Good news for poo-flingers: a Colorado lawyer is arguing (on behalf of a client facing misdemeanor charges) that there’s a First Amendment right to deliver dog droppings to someone’s office as a means of political self-expression, at least if the lucky recipient is a member of Congress. (AP/Boston Globe, Jan. 18).
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
New Orleans king cake, and the French kind
In its traditional presentation, the celebrated Mardi-Gras-season New Orleans King Cake contains a small concealed figurine of a baby which someone gets as part of their slice; the lucky recipient then has to throw the next party or buy the next cake. Back in Feb. 2002 we ran an item, quoting columnist James Lileks, on how purveyors of some store-bought King Cakes no longer were willing to conceal such a figurine, tradition or no. For a discussion of King Cakes, including a picture of what one looks like, check Blawg Review #90, just published the other week at Minor Wisdom.
Now the New York Times introduces us to what is apparently the original French version of the cake, a flat round galette, also served during Carnival and also concealing a good-luck figurine. Don’t expect to encounter this delicacy in American stores, however, for reasons readers of this site will easily anticipate:
Alexandre Colas recalled that he once met a baker from Syracuse, N.Y., at a trade show in Paris, who at first showed interest in buying porcelain favors for his baked goods but later backed off. “He said there were too many legal issues,” he said.
(John Taglibue, “3 Lands of Orient Compete With French Holiday Favors”, New York Times, Jan. 17).
Best of 2006: December
Completing our series of the Best of 2006 in a busy month:
- Frequent filer v. Kraft: pay my attorney millions because I didn’t read the label on your guacamole dip.
- ADA Week: drive-by suits and filing mills, $2.5 billion sidewalks, the separatist fringe, paper money redesign for the blind appeal, and an epileptic’s right to operate heavy equipment.
- Jesse Branham v. Ford: $31M verdict against Ford when driver drove off the road while turned around, and followup and more followup. See also multimillion dollar seatback verdicts, again blaming Ford for driver error. Ford did win an Arkansas “sudden acceleration” case, and the losing lawyer wrote in.
- Imams: we want to “hit [US Airways] where it hurts, the pocketbook.”
- Killer’s mom sues high school for not stopping him.
- Warren Buffett’s new insurance company on medmal caps.
- Class action for uninjured Nintendo Wii purchasers.
- GAO on litigation risk and drug development.
- Lawsuit: I should be allowed to anoint cubicles with olive oil
- What do wacky pro se cases teach about legal reform?
- UK patient: doc hurt my feelings by telling me to quit smoking
- California Prop 65: protecting us from cooked chicken.
- 19 year old dies moshing, sues home owner
- Bad facts make bad law—and that’s true even when the defendant wins because of that bad law.
Affluence and Accidents and Ad Hominems
Stephanie Mencimer, in a trolling post I really should just ignore, suggests that reformers are just “overprivileged white guys” who have “never flipped a burger” or driven an American car and whose “private schooling and Ivy League bona fides” mean we just want to stick it to the little guy.
Fatal draught of water
Tomorrow’s headlines today on Overlawyered: scarcely had Ted speculated in this space (Jan. 12) about the possibility of warning on water bottles that excessive drinking of water can be fatal, than a sensational news story comes down the wires that a California radio station, apparently ignorant or heedless of the very real risks involved, staged a water-drinking contest which proceeded to kill one of its participants (“Woman drinks so much water she dies”, AP/CNN, Jan. 13; Respectful Insolence, Jan. 14). Profs. Childs and Berman discuss the legal implications. More: In an update, Respectful Insolence provides further evidence of the recklessness of radio station personnel; the station’s ownership has fired ten of them.
Lott v. Levitt, Part VIII, and Karla Knafel v. Chicago Sun-Times
The major claim of libel from the use of “replicates” in Freakonomics was thrown out because it could reasonably be constructed to have an innocent meaning; a smaller claim regarding Levitt’s accusations in an e-mail to a single person in response to a solicited query remain. John Lott’s link to the decision suggests a world where he isn’t going to give up even on the first claim, but that decision is soundly based on the recent precedent in Knafel v. Chicago Sun-Times, 413 F.3d 637 (7th Cir. 2005), a case of relevance to Overlawyered. In Knafel, columnist Richard Roeper criticized a woman suing Michael Jordan over an affair that they had:
In other words, you had sex with a famous, wealthy man, and you claim he promised to pay you $5 million to keep quiet about it, and now you want your money.
