FoxNews.com’s “Views” section names us its “Blog of the Week“. If you’re interested in strange lawsuits that engage in creative blame-shifting, a good place to start is with our personal responsibility archives (& welcome Howard Bashman readers).
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
On the Beeb, etc.
Our editor was interviewed at some length, particularly on pending gun and asbestos legislation, on the BBC World Service’s weekly World Business Review. (Accuracy of transcript not guaranteed.) There’s an audio link, too. Both links may disappear on Saturday when the BBC site updates to the next week’s show.
While on the subject of publicity, our editor’s book The Rule of Lawyers came in for a lengthy review from Neil Hrab of Canada’s National Post in the July issue of Organization Trends, a publication of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. (“More Than Good Friends: Trial Lawyers and Nonprofits“, PDF format, scroll to p. 7). Also, thanks for very kind mentions lately to a number of weblogs you should know about: Ernest Svenson’s Ernie the Attorney, MedRants, Steve Pilgrim’s Rodent Regatta and Aaron Haspel’s God of the Machine (the most philosophical spin on fast-food lawsuits you’ll read this month — it’s not easily paraphrased, just go read it).
Chewing the Shrink’s Ear Off
Mike Tyson is being sued — by his psychiatrist. (If that’s not the start of a good post, what is?) Seems that Iron Mike — a candidate for psychotherapy if there’s ever been one — has been seeing one Mitchell Gibson at the cost of $12k a month, plus $900 for “emergency cross-country visits.” But now Mike won’t pay up the $44,000 he owes the analyst. We’re not one to agree with Tyson, but if the shrink couldn’t talk him out of getting the Che Guevara and face tattoos… well, at least he didn’t bite Lennox Lewis. Yet. (“Tyson sued by his shrink,” Agence France-Presse, Jul. 15; Link via Fark).
And that’s not all! Tyson is doing his part keeping lawyers above the poverty line by beating up bodyguards. Apparently, the former champ “[ran] down the median of I-95 on top of the concrete barrier, with a string of winded people in pursuit” and then punched Izzy Bolton, Don King’s bodyguard, smack in the face. Bolton needed stitches and now claims to suffer from double vision. (“Mike Tyson sued over attack on Don King bodyguard,” Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Jul. 12).
Who am I? And What am I Doing Here?
Hi, I’m Dan Lewis. Pleased to meet you. You may have met me before — I run WhatTheHeck.com, home of the strange eBay auction archive. And I’m a sportsblogger — yes, we exist! — over at my personal site, DLewis.Net. (Yes, .com was taken.)
But why am I here? Glad you asked. Sure, I can, and will, sprinkle some sports posts here. But get this — I’m a first-year law student. That’s right, I’m being trained to come up with “creative legal theories,” not dissimilar from those that have graced OverLawyered for four years strong. It’s my pleasure to be with you for the rest of the week.
“Links don’t work”, update
A half dozen readers have now written in responding to our query on this problem (see Jul. 11), and we’re pretty sure we understand it now. It seems to afflict users of older browsers that cannot handle newer implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) such as those used in Movable Type.
In fact, we replicated the problem ourselves by calling up the site on an ancient Netscape 4.79 Navigator browser. Typically, in this kind of failure, the links on the main (left) column are unusable while the links on the right (blogroll, etc.) column will work as usual. Browsers of this vintage will have problems displaying many sites of recent design; for example CorpLawBlog shows the same links-don’t-work problem.
What to do? We begin with reader-side fixes: 1) upgrade to a more recent browser (we assume this is the best advice for most readers); 2) Some noncurrent browser versions (such as Opera’s) have a toggle-view switch by which users can make the links workable, though possibly at the cost of making the display look even more jumbled. 3) At Tantek ?elik’s site there is a “Toggle CSS style sheets” button which you can drag to your toolbar or favorites section, achieving the same effect (sounds promising, but we haven’t tried and can make no guarantees). 4) Another reader writes: “It’s not a major problem for me; I work around it by looking for the entry in the ‘Recent Entries’ section, where the links work.”
Then there are fixes that could be installed on our side. One brute-force method, which we don’t care for, would be to stop displaying in columns altogether, relegating the blogroll and other permanent links to the bottom beneath all the recent blog posts. Another reader suggests that we install the tantek.com “Toggle CSS style sheets” button ourselves in a visible location, which we assume would increase our page size and thus load time. A third reader suggests that we tinker with our own CSS file as follows: “Either delete ‘position:relative;’ or comment it out (replace with ‘/*position:relative;*/’).” But we’re wary of tinkering with the code unless we understand all the effects of doing so.
