Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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“Lawyer Seeks Patent on Form of Patent Trolling”

Sometimes a headline, and the story behind it, just makes our day. (Elefant channeling Patently-O). Given that the “inventor Clive D. Menezes is a Halliburton patent attorney”, and Halliburton as a big industrial company has presumably gotten shaken down by patent trolls many times in the past, it seems to have taken some of the commenters at Patently-O a while to catch on as to possible satirical intent.

Update: Or maybe not precisely satirical intent: Halliburton has issued a statement saying that it “has no intention of applying the technique offensively. Rather, Halliburton intends to use any patent that may issue from this application defensively to discourage entities that engage in such tactics.” (AmLaw Daily).

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National service: Ben Smith (Politico) misses the story

He’s oh-so-dismissive of John Derbyshire for overreacting to an Obama national service plan that (in Smith’s words) “is, whatever its merits, voluntary”. His commenters pile on. Meanwhile, Smith completely misses the actual news of the day on the subject, namely that the Obama transition team’s Change.gov website flatly endorsed a mandatory, not voluntary plan, and then silently edited (and later yanked) its language when bloggers noticed. How misleading is it to describe Derbyshire as reacting to a voluntary plan when he was quite patently reacting to the sudden prospect of a mandatory one? And Andrew Sullivan was unfair and misleading in the same way.

Ben Smith writes for one of the hottest news operations around, which means he’s well situated to start digging for questions you’d think almost any reporter would want to ask about this episode: who drafted or approved the first version, the one that got edited before being yanked? Was it some staffer misinformed about the genuine thinking of the Obama team, which would make the later editing a relatively conventional (if covert) effort to correct a mistake? Or did the language reflect actual thinking that the Obama team has not yet seen fit to share with the public? I certainly hope it was the former and am by no means ready to jump to the latter conclusion. But wouldn’t it be nice if our press corps took an interest in shedding light on such questions? (& welcome Coyote readers).

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November 10 roundup

  • Time for another aspirin: Harvard Law’s Charles Ogletree, key backer of lawsuits for slave reparations, mentioned as possible Attorney General [CBS News, BostonChannel WCVB, Newsweek; earlier speculation about post as civil rights chief]
  • Calif. law requires supervisors to attend sexual harassment prevention training, a/k/a sensitivity training, but UC Irvine biologist Alexander McPherson says he’ll face suspension rather than submit [AP/FoxNews.com, On the Record (UCI), Morrissey, Inside Higher Ed, OC Register; ScienceBlogs’ Thus Spake Zuska flays him]
  • Fan “not entitled to a permanent injunction requiring American Idol singer Clay Aiken to endorse her unauthorized biography” [Feral Child]
  • Local authority in U.K. orders employees not to use Latin phrases such as bona fide, e.g., ad lib, et cetera, i.e., inter alia, per se, quid pro quo, vice versa “and even via” [via — uh-oh — Zincavage and Feral Child]
  • Participants in 10th annual Boulder, Colo. Naked Pumpkin Run may have to register as sex offenders [Daily Camera, Obscure Store]
  • Joins drunk in car as his passenger, then after crash collects $5 million from restaurant where he drank [AP/WBZ Boston, 99 Restaurant chain]
  • Election may be over, but candidates’ defamation lawsuits against each other over linger on [Above the Law, NLJ]
  • School nutrition regs endanger bake sales, but they’ll let you have “Healthy Hallowe’en Vegetable Platter” instead [NY Times]

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WWII-era Mexican braceros settlement

The government of Mexico has agreed to pay about $14.5 million to settle claims on behalf of its citizens who came north as guest workers between 1942 and 1946. Ten percent of the workers’ pay was deducted and sent back to the Mexican government, which was supposed to apply much of it to their benefit, but (according to advocates) substantial sums were never claimed or paid out. Many years later the Mexican government opened a compensation program for the elderly braceros and their survivors, but some of those resident in the U.S. found it too hard to use and a Chicago class-action lawyer sued.

The lawsuit was dismissed twice, as courts considered whether too much time had passed and whether a lawsuit against the Mexican government could have standing in the United States. The American government and Wells Fargo Bank, initially named as defendants, were dismissed from the case.

