennessee drug offenders — most of them dealers — will be released from federal prison on Nov. 1, 2015, courtesy of two separate initiatives with the same goals — to free up federal prison beds and to lower what critics contend are draconian penalties for drug offenders. After lowering the penalties for all future federal drug defendants, the U.S. Sentencing Commission earlier this year agreed to grant any criminal convicted in federal court under tougher penalties than currently apply to their crimes who have spent at least a decade behind bars to be set free, except under some limited circumstances. Knoxnews has more.