• Plenty of reaction to our Tuesday post questioning the NYT school-bullying story, including reader comments and discussion at other blogs; one lawprof passes along a response by the Wolfe family to the Northwest Arkansas Times’s reporting [updated post]
• Geoffrey Fieger, of jury-swaying fame, says holding his forthcoming criminal trial in Detroit would be unfair because juries there hate his guts [Detroit News]
• Another Borat suit down as Judge Preska says movie may be vulgar but has social value, and thus falls into “newsworthiness” exception to NY law barring commercial use of persons’ images [ABA Journal]
• Employer found mostly responsible for accident that occurred after its functionaries overrode a safety device, but a heavy-equipment dealer also named as defendant will have to pay more than 90 percent of resulting $14.6 million award [Bloomington, Ill. Pantagraph]
• New Mexico Human Rights Commission fines photographer $6600 for refusing a job photographing same-sex commitment ceremony [Volokh, Bader]
• “Virginia reaches settlement with families of VA Tech shooting victims” [Jurist]
• Roger Parloff on downfall of Dickie Scruggs [Fortune]
• Judge in Spain fined heavily and disbarred for letting innocent man spend more than a year in jail [AP/IHT, Guardian]
• Hard to know whether all those emergency airplane groundings actually improved safety, they might even have impaired it [Murray/NRO "Corner", WSJ edit]
• “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value” — tracking down the context of that now-celebrated quote from a Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator [Volokh]
• Who was it that said that lawyers “need to be held accountable for frivolous lawsuits that help drive up the cost of malpractice insurance”? Hint: initials are J.E. [three years ago on Overlawyered]

As a Tennessee appellate court noted in rejecting Joan Frye’s lawsuit against her hospital employer, “[T]he fact that a supervisor is mean, hard to get along with, overbearing, bellig­erent or otherwise hostile and abusive does not violate civil rights statutes.” Some legislators are trying to change that (excited in part by Suffolk Law Professor David Yamada’s theory of making “bullying” actionable). The ABA Journal is the latest to note the trend. (The article unfortunately repeats the false smear against my colleague John Bolton.) As we noted last May,

Enactments of this sort could result in a large new volume of litigation; the ample scope for differences of opinion about what constitutes hurtful sarcasm or a humiliating memo style could turn the courts into ongoing “superpersonnel departments” dispensing financial balm for injured feelings in the workplace.

Employment attorney Richard Block is more blunt in the ABA Journal: “You’re talking about a lifetime annuity of work for employment lawyers.” Bills are pending in thirteen states.

School districts have learned that they cannot discipline students for abusive Internet postings they make off-campus. Layshack v. Hermitage Area School District, No. 074465 (pending 3d Cir.); Dwyer v. OceanPort School District No. 03-6005 (D. N.J.) ($117,500 settlement to student suspended over web site). “Lawyers say school districts are in a legal quandary: If they punish a student for something they did off school grounds, they could get hit with a freedom of speech claim. If they do nothing, they could get hit with failure to act litigation.” (Tresa Baldas, “As ‘cyber-bullying’ grows, so do lawsuits”, National Law Journal, Dec. 10).

• Ethical questions for Vioxx lawyers [WSJ law blog] And who’s going to make what? [same; more from Ted at PoL]
• American lawyers shouldn’t get all self-congratulatory about the courage shown by their Pakistani counterparts [Giacalone; more]
• Just another of those harmless questionnaires from school, this time about kindergartners’ at-home computer use. Or maybe there’s more to it [Nicole Black]
• Probe of personal injury “runners” bribing Gotham hospital staff to chase business nets another conviction, this one of a lawyer who stole $148,000 from clients [NYLJ; earlier]
• Facebook sometimes sends text messages to obsolete cellphone numbers relinquished by its users, so let’s sue it [IndyStar]
• Series on defensive medicine at docblog White Coat Rants [first, second, third]
• Arm broken by bully, student wins $4 million verdict against Tampa private school; bully himself not sued [St. Petersburg Times]
• Washington, D.C. reportedly doing away with right to contest a traffic parking ticket in person [The Newspaper, on "the politics of driving"]
• “Walking headline factory” Scruggs to be arraigned November 20 [Rossmiller]
• More on whether government’s refusal to alter paper currency discriminates against the blind [Waldeck, ConcurOp via Bader; earlier]
• Eric Turkewitz hosts a truly marathon Blawg Review #134 [NY Pers Inj Law Blog]