Peter Lattman reported on Gary Farmer, a Florida judge who decided to try his hand at humorous legal writing in the course of deciding a lawsuit. Discussion of the opinion around the internet (see, e.g., Orin Kerr) focused on the propriety of a judge turning his job into a forum for self-promotion. Regardless of whether judges are allowed to have fun with their work, in my opinion, it wasn’t very funny at all. But perhaps I had lost my sense of humor after reading the ridiculous nature of the lawsuit.
The case was brought by the owners of the championship racehorse Funny Cide against the publishers of the Miami Herald, for a newspaper report that the horse’s jockey had used an illegal device to help him win the Kentucky Derby. The report was false, and the paper ran a correction. But that wasn’t good enough for the owners of Funny Cide; they sued in May 2005.
Their complaint? Although Funny Cide won the Preakness, the false report caused the horse to lose the Belmont Stakes, and hence miss out on the Triple Crown, which would have been worth large sums of money.
Their theory? Funny Cide’s jockey was so motivated to disprove the false report that he worked the horse too hard in the Preakness, which tired the horse out so it couldn’t win the Belmont three weeks later.
As you can imagine, this theory is (to use the technical legal term) loony. Even if they had a snowball’s chance of proving causation — as if there were no other possible reason a horse might lose a race? — they would also have to show that it was foreseeable by the Herald that their report would cause this to happen. This they obviously could not do, and so the court granted summary judgment to the newspaper. What makes this case especially egregious, though, is that the humorous opinion being discussed above wasn’t written by the trial court; Gary Farmer is an appellate judge. That’s correct: the horse’s owners appealed the dismissal of their frivolous lawsuit.
In case you were wondering, Bruce Rogow was listed as one of the attorneys for the horse’s owners.
Mr. Rogow has taught Civil Procedure, Federal Jurisdiction, Constitutional Law, Appellate Practice, Criminal Law and Legal Ethics.
4 Comments
Personally I’d rather have judges that attempt humor and fail, but get the judgement correct; than the current plethora of judges whose rulings would be funny if they weren’t so sad.
Maybe the judge wasn’t trying to be funny at all. Perhaps he knew his jokes weren’t funny, and the whole idea was to kill humor while ruling on a horse named after killing humor.
If you like funny court cases, Google about the judge in England last month who stopped the lawyers to ask what a website was.
Justin,
“If you like funny court cases, Google about the judge in England last month who stopped the lawyers to ask what a website was.”
Unfortunately that’s not actually true.
Such things as Urban Myths are made of.