For years lawyers representing the owners of the children’s-show character Barney have been firing off cease-and-desist letters to parodists who’ve portrayed various forms of violence being visited on the purple dinosaur (see, for example, Jun. 25, 2001). Now one such exchange has escalated, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued Lyons Partnership, owner of Barney rights, seeking a court’s declaration that Stuart Frankel is not committing infringement by publishing a Barney parody site. (Robert Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch, Aug. 24). Update Nov. 30: Lyons backs off.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
CNBC “Morning Call” today
I’m scheduled to be a guest this morning at 11:45 Eastern Time on CNBC’s “Morning Call“, discussing the possibilities that employers will get sued over their employees’ “BlackBerry addiction“. I’ll be arguing that such suits are unlikely to get anywhere if filed.
Suit: plaintiff was too stupid to be admitted into law school
Thomas Joseph Bentey flunked out of St. Thomas University School of Law of Miami, and claims it was a conspiracy of the school to admit students it knew would flunk out, and wants his tuition and room and board back (as well as damages for lost wages and “embarrassment”). (The complaint also complains that Bentey’s mother called the law school, but that it refused to review his C grade in Contracts II, and seeks an injunction for a review of the grade.) The attorneys seek class action status, which is frivolous on its face, because the individualized issue of whether a St. Thomas student flunked out because of their own underachieving would clearly predominate any group inquiry even if the conspiracy theory had any basis in rationality. One might also make some adverse inferences about Bentey’s attorney, Michael Lombardi of Lombardi & Lombardi, for coming up with such a cockamamie theory of recovery that will only result in more embarrassment for his client, but he is a “Super Lawyer.” Other defendants in the shotgun complaint include the ABA and the Department of Education, suggesting hopes for a number of nuisance settlements. (Bentey v. St. Thomas University School of Law, No. 2:06-cv-03463-PGS-RJH (D.N.J.); Leigh Jones, “Law School Sued for Expelling Students”, National Law Journal, Sep. 1).
Update: Orin Kerr comments at the VC blog.
Dissent on global warming? See ya in court
“For no apparent reason, the state of California, Environmental Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have dragged [MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard] Lindzen and about 15 other global- warming skeptics into a lawsuit over auto- emissions standards. California et al. have asked the auto companies to cough up any and all communications they have had with Lindzen and his colleagues, whose research has been cited in court documents.” (Alex Beam, “MIT’s inconvenient scientist”, Boston Globe, Aug. 30).
New Times column — Katrina verdict
My new column at the Times (U.K.) Online is on last week’s Mississippi Katrina insurance verdict. (Walter Olson, “Insurers can breathe easier over Katrina lawsuits”, Aug. 30). Concluding paragraph:
Major coverage issues remain to be resolved (and appealed), but at least we can take note at this point that America is not Zimbabwe or Bolivia. As Dickie Scruggs said before the Leonard ruling, “If you win it, it’s a huge win. If you lose it, you spin it the best way you can.”
Also, I was a guest last evening (6:30 p.m. Eastern) on Marc Bernier’s high-rated radio show, “The Talk of Florida” to discuss the article.
New David Lat blog
David Lat, a.k.a. “Article III Groupie” of the great Underneath Their Robes blog, and former co-head of the DC gossip blog Wonkette, has a new site, Above the Law, that looks promising. Plus, he sent me the same e-mail he sent Eugene Volokh, and anyone who flatters me to tell me I’m as influential as Eugene Volokh gets a free plug.
Fact-checking the mainstream media (lawsuit division)
News clips reporting on large verdicts and settlements cross my desk regularly, and most do not seem on their surface to be worth blogging about. Most are terse summaries of a case’s outcome, and others do not present any indication (again, on the surface at least) that a case might have problematic aspects. The other day, however, I ran across a story in the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette describing a case in which a plaintiff had been terribly injured after a retailer sold what the reporter bluntly stated was a “defective mower.” This particular newspaper story was so one-sided that I thought there almost had to be more to it than was being reported — and I had no idea how right I was in that suspicion. This is a long post, but I hope worth readers’ while. It certainly makes me wonder how much I’m missing when I don’t go into the dockets to fact-check other seemingly run-of-the-mill cases.
Busy Lizzies in a hanging pot
Think twice about trying to grow your own from nursery stock: If the patent held by biotech firm Syngenta doesn’t get you, the indigenous-flora royalty supposedly owed to the government of Tanzania just might (Antony Barnett, “The new piracy: how West ‘steals’ Africa’s plants”, The Observer (UK), Aug. 27).
“A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation”
A Little Rock friend of mine had an emergency gap in his law review, and solicited me to write about the fast-food litigation. I’m not a big fan of the eight-footnotes-a-page-style that law reviews like, but I think the piece is a good overview of what has happened to date. The article, 28 UALR L. Rev. 427 (2006), can be downloaded at SSRN (help me catch up with Bainbridge!) or at the AEI Liability Project website. (cross-posted at Point of Law)
I worry that events have outstripped me; one sentence in the article, “Why is selling soda [to 17-year-olds] an attractive nuisance, but selling … Internet connectivity is not?” predates the MySpace litigation.
“Katrina rescuer is sued by boat owner”
Giving property rights a bad name? “A Broadmoor man who said he rescued more than 200 residents after commandeering a boat during the flood after Hurricane Katrina is being sued by the boat’s owner for taking it ‘without receiving permission.'” Mark Morice cut the unattended boat loose and managed to hot-wire it, then used it to rescue an elderly dialysis patient and many others; he then left the vessel for other rescuers’ use. “The lawsuit contends that boat owner John M. Lyons Jr. suffered his own distress, in the form of ‘grief, mental anguish, embarrassment and suffering … due to the removal of the boat,’ as well as its replacement costs.” One of those who benefited from Morice’s rescue efforts, Molly Gordon, says she has trouble understanding the mental-anguish angle: “This man should be so grateful he had a boat that saved lives,” she said. (Steve Ritea, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Aug. 26)(& No Quarter/Michael Silence, KnoxNews).