Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Font darkness

Thanks again to readers who wrote in on the question of how to make the font darker. The most elegant solution was the “stylesheet switching” reader option suggested by Plogs.net, but since we aren’t confident of our technical capability to implement that option smoothly, we’re falling back on what everyone else suggested, which is just to darken the font for everyone by adjusting the “blogbody” color value in Cascading Style Sheets.

Speaking of light and darkness, Virginia Postrel has a wonderful article newly online at D Monthly (“Spaces: Technocrats and Glowing Panties”, not dated; via her Dynamist blog) on how Texas regulations prescribing fluorescent rather than incandescent lighting in new commercial buildings, billed as “cost-free” by environmentalist and technocratic advocates, are in fact anything but cost-free as an aesthetic and commercial matter.

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“Flood of Fees Draining Enron Funds”

Fees in the Enron bankruptcy, which include accountants’ and advisers’ as well as lawyers’ fees, total $496 million through May, the richest in history (see Dec. 27-29, 2002). “Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, whose state is a major creditor, complains that attorneys in the case are ‘lining their pockets. There is a lot of money sloshing around, and the participants are taking it away from the people who really deserve it,’ he said in an interview. John W. Toothman, president of the Devil’s Advocate, a Northern Virginia company that scrutinizes legal fees, and co-author of a textbook on fees, calls it a ‘feeding frenzy.’ Enron ‘has turned its pockets inside out, and everybody who can get in line gets a piece. The lawyers have been first in line.'” (Peter Behr, Washington Post, Jun. 28).

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New format, cont’d

A reader writes: “Love the new format of Overlawyered.com. One request, though: I have trouble reading the light font. Would it be possible to set it darker, or as text to be defined by the user’s browser settings?” We don’t know the answer — would any technically knowledgeable reader care to suggest a fix?

Others wonder: where are the permalinks to individual items, what we used to call “Durable Links” in the old format? You’ll find them by clicking the time-of-day-posted link at the bottom of each post.

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Private club liable for sexist speech

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has upheld the decision of the state Commission on Human Rights to assess $64,000 plus attorneys’ fees against the Franklin Lodge of Elks for committing sex discrimination against four applicants including “derogatory and anti-female comments” by club members during discussions over whether to admit the applicants. “Of course, when clubs are held legally liable for their members’ speech, they will naturally be forced to suppress such speech, to avoid this liability.” (Eugene Volokh, “Club Codes”, National Review Online, Jun. 25.)

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Format change

As of 3:30 p.m. EST Tuesday, Overlawyered has a new format, based on the Movable Type blogging system. (Thanks to Dean Esmay and the MT people for helping.) In addition to saving us a great deal of time and effort compared with the primitive hand coding we’d been using (“baking [my] HTML on clay tablets”, as Glenn Reynolds puts it), the new system gives us much wider scope for such features as guest blogging and on-the-road blogging, pings and trackbacks, and so on. The site’s existing archives can still be reached (follow links in right column of front page), but the search and archive functions will operate separately for postings after June 20. And there will now be topical archives which collect all the new postings on a single subject into a single file, saving readers a lot of clicking around.

What happened to the left column with its long list of links? Much of it is inside now at a new General Links page. One consequence of the new format is that we’ll probably drop our self-imposed norm of posting only once a day, around midnight, in favor of blogging at all hours as the rest of the world does. And: Thanks not only to Instapundit but to other sites that have noted the switch with kind words: Ernie the Attorney, Legal Reader (formerly Weird of the News), and Scott Ferguson (who recalls our editing as “affably ruthless”, and concludes with an assertion that is falsified by this very linkback).

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EU: “Ban sought on sexual stereotyping”

According to EUObserver.com, “Brussels is said to be preparing new legislation to monitor sex discrimination outside the workplace. The proposal could lead to a ban on programmes and advertisements that stereotype women or men.” The idea is to ban “images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency”. At the same time, “safeguards on freedom of expression are thought to be included” — very comforting. In the spring of 2002 it was reported that Norway’s Ombudsman for Gender Equality, whose duties include monitoring sexism in toy ads, was proposing to ban a particular toy ad which referred to boys as “tough”. More: Daily Telegraph.

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Let that gator do his thing

Michael McCormick of Lake County, Fla., has now gotten off with a simple warning, instead of the original $180 ticket from the Florida Wildlife Commission, for roping an alligator he saw headed toward some children and their adult caretaker. The mechanic “says he’s certain what would have happened if he had not put himself between the 5 or 6 foot gator and the family. ‘Considering the size of the small children, I honestly think he was coming after them.'” To his surprise, wildlife officials when they arrived treated him as the wrongdoer for illegally “possessing” an alligator. A 12-year-old Tavares, Fla. boy was recently killed by an alligator. (Man Ticketed After Catching Gator That Was Threatening Children, WFTV.com.)

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Mold — to the highest bidder!

“Did you hear the one about the guy with the Park Avenue apartment full of toxic mold? He couldn?t find anyone to buy the place for $15.5 million, so he jacked up the asking price last week to $18 million. … At 515 Park Avenue, real-estate developer Richard Kramer would have you believe that recently, his apartment went up in value by $2.5 million even as he and the condominium?s board of managers continue to fight multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the building?s developers and sponsors, in which they allege that the 43-story tower is plagued with a mold infestation and major construction deficiencies.” (Blair Golson, “Toxic-Mold Gold: Shoddy High Rises Sold With Flaws”, New York Observer, Jun. 23 (temporary URL — after it expires, try search function))

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