• New York attorney suspended from practice after attempting as guardian to extract $853,000 payday from estate of Alzheimer’s victim [ABA Journal, Emani Taylor]
• Bought a BB gun to fend off squirrels, now his 20-year-old son faces three years for bare possession [MyCentralJersey.com via Zincavage]
• U.K.: “Sports clubs face being put out of business following a landmark court ruling forcing them to be liable for deliberate injuries caused by their player to an opponent.” [Telegraph]
• Prosecutors in Norwich, Ct. still haven’t dropped their case against teacher Julie Amero in malware-popup smut case. Why not? [TalkLeft, earlier]
• Dealership protection laws, deplored earlier in this space, work to make a GM bankruptcy both likelier and messier [The Deal]
• Strange new respect for talk show host Joe Scarborough in quarters where conservatives are ordinarily disliked? Some of us saw that coming [NYMag]
• Following Rhode Island rout of lawsuit against lead-paint makers, Columbus, Ohio drops its similar case [PoL, Akron Beacon Journal editorial]
• In latest furor over free speech and religious sensitivity in Europe, Dutch authorities have arrested cartoonist “suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities” [WSJ; "Gregorius Nekschot"]

State laws providing a kind of tenure protection for no-longer-needed car dealers are among the reasons it can be extremely expensive to close down a failing marque. General Motors, which closed Oldsmobile eight years ago, “spent more than five years battling dealer lawsuits” despite having set aside almost $1 billion to handle the transition, and Ford may face similar challenges if it tries to shutter its ailing Mercury line. (Martin Zimmerman, “Mercury may be coming to the end of the road”, Los Angeles Times, May 10). Earlier: Oct. 5, 2006. For more see this 2001 speech by FTC commissioner Thomas Leary, and this article by Missouri lawyer Gene Brockland on the federal Auto Dealers’ Day in Court Act, which is exceeded in stringency by some of its counterpart laws at the state level.

Worsening Detroit’s agonies: special laws at both state and federal levels expose automakers to lawsuits from dealerships that they try to cut loose as superfluous. Does GM want to reduce the number of Chevy dealerships in, say, Buffalo, to reflect its declining market share there or falling population? Then it’ll have to come up with millions to induce dealers to accept buyouts. The laws don’t inflict a comparable burden on automakers whose fortunes are on the upswing, such as Toyota and Honda. (Joann Muller, “Dealer Surplus”, Forbes, Oct. 16).