(Pam Belluck, “Settlement Will Allow Thousands of Mexican Laborers in U.S. to Collect Back Pay”, New York Times, Oct. 15; “Mexican ministry OK with braceros deal”, AP/BakersfieldNow, Oct. 17).

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Shot in Kosovo, collects £2.4m from British defense ministry

“A Kosovan man shot in the jaw by a British soldier has been awarded £2.4 million compensation after suing the Ministry of Defence. The sum is more than eight times the maximum damages available to UK troops seriously injured abroad, and has been criticised by the relatives of disabled veterans.” Muhamet Bici had been “in a car with other men who were firing weapons into the air to celebrate a national holiday” in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo; a Military Police probe cleared British soldiers who shot at the car of charges of wrongdoing, saying they reasonably if erroneously believed themselves in danger. (Matthew Moore, “MoD pays out £2.4m to Kosovan shot in the jaw”, Daily Telegraph, Nov. 6).

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Microblog 2008-11-08

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New at Forbes.com: RFK Jr. to EPA?

I’ve got a new opinion column just out at Forbes.com on the reports that president-elect Obama may be considering America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure®, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Earlier this week I posted on the topic here and here (welcome Jonathan Adler/Volokh, Ron Coleman/Likelihood of Success readers).

More: Orac advises writing letters to the Obama transition team urging them to consider the harm to their credibility should a figure such as RFK Jr. get the nod. His comments section includes many good examples of such letters, and Kathleen Seidel, autism blogger extraordinaire, contributes one at her site as well. See also this perhaps unintentionally ironic dispatch by MSNBC’s Alan Boyle on Thursday listing as among president-elect Obama’s “top tasks” “taking the ideology out of scientific issues” and quoting Chris Mooney, author of “The Republican War on Science,” to the effect that “the war has ended, and science has won”. The Center for American Progress’s ScienceProgress site, to which Mooney contributes, doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the RFK Jr. matter.

And: tons of mostly helpful blog reactions. At ScienceBlogs, besides Orac, there are the influential P.Z. Myers/Pharyngula (“another irrational purveyor of woo and fluffy substanceless hysteria”), Chad Orzel, Uncertain Principles (“his highest-profile activity in recent years has been the promotion of nutbar conspiracy theories”), Mike the Mad Biologist (“every bit as ridiculous as creationism”), Around the Clock (“He is the typical paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, hyperbolic quack. A kind of person shunned, ignored and marginalized by the Democratic Party for decades now for two good reasons: such people’s judgment cannot be trusted, and such people give the party a bad name”), James Hrynyshyn (“More worrisome is the fact that Obama on at least one campaign occasion, pandered to the anti-vaccine crowd by describing the science on the subject as “inconclusive” despite loads of studies that show no link”, PalMD, ERV, Science Woman, Effect Measure, SunClipse, and Mark Hoofnagle. Plus: Skepchick, DarkSyde @ DailyKos, Rondi Adamson (“gives me the creeps…The guy’s a complete wingnut”), Wendy Williams, Steven Novella, Neurologica (“This would be an unmitigated disaster for science in government … Putting a known antiscientific crank in this position is inexcusable”), The Amateur Scientist (“an absolutely terrible idea … the guy’s bad news”), Brandon Keim, WiredScience (“America doesn’t need more political officials who skew science to fit personal beliefs.”), Thinking Outside, Science Avenger, Colossus of Rhodey, Politico. Liz Ditz has a great roundup of critical opinions.

Further: Edward John Craig at NRO “Planet Gore” here and here.

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Welcome Instapundit (and Change.gov!) readers

Quite an eventful night here: after Glenn Reynolds linked to my item on the Obama transition website and the plans it outlined for mandatory national service, upwards of five thousand visitors read the item and, as I’ve noted in an addendum, the people at Change.gov silently edited the passage in question to replace the controversial “require” language with vaguer talk of a “goal”. (Update Sun. morning: and now they seem to have yanked “Agenda” entirely).

Also, my thanks to commenters for their patience. I went out for an evening in the city and when I got back there were seventy comments in the moderation queue. I approved the whole batch, but inevitably there was one reader who was sure he was being singled out when his comment (#19) didn’t appear after an hour or two. (Update: thanks for correction.)

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