You can’t win if you don’t play: “A Dutch woman who claimed she suffered emotional damages due to not winning the lottery missed the jackpot in court too. Amsterdam District Court judges Wednesday rejected the claim of Helene de Gier, who said she was traumatized by not winning the country’s National Postcode Lottery, which she didn’t enter, while her neighbors did.” DeGier said one lucky neighbor had rubbed in his good luck by showing off a new Porsche, and claimed lottery ads had engaged in “emotional blackmail” by suggesting that non-entrants like herself might be sorry afterward. (AP/IHT, Reuters).
Posts Tagged ‘sports’
Committee votes to disbar Nifong
The Duke lacrosse prosecutor acted as a “minister of injustice”, said State Bar prosecutor Douglas Brocker. The disciplinary committee wound up agreeing unanimously on nearly every element of the ethics charges against Nifong, who’s agreed to quit as Durham prosecutor. (Aaron Beard, “N.C. Panel Disbars Duke Prosecutor”, AP/Chattanooga Times Free Press, Jun. 16; “Nifong stripped of law license”, Sports Network, Jun. 17). We’ve covered the case extensively from early on; K.C. Johnson at Durham in Wonderland, who’s led the blog charge on the issue, notes that the New York Times’s Duff Wilson is still slanting his coverage of the case (Jun. 16).
Charge: Little League didn’t teach base-sliding
On Staten Island, New York, “Jean Gonzalez is suing a beloved veteran coach for not teaching her son Martin how to slide properly”. The boy, 12 at the time, was hurt sliding into second base. Coach Leigh Bernstein, along with “the New Springville Little League, and its international umbrella organization, Little League Baseball and Softball Inc., are all named as defendants in the suit, which charges them with never teaching him ‘skills needed to avoid and/or minimize the risks of injury,’ specifically how to run bases and slide.” (James Fanelli and Mike Scholl, “Base Accusation”, New York Post, May 20).
The frivolous side of Funny Cide
Peter Lattman reported on Gary Farmer, a Florida judge who decided to try his hand at humorous legal writing in the course of deciding a lawsuit. Discussion of the opinion around the internet (see, e.g., Orin Kerr) focused on the propriety of a judge turning his job into a forum for self-promotion. Regardless of whether judges are allowed to have fun with their work, in my opinion, it wasn’t very funny at all. But perhaps I had lost my sense of humor after reading the ridiculous nature of the lawsuit.
The case was brought by the owners of the championship racehorse Funny Cide against the publishers of the Miami Herald, for a newspaper report that the horse’s jockey had used an illegal device to help him win the Kentucky Derby. The report was false, and the paper ran a correction. But that wasn’t good enough for the owners of Funny Cide; they sued in May 2005.
Their complaint? Although Funny Cide won the Preakness, the false report caused the horse to lose the Belmont Stakes, and hence miss out on the Triple Crown, which would have been worth large sums of money.
Their theory? Funny Cide’s jockey was so motivated to disprove the false report that he worked the horse too hard in the Preakness, which tired the horse out so it couldn’t win the Belmont three weeks later.
As you can imagine, this theory is (to use the technical legal term) loony. Even if they had a snowball’s chance of proving causation — as if there were no other possible reason a horse might lose a race? — they would also have to show that it was foreseeable by the Herald that their report would cause this to happen. This they obviously could not do, and so the court granted summary judgment to the newspaper. What makes this case especially egregious, though, is that the humorous opinion being discussed above wasn’t written by the trial court; Gary Farmer is an appellate judge. That’s correct: the horse’s owners appealed the dismissal of their frivolous lawsuit.
In case you were wondering, Bruce Rogow was listed as one of the attorneys for the horse’s owners.
Mr. Rogow has taught Civil Procedure, Federal Jurisdiction, Constitutional Law, Appellate Practice, Criminal Law and Legal Ethics.
“The Microsoft of kickball”?
Apparently kickball isn’t just for elementary school students anymore: the website DCist reports that a lawsuit filed last February by the World Adult Kickball Association (“WAKA”) against rival adult kickball league (I’m having trouble reporting this without snickering) DC Kickball is still kicking around in the federal courts a year later.
The original complaint doesn’t appear to be online, but the Washington City Paper provided more details last year, including:
The complaint accuses DCKickball founder Carter Rabasa of copyright infringement for unauthorized use of WAKA’s co-ed kickball rules, including “the clearly unique requirement that there be 4 men AND 4 women at a minimum to play” and for mandating that “players must be at least 21 years old.” No other specific rules or intellectual-property thefts are mentioned, but the suit points out that David Fischer, a volunteer director for DCKickball, was previously a player for the WAKA team “Scoregasm.”
