Another academic-poetry litigation brawl: “New England College has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the former director of its master’s-degree program in poetry stole faculty members and students from the New Hampshire institution and re-created the program at Drew University, in New Jersey”. New England College had offered the country’s only master’s program of its sort, but now six faculty members have departed to join the fledgling program at the New Jersey institution. (Chronicle of Higher Education; Concord Monitor).
Archive for November, 2008
“American Bar Association Recalls 230,000 Defective Lawyers”
It’s just a parody, from The Onion (audio, auto-play). They would never actually recall defective lawyers.
Troll trips up: SCO told to pay Novell $2.5 million
Bankrupt SCO Group Inc., much loathed for its (sometimes successful) efforts to extract copyright royalties from users of the open-source Linux system, has suffered another humiliating defeat in a Utah federal courtroom. The court proceedings determined, among other things, that SCO didn’t in fact own the copyrights it claimed to own, and had breached its fiduciary duty under an earlier agreement with Novell. (Ars Technica, Information Week, GrokLaw). At the height of SCO’s notoriety, the high-profile law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner was pursuing its anti-Linux claims on contingency. Earlier here, here, and here. [Update Sept. 18, 2009: in dramatic reversal, 10th Circuit, McConnell writing, reinstates SCO’s suit; Boies firm still representing SCO. See WSJ Law Blog, 8/25/09]
In other news, progress is being made on a scheme of “defense patent aggregation”; an outfit called the RPX Corp., with subscriptions from large technology-using companies, aims to buy up (presumably lower-value) patents to keep them out of the hands of trolls (WSJ Law Blog).
Microblog 2008-11-25
- Why real estate agents make you sign 1,000 silly forms [Christopher Fountain] Michigan requires acknowledgment that nearby farms “may generate noise, dust, odors” [Land Division Act h/t Sean Fosmire]
- Albuquerque police take out want ad seeking snitches [AP]
- “A prez must know S of S has no agenda other than his own” Chris Hitchens flays the Hillary pick [Slate]
- Not all British nannies are charming: U.K. regulators may ban “happy hour” in bars [AP h/t Jeff Nolan]
- As Georgia “sex offender” horror stories go, Wendy Whitaker case may outdo Genarlow Wilson’s [Below the Beltway; more on Wilson case]
- U.K. juror polls her Facebook friends to help decide on case [AllFacebook h/t @lilyhill and @Rex7; Greenfield]
- Looking for political conservatives on Twitter? Here’s a long list [Duane Lester, All American Blogger; and I have a comment on ways to use Twitter]
- New page of auto-feeds from leading Canada & U.S. law & politics blogs [Wise Law Reader]
- Bailout’s a lot bigger than you think, try $7.8 trillion with a “t” [John Carney]. Claim: with $ sunk since ’80, GM and Ford could have closed own plants and bought all shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan and VW [David Yermack, WSJ via Cowen]. What if Citi gives up Mets naming rights? Gary’s Bail Bonds Stadium just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it [Ray Lehmann]
- Australian class action could derail because overseas funders didn’t register as investment managers [The Australian h/t @SecuritiesD]
Professor fired for blog post charging students with plagiarism
Adjunct Loye Young at Texas A&M International University in Laredo had named and shamed students he said he had caught submitting essays not their own. The university “is paraphrased as stating that the professor ‘was terminated for violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law that prohibits the release of students’ educational records without consent.'” (Eugene Volokh, Nov. 18; Paul Caron, TaxProf, Nov. 18).
“To extinguish candle, blow out flame”
In comments last week, reader Richard Harrison recalled his favorite warning label, on a candle from Target.
“Nice Work If You Can Get It”
Berman DeValerio Pease and other class action lawyers in the settlement of a case against Xerox want reimbursement of about $500 an hour for time spent by temporary attorneys who say they were getting $35/ and $40/hour. “Documents in the Xerox case also suggest the plaintiff lawyers spread the markup on temp attorneys among themselves, sometimes in puzzling ways. Partners at Bernstein Litowitz, a big New York class action firm, spent less than 20 hours on the case, according to court reports. Yet the firm wants $7.5 million for the 15,000 hours” its temps put in. (Daniel Fisher, Forbes, Dec. 8). Eight years ago we recounted how Maryland tort magnate Peter Angelos was expecting to reap between $15,000 and $30,000 an hour on legal work a large chunk of which had been carried out by $12/hour lawyer temps.
AOL putting ads in its users’ emails
So let’s file a class-action lawsuit about it. (Spam Notes, Oct. 24; Cecchini v. AOL LLC, PDF (C.D. Calif.)).
French cafés in decline
You have to get down to paragraph 8 in the New York Times account before you begin to learn about the effect of a nationally legislated smoking ban. “So, there it is. Your café culture is inconsistent with the safety world you have chosen.” (Althouse, Nov. 23; Steven Erlanger, “Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering”, New York Times, Nov. 22).
Lawsuit: school district was wrong to discipline cheerleaders over nude cellphone pics
Just trying to dispose of all the nude cellphone pic lawsuit stories in one weekend, so that we can get back to more seemly litigation topics. (The other one was the case of the couple suing an Arkansas McDonald’s, saying the husband left his cellphone in the restaurant and the nude photos of his wife that were on it wound up on the internet.) In Bothell, Washington, parents of two cheerleaders “have sued the Northshore School District, alleging school officials erred when they suspended the girls from the team this year after nude photos of them circulated throughout the student body via text message.” Cellphone pictures of the two were separately and, it is said, accidentally circulated among fellow students; the lawsuit charges, inter alia, that the school was arbitrary to suspend the two girls while not disciplining students that had seen the pictures. (Jessica Blanchard, “Cheerleaders’ parents sue in nude photos incident”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 21).