Lawyers for Sholom Rubashkin, the Iowa businessman sentenced to 27 years in prison for bank fraud, are calling for a new trial based on the presiding judge’s interaction with federal investigators in the law enforcement raid targeting Rubashkin and his family-owned kosher meatpacking plant. Rubashkin’s lawyers filed a motion for a new trial Thursday, saying the judge failed to disclose the depth of her involvement in the planning of the raid, which ended in the arrest of nearly 400 undocumented workers.

The day after her appointment to oversee discovery in massive litigation against Prudential Life Insurance, a special master has withdrawn amid allegations that impermissible conflicts of interest barred her involvement.

A former acting chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said Tuesday he is “not opposed” to a criminal investigation of the office, which was at the center of the Bush administration’s internal debate about torture. At the same time, Daniel Levin defended the motives of former OLC officials who have drawn criticism because of their involvement in so-called “torture memos.” Levin’s comments were unusual because other former Republican appointees have opposed additional investigations of the OLC.

New York AG Andrew Cuomo has asked Bank of America to allow his office to question the institution’s lawyers in a probe of its merger with Merrill Lynch. The request comes at a time of scrutiny into the involvement of the bank’s lawyers in Merrill Lynch’s decision to issue $3.6 billion in bonus payments on the eve of the merger. In a letter, Cuomo’s office said it cannot adequately explore whether to bring charges against BofA officers because of the bank’s “indiscriminate invocation of the attorney-client privilege.”

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this month began his tenure as a visiting professor at Texas Tech University. His first class is “Contemporary Issues in the Executive Branch,” and when it comes to his students, all topics are open for discussion, he says