Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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Book review: “J. Anthony Froude”

Not really any legal content here, but I’ve got a review in today’s Sunday New York Times Book Review of a new biography of a distinguished Victorian figure. First paragraph:

Among the leading British historians, few have suffered as steep a decline in public estimation as J. Anthony Froude. With Gibbon and Hume, Froude played a key role in the advance of religious doubt; with Macaulay, he shaped Britain’s view of itself as a nation whose greatness was intimately linked to the liberty of its political institutions. Even those who found him partisan and factually careless conceded his literary merit; in Lytton Strachey’s words, he gave to historical events the “thrilling lineaments of a great story, upon whose issue the most blasé reader is forced to hang entranced.” One of his latter-day admirers, the historian A. L. Rowse, has called him “the last great Victorian awaiting revival.”

The whole thing, again, is here.

P.S.: Herbert Paul’s 1905 biography of Froude, mentioned in the review, is available at Gutenberg.org. A Wikipedia entry on Froude is here.

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Font size, redesign, newsletter, cont’d

As regular readers may have noticed, we’ve tried out a variety of design tweaks over the last week. In response to reader requests, we’ve also installed a simple font size switcher toward the top of the right-hand column, which however works only for users of the Internet Explorer browser. Users of Firefox, Opera and most other browsers can alter font sizes relatively easily by executing simple commands from their mouse or keyboards. To enlarge the fonts on a page viewed in Firefox, for example, press Ctrl-+ (“Control” key simultaneously with plus sign).

Our thanks also for the patience of bulletin subscribers: Google Groups took more than twelve hours to deliver many copies of last night’s newsletters, and some users (including ourselves) have run into technical difficulties lately with the Google Groups site. To change your subscription, visit this site (requires Google registration). And should you ever wish to unsubscribe from the newsletter without going on the Web, just send an email from the relevant account to Overlawyered-unsubscribe – [ at] – googlegroups – [dot]- com.

Also: after installing the redesign/rehosting, we got word that our RSS feeds were returning broken links to those of you who keep up with the site that way. We think we’ve fixed that problem now, but if not, please let us know.

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Licensing eBay sellers, cont’d

First it was Ohio contemplating a requirement that people get an auctioneer’s license before selling goods on eBay (Mar. 21). Now it’s North Dakota, which is considering whether to force small consignment merchants like Mark Nichols to take instruction in talking rapidly and interpreting hand gestures before listing merchandise for others on the online service. (Dale Wetzel, “Internet sellers may need auctioneer license”, AP/Bismarck Tribune, Oct. 10).

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Suing Saudis over 9/11

The plaintiffs don’t seem to have fully factored in the principle of foreign sovereign immunity, which leaves it to the democratically elected executive branch, rather than to the courts, to decide how to handle grievances against other nation’s governments. (Mark Hamblett, “Saudi Charity Dropped From Suit Over Sept. 11 Attacks”, New York Law Journal, Sept. 28). See Sept. 26 and Nov. 6, 2004.

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How copyright clearance problems stultify documentaries

Forty-five percent of the budget for the movie “Mad Hot Ballroom” covered the cost of “clearing” rights to songs. The filmmaker even had to negotiate with the subject of the film not to play certain music, because the presence of an uncleared song playing in the background on a boombox would prevent a scene from being used. A three-word-shout that corresponded to the lyrics of a song would have cost the filmmakers $5,000 alone; they had to cut the scene rather than risk litigation. Carrie McLaren interviews producer/writer Amy Sewell on the Stay Free Daily blog (Jun. 22), and a follow-up post notes how the fear of litigation prevented her from asserting her fair-use rights (Jun. 22), a problem that could be solved by loser-pays rules. (Hat tip to C.N.) More: Feb. 8-10, 2002.

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Update: custard finger-finder sues

Clarence Stowers, the North Carolina man who gained notoriety (see May 9) for refusing to return the employee’s fingertip he found in a mouthful of frozen custard, thus preventing doctors from reattaching it to its owner — it was more valuable to Stowers as evidence, you see — has now filed the inevitable lawsuit against Kohl’s Frozen Custard and the Carvel Corporation, which made the mixing machine. Stowers says he suffered post-traumatic syndrome and nightmares and wants money for that. People who have nightmares about Stowers himself, however, are out of luck lawsuit-wise. (“Man Who Bit Finger In Custard Sues”, AP/CBS News, Oct. 7).

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Wesley Snipes exonerated

Lanise Petits, alleged to be a delusional crack addict, filed suit accused actor Wesley Snipes of fathering her baby in a Chicago crack house, and successfully persuaded a court to require Snipes to submit to a paternity test. Snipes refused out of principle, noting that he had never met Petits, much less slept with her; moreover, Petit had filed various lawsuits with various accusations against Bill Clinton and Oprah. For his trouble, arrest warrants were issued, and Snipes suffered more adverse publicity. However, the child’s real father came forward, and the paternity suit has been dismissed. Snipes is suing the woman, albeit in the wrong forum, for the embarrassment. (AP, Oct. 7.)

Not that Snipes is innocent of legal abuse. In 2001, Snipes tried to obtain a $7 million federal tax refund using a bogus tax protester scheme.

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Site upgrade update

* After much tinkering over the past two days I’ve settled for the moment on a modified version of Lilia Ahner’s style Stevenson from the Movable Type style library. Fonts are bigger than in the first Wednesday design, and readability better, but I’m still hearing from readers saying they’d like access to a style-switch or font-enlargement option. Anyone know of one that’s easy to install on a MT site?

* TrackBacks are back, at least for the moment. MT 3.2 supports TrackBack preapproval, and it remains to be seen whether the former rate of 200+ spams a day will resume now that TrackBacks do not appear automatically.

* I’ve installed a handy new archives page collecting links to archives through mid-2003 (earlier archives are here), and fixed (via redirects) the broken URLs on monthly and category archives generated by the earlier version of Movable Type. That still leaves a problem with the 2,700 or so individual links generated by the earlier version, each of which now exists in two versions: a new descriptive-word-URL version, and the old numbered-individual-URL version. Rather than let the old links break, I moved the whole lot of them to the new site via FTP, but this leaves two problems: 1) each exists in two versions now, which is likely to confuse the many visitors who reach this page via search engines; 2) the old version now fails to display styles properly. The logical next step would be to install redirects for all the old URLs, but MT seems unable to generate a simple list mapping old onto new posts for this purpose. If any technically inclined readers can help out on this, drop me a line.

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