• Cameras in the Neiman Marcus “loss security” (anti-theft operations) room? So unfair when they catch two employees making whoopee [Chicago Tribune via Feral Child]
• Flipping their wigs: after three centuries judges in British civil and family courts today end tradition of horsehair wigs [Times Online]
• The right number? $28 million to Boston victim of negligent Big Dig construction [Globe]
• White collar advice: “Always commit crimes with people more important than you are, so you can turn them in” [Dershowitz, Forbes]
• Injured while skylarking on freight trains, now want Oz taxpayers to pay for their injuries [The Australian]
• That’ll spoil the fun: New Jersey high court bars judges from discussing future employment with lawyers who have pending cases before them [NJLJ]
• Compromise on Capitol Hill lets Pandora survive a little longer to negotiate with music rights owners [ReadWriteWeb; earlier here, here]
• Rapists with leverage over the adoption of a resultant child? [four years ago on Overlawyered]

“A new high-tech aerial photography system that can spot an illegal porch from 5,000 feet is being marketed to tax assessors as a way to grow revenue.” Backers say the system can help assessors spot not only unauthorized building additions but also cases in which taxpayers claim farmstead exemptions but aren’t farming enough of their land to qualify. (Richard Degener, “Taxes could get sky-high with aerial technology”, Press of Atlantic City, Sept. 29).

Arelia Margarita Taveras, a lawyer who gambled away client funds at New Jersey tables and then proceeded to sue the casinos, was thrown out of court by a federal judge. We covered the case Mar. 9. (AP/PhillyBurbs, Sept. 22).

More things it would be better to avoid doing if you’re a lawyer:

• Claim to be assetless and thus unable to make restitution for the largest theft of state money in Massachusetts history even though you live in a $1.5 million Florida house with a $70K BMW and other goodies [Boston Herald, Globe, disbarred attorney Richard Arrighi]
• Botch appeals and then refrain from telling clients their cases have been lost [Clifford Van Syoc, reprimanded by New Jersey high court; NJLJ; seven years ago]
• Attempt to deduct “more than $300,000 in prostitutes, p0rn, sex toys and erotic massages” on your income tax returns, even if you are “thought of as a good tax lawyer” [NY Post] Nor ought you to accept nude dances from a client as partial payment for legal fees [Chicago Tribune; for an unrelated tale of a purportedly consensual lap dance given by secretary to partner, see NYLJ back in April]
• Introduce a patent application purportedly signed in part by someone who in fact had been dead for a year or two [Law.com/The Recorder, Chicago's Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, of blog-stalking fame, client's patent declared unenforceable] Or pursue a patent-infringement case based on what a federal judge later ruled to be a “tissue of lies” [NYLJ; New York law firm Abelman, Frayne & Schwab and lawyer David Jaroslawicz, ordered to pay opponents' legal fees; earlier mentions of Jaroslawicz at this site here, here, here, and here]
• Demand ransom for a stolen Leonardo da Vinci painting [biggest U.K. art theft ever, all defendants have pleaded not guilty, LegalWeek via ABA Journal]

“A trial judge had an obligation to hold a plenary hearing on disputed issues in a suit between two former law firm partners, even if he thought the matter petty and unworthy of the lawyers involved, an appeals court ruled last week. The panel reversed Monmouth County, N.J., Superior Court Judge Alexander Lehrer, who decided motions to enforce litigants’ rights based on conflicting certifications, after calling the dispute ‘the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen’ and questioning whether the amount at issue justified the cost of a hearing.” At one point the judge said, of a requested evidentiary hearing, “Let’s spend $60,000 in legal fees for me to determine whether or not one lawyer owes another lawyer $24,000.” (Mary Pat Gallagher, New Jersey Law Journal, Sept. 9).

New Jersey’s most famous homeless litigant has reached an “amicable settlement” with the Seattle Cafe and Grill at Hoboken Terminal, the Hoboken Now blog reported in April (via). “Kreimer said an employee falsely accused him of stealing an apple and had cops frisk him to keep him from coming to the shop. ‘I was dirty and disheveled. … It was homeless profiling,’ he said”. Kreimer’s many lawsuits have apparently been a mixed blessing for him: per the Hoboken blog, he’s made so much in settlements that he’s lost his Medicaid eligibility. Some of Kreimer’s earlier exploits are here.

At least that was Thomas Guhl’s theory as to why the ball struck his windshield with high velocity while he was driving near the Eagle Oaks Golf and Country Club, injuring him. His $725,000 settlement is based on the theory that the golf club was negligent for not installing netting along Asbury Avenue that would have kept balls from landing on a neighboring homeowner’s lawn, and that Canfield Lawn and Landscaping was negligent because it hadn’t checked that lawn for golf balls before mowing. (”Man injured by golf ball gets $725K”, AP/Newark Star-Ledger, Jul. 31).

New Jersey dental assistant Amber Arpaio found herself an asterisk-to-an-asterisk in the history of political scandals when it was reported that Ashley Dupre used Arpaio’s lost driver’s license to pass for more than 17 when she made a “Girls Gone Wild” video that later became notorious after the exposure of Dupre’s paid liaison with Gov. Eliot Spitzer. So now Arpaio is suing Dupre and Joe Francis, impresario of the “Girls Gone Wild” series. The news coverage of the lawsuit contains no indication that Arpaio suffered any damage to her credit record or other tangible interests from the affair, but she wants upwards of $10 million in cash solace for defamation and invasion of privacy, and, per her attorney, because “when someone searches her name on the Internet, pornographic material comes up.” Much better, when someone searches her name on the Internet, for intimations of litigiousness to come up. (Nancy Dillon, “Duped by Dupre: N.J. woman charges Spitzer call girl with identity theft”, New York Daily News, Jul. 17; AP/Comcast, Jul. 17)(& Prettier Than Napoleon). Plus: complaint at The Smoking Gun (h/t commenter VMS).

More 7/22: Thanks to commenter Eric Turkewitz for pointing out that Dupre had posed as Arpaio in actual news coverage, not just in the signing of film releases and the like, which makes the basis for the suit less unreasonable than I had hastily assumed.

They instruct the people who