Following a jail riot, Reggie Townsend, serving 23 years in a Wisconsin prison, was put in a segregation unit with “wet, moldy and foul-smelling” bedding which the jailer did not change despite his request. “Though he did not suffer any physical harm from the unsanitary bedding, Townsend was deprived of the ‘minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,’ the jury decided after deliberating six hours,” and awarded him $295K. (The Smoking Gun, Sept. 19; AP/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sept. 23).
Author Archive
Major League Baseball takedown notice
Microblog 2008-09-23
- @carney John Carney on short selling “I want a personal uptick rule. No one can be mean to me unless it’s preceded by good news about me.” #
- Megan McArdle on the run on money market funds, thanks @petewarden Atlantic #
- George Will implicitly endorsing Obama? Sure looks like it WaPo #
- Kevin LaCroix keeps a tally of credit crisis investor lawsuits D&O Diary thanks @lilyhill #
- Moose causes 9-car pileup right here in the NYC suburbs, Sarah come help White Plains Journal-News #
- Politicshome USA is pretty neat election site even aside from their flattering the heck outta me Overlawyered #
PoliticsHome “Online 100”
PoliticsHome.com offers “minute by minute coverage of campaign ’08 — all on a single screen”; it’s the developing U.S. branch of an innovative British site launched earlier this year. Among its features is an “Online 100” poll (see right-hand column)
The PoliticsHome Online 100 Panel consists of the 100 leading online voices in the United States. Each day until November 4th, the ‘Online100’ panel will answer 5 strategic questions anonymously and the results will be posted on PoliticsHome. Find out how the blogosphere is calling the election on PoliticsHome.
The panel includes Arianna Huffington, Karl Rove, Joe Klein, Joe Trippi, Mike Allen, Mark Halperin, Mark Blumenthal, Dana Milbank, Jonah Goldberg, John Fund, Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan.
I’m not nearly as well known as many of the above names, but they’ve included me in the Online100 as well, and we’ve been answering questions about various campaign issues (the consensus is that Obama’s response to Palin was his worst strategic mistake lately; as for predictions of who’s going to win, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat at the moment.) Especially if you’re a politics junkie, check it out today.
Update: “Gambler’s $20M lawsuit against casinos tossed”
Parody, nastygrams, and Star Wars’ George Lucas
If only we could all resolve threatening letters from lawyers as neatly as the editors at MAD magazine were once able to do:
The book [MAD About Star Wars] is liberally sprinkled with sidebar anecdotes telling stories of MAD and Lucas’s relationship to each other (for example, the Lucasfilm legal department sent a threatening letter to MAD about one of their parodies; the same parody generated a personal fan-letter from George Lucas — MAD simply sent copies of each letter to the other sender and the problem went away)…
(Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, Sept. 5; & welcome readers of Blawg Review #179, at Securing Innovation).
U.K.: “Government to ban suicide-promoting websites”
One assumes that in the U.S., the First Amendment would restrain the government from regulating this variety of online content. Not so in Britain, where parliamentarians frankly avow their intent to shut down websites that morbidly encourage notions of self-destruction. “I would recommend that publishers who moderate all comments on their forums or chat rooms should silence discussions that encourage suicide, and sites that rely on others to complain about material before they review it should take down such discussions if complaints are received,” said technology lawyer Struan Robertson. What would have happened to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther? (Out-Law News, Sept. 18, via @lawtweets).
Microblog 2008-09-22
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I’ve renamed these telegraphic roundups “microblog” which seems more approachable than “Twitter”. Better name suggestions are welcome.
- Many countries had booms in housing finance, why was our meltdown worst? EconBrowser #
- Hail of dead cats from blogosphere for Paulson bailout plan PoL #
- Stunningly bad McCain idea: have Andrew Cuomo run SEC Mickey Kaus #
- Business historian John Steele Gordon on origins of mortgage meltdown NYT Freakonomics guest post #
- Going after lawyers in mortgage mess? New York Law Journal #
- Obama to pick centrists for high court? Not if advisers Minow and Tribe can help it Kerr @ Volokh #
Don’t
More things it would be better to avoid doing if you’re a lawyer:
- Claim to be assetless and thus unable to make restitution for the largest theft of state money in Massachusetts history even though you live in a $1.5 million Florida house with a $70K BMW and other goodies [Boston Herald, Globe, disbarred attorney Richard Arrighi]
- Botch appeals and then refrain from telling clients their cases have been lost [Clifford Van Syoc, reprimanded by New Jersey high court; NJLJ; seven years ago]
- Attempt to deduct “more than $300,000 in prostitutes, p0rn, sex toys and erotic massages” on your income tax returns, even if you are “thought of as a good tax lawyer” [NY Post] Nor ought you to accept nude dances from a client as partial payment for legal fees [Chicago Tribune; for an unrelated tale of a purportedly consensual lap dance given by secretary to partner, see NYLJ back in April]
- Introduce a patent application purportedly signed in part by someone who in fact had been dead for a year or two [Law.com/The Recorder, Chicago’s Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, of blog-stalking fame, client’s patent declared unenforceable] Or pursue a patent-infringement case based on what a federal judge later ruled to be a “tissue of lies” [NYLJ; New York law firm Abelman, Frayne & Schwab and lawyer David Jaroslawicz, ordered to pay opponents’ legal fees; earlier mentions of Jaroslawicz at this site here, here, here, and here]
- Demand ransom for a stolen Leonardo da Vinci painting [biggest U.K. art theft ever, all defendants have pleaded not guilty, LegalWeek via ABA Journal]
Do not propagate these grapes
Shrinkwrap contracts in the produce section (Mike Madison, Sept. 18).