The suit also accuses Rabasa of defamation, based on his calling WAKA “the Microsoft of kickball” in a 2005 Washington City Paper story (“Kickball Wars,” Cheap Seats, 5/13) and his additional comments in a subsequent Wall Street Journal article. Those comments, the suit alleges, incited a kickballer to post “WAKA bites it” on the DCKickball Web site.
To the extent this represents the entire complaint (there also seems to be an unspecified trademark claim as well), it appears utterly meritless. You can’t copyright the rules of a game (although you can copyright the specific wording used), and in any case, neither of the rules cited sound particularly original. And “the Microsoft of kickball” may be insulting to a Macintosh fan, but is not defamatory. These hurdles don’t seem to faze WAKA, though; the company is suing its much smaller competitor for at least $350,000.
But WAKA is apparently very aggressive; it has reportedly sent out cease-and-desist letters to at least two other competitors, according to the City Paper article, accusing them of violating its intellectual property, trade secrets (!), and a non-compete clause (for an unpaid volunteer).
And since “turn the other cheek” is not one of the canons of legal ethics, DC Kickball has countersued for violations of federal and DC antitrust law.
Seriously, adults play kickball? Seriously?
Moving to the nuisance?
Couple build mansion next door to Altamont Speedway, are upset by noise and rowdiness spillovers, head for court citing environmental concerns (Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, “Racetrack, neighbor in a heated fight”, Sept. 26, 2006; Jalopnik, Apr. 25).
Mom: I never authorized lawyer to sue school over football injury
Curious doings in Camden, N.J.:
Nita Lawrence, whose son Shykem was paralyzed in a scrimmage football game between Woodrow Wilson and Eastern Regional high schools on Aug. 25, said Monday she never gave a Michigan lawyer authorization to file paperwork naming both high schools in a potential $10 million lawsuit.
In fact, Lawrence said she fired [Ronald R.] Gilbert in early March after he tried to receive advance payment from Bollinger Insurance, the company that provides coverage for student athletes in the Camden School District.
“We didn’t say we were suing nobody,” Lawrence said. “All we wanted was the insurance company to pay for my son’s medical bills. That’s all we wanted.
“We don’t want no $10 million. We’re living fine. Whatever the insurance company doesn’t pay, Medicaid pays. We don’t need a lawsuit. Now, we’ve got all these people against us and it’s not fair because it’s not true.”
A $10 million notice of claim dated Mar. 20 names 18 people, including football coaches, principals and superintendents, as possible defendants. (Chuck Gormley, “Mom: No suit authorized over son’s injury”, Camden Courier-Post, May 1; “Michigan lawyer confirms he’s off Lawrence case”, May 2).
Further information on Fenton, Michigan attorney Ronald R. Gilbert can be found here. Gilbert appears to be the guiding spirit behind two seemingly philanthropic outfits, the Foundation for Spinal Cord Injury Prevention, Care & Cure and the Foundation for Aquatic Injury Prevention. Visitors to the two groups’ websites rather quickly run into discussions of liability and legal options which would seem helpful, no doubt unintentionally, to attorney Gilbert’s client intake efforts.
Update: Takedown ping-pong
“Jury rules for girl in bike-skate crash”
Updating yesterday’s post about a widely discussed New Jersey case: “Deliberating just 15 minutes, a Morris County civil jury at 4 p.m. today declared that a Chester Township teenager was not to blame in 2003 when she collided with a bicycling physician while riding her in-line skates.” (Peggy Wright, Morristown Daily Record, Mar. 5). Earlier, it was reported: “The girl was knocked to the ground in the collision and bruised, but her parents have not filed a countersuit.” (“Bicyclist sues child roller-skater over accident”, AP/CourtTV, Mar. 1).
Inline skater-bicyclist collision
11-year-old Lauren Ellis was inline-skating down her street in Chester Township, N.J., one afternoon when a bicyclist approached her from behind, rang his bell and shouted “watch out”. Was she responsible, by her startled reaction, for the resulting collision, which broke the cyclist’s collarbone? Unluckily for young Ms. Ellis, the bicyclist happened to be a “prominent fertility doctor” named Alexander Dlugi who says he had to miss work as part of recovering from the mishap. (Peggy Wright, “Doctor sues girl, 11, over inline-skating collision”, Morristown Daily Record, Mar. 1). Update Mar. 6: jury returns defense verdict.