Knafel was once an aspiring singer. She’s now reportedly a hair designer. But, based on the money she’s been paid already and the additional funds she’s seeking in exchange for her affair with Jordan, she’s making herself sound like someone who once worked in a profession that’s a lot older than singing or hair designing.
Knafel sued over the column; the court noted that “Roeper almost certainly refers to prostitution when he talks about an ‘older’ profession,” but held that the possibility of an innocent construction permitted a motion to dismiss. (See also Media Law Prof blog from 2005.) And that passage was significantly less ambiguous than that in Lott’s case.
(Via Deltoid via Cowen.) Earlier coverage: Aug. 21 and links therein.
Volokh just wants an aspirin
Eugene Volokh reasonably asks why he can’t get an aspirin when he has a headache in a restaurant. The fact that we’re posting this can give you a clue to the answer, but dozens of people educate him in the comments to his post.
Yanking RIAA’s chain
Lawyers representing the recording industry have long been accustomed to demand $750 per downloaded song from alleged infringers, which cumulates into terrifying aggregate liability for many an individual defendant. In a case called UMG v. Lindor, attorney Ray Beckerman is advancing the argument that awards should instead be limited to the industry’s actual losses. (Capping awards at the level of actual damages — imagine that!) He’s also asking for discovery into the industry’s wholesale pricing arrangements by way of ascertaining what those actual damages might be. The industry really, really doesn’t want to disclose that information, so this should be interesting. (Eric Bangeman, “RIAA fights to keep wholesale pricing secret”, Jan. 3; Nick Farrell, “RIAA’s price secrets probed”, The Inquirer, Jan. 5).
Accept no imitations
Now, this is ridiculous: at the URL http://www.overlawyered.blogspot.com/ (no, I’m not going to give it a live link) someone or other has erected a pseudo-blog under the heading, “Overlawyered”, followed by a verbatim swipe of the paragraph (“Overlawyered explores an American legal system…”) which for years stood atop this site’s sidebar and currently stands atop our “about us” page. The imitation-Overlawyered blog has relatively little content, but one of its entries (dated May 05, 2006) consists of excerpts swiped verbatim from a post of Ted’s of Feb. 16, 2006 on this site about a South Texas legal case.
Other content on the pseudo-Overlawyered site suggests that the author(s) take an interest in the South Texas legal scene, and have established a large group of blogspot entities which blogroll each other under the banner of “Team Kenedeno” (more at http://teamkenedeno.blogspot.com/). These interlocking sites often sport not very accurate names such as corpuschristicallertimes.blogspot.com, microsoftdotcom.blogspot.com, and exxonmobile.blogspot.com, and at least one of them (at http://wattslawfirm.blogspot.com/) also contains a more extensive verbatim swipe from Ted’s Feb. 16, 2006 post, mentioned above.
I looked around for a while, but failed to find any appropriate “report abuse” procedure on the Blogspot/Blogger site. The nearest thing was a “Flag Objectionable Content” button which apparently triggers a review for hate speech, obscenity, etc., but does not offer any way of reporting the rather different problem arising here. Reader suggestions are welcome.
Update from Ted: “We’ve contacted the appropriate people. Thanks for everyone’s help.”
Reader feedback
A reader from Australia writes, apropos of no post in particular:
Guys, I broadly agree with your website — personal injury litigation is out of control.
As a lawyer though, I think you’re missing the other side of the coin: that the system for necessary cases, ie suing someone who owes you money, is too long, and too complex. In my view the inefficiency of the legal system is a far bigger problem. Perhaps you could highlight this in some stories?
After all, having a quick efficient legal system to enforce the law is crucial in a modern economy.