Right now, we’re inclined to recommend that readers try one of the reader-side methods outlined above if they have this problem, which will have the incidental benefit of making many other sites more usable as well. We’ll try to keep an open mind about the possible fixes to be done on our side, though.
Another guest blogger tomorrow; a neglected anniversary
Our experiments with guest-blogging resume tomorrow (Tuesday). This time our editor is not going on vacation; there’ll just be two of us posting instead of one. Come back tomorrow when we unveil the identity of the mysterious stranger.
What with our vacation over the July 4 holiday, we neglected to make note of another milestone for Overlawyered.com, namely our fourth anniversary (we launched on July 1, 1999). We’ve had millions of visitors over those four years, with traffic currently running at around 3000 visitors and 8000 pages-served per weekday (with a big fall-off on weekends). Those curious about how this stacks up against other sites’ popularity may consult N.Z. Bear’s weblog traffic rankings, which cover only those sites using SiteMeter counters (we are not among them). The site’s redesign a month ago does not seem to have affected our traffic volume one way or the other.
Update: intimidating tort reformers
Madison County, Ill. class action lawyer Bradley Lakin has withdrawn his subpoenas aimed at four organizations that had spoken out against lawsuit abuse in the Madison county courts: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Civil Justice League, American Tort Reform Association and Illinois Chamber of Commerce (see Jun. 9). Lisa Rickard, president of the Chamber?s Institute for Legal Reform, called the subpoenas “an illegitimate attempt to silence the critics of lawsuit abuse.” The ICJL, which has filed a sanctions motion against Lakin, has its own press release as well as links. (Further update Jul. 26: sanctions motion dropped)
“Links don’t work”
A reader writes: “On the newly designed Overlawyered.com, the links no longer work, at least they don’t every time I’ve tried to use them from my computer on the House of Representatives network. I don’t know if this is a problem on our end or yours, but I thought I might flag the issue, as not being able to link to cited articles unfortunately makes Overlawyered.com much less useful to folks on Capitol Hill.”
Any other readers or sites report this problem? We recently viewed the site with a very old browser (under Windows 95) and while Movable Type didn’t display optimally, the links did work. Any technically savvy readers know what the problem may be here, and whether there’s an easy fix for it on our end? (See update Jul. 14).
Update: San Antonio evidence-faking and witness-tampering case
The Texas case we covered on May 23 and Jun. 26, 2000 and Mar. 17 of this year has now eventuated in a suit by DaimlerChrysler against the Kugle Law Firm. A trial court dismissed the Kugle firm’s $2 billion suit against Chrysler and imposed sanctions of $865,000 against three of the firm’s lawyers after finding that the steering decoupler of the sued-over Dodge Neon had been altered to simulate mechanical failure and that Mexican policemen had been asked to change their accounts of the accident giving rise to the suit. An appeals court called the firm’s conduct ‘an egregious example of the worst kind of abuse of the judicial system.'” “The senior lawyer at the firm, Robert A. Kugle, has been suspended from the Texas bar and has moved to Mexico. He could not be located for comment.” (Adam Liptak, “Law Firm Is Sued Over Conduct in Liability Case”, New York Times, Jul. 10; AP/Miami Herald; San Antonio Express-News). More: David Giacalone at EthicalEsq.? weighs in.
Viacom, Spike Lee kiss and make up
But not until after a publicity bonanza for both sides. Filmmaker Shelton Lee (see Jun. 16-17) now says “I no longer believe that Viacom deliberately intended to trade on my name when naming Spike TV. As an artist and a filmmaker, I feel that protection of freedom of expression is a critical value, and I am concerned that my efforts to stop Viacom from using the Spike TV name could have the unintended consequence of threatening the First Amendment rights of Viacom and others. I am pleased to be able to resolve this matter and be able to work with Viacom on new projects”. (Buzz Johnson, “Spike Lee and Viacom Settle”, FilmStew.com; Washington Post; Hollywood Reporter/Reuters). Earlier, the son of musician Spike Jones filed court papers in the case, saying (per AP) “it is ‘frightening’ that filmmaker Spike Lee is trying to claim exclusive ownership of the name ‘Spike.'” (see The Legal Reader, Jun. 24).