Blogger Eric Turkewitz fooled a lot of people with his April Fools Day blog-post about Supreme Court justices differing amongst themselves whether to recuse themselves from the pending cert petition in the fantasy-baseball case CBC Distribution v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media because of their own participation in a fantasy baseball league–a timely satire of the tsuris caused by individual Supreme Court members’ insistence in holding shares in individual stocks instead of mutual or index funds, which has caused recusals and 4-4 rulings.

But someone at American Lawyer didn’t get the memo when Turkewitz jumped up and said “Gotcha!” The hoax is repeated as fact (without attribution) in an unsigned squib on page 25 of the May 2008 issue of the $385-annual-subscription glossy. The moral is: don’t believe everything you read. Even if it’s in the extensively fact-checked mainstream media. The issue has been out for four weeks, and this post appears to be the first time someone has noticed the error publicly.

(As for the copyright issue in the fantasy baseball case, where baseball players claim intellectual property rights in their statistics, that really is before the Court in its certiorari conference Thursday the 29th; Overlawyered covered the Eighth Circuit opinion by Judge Morris Arnold October 23 and at the lower court level in 2005 and 2006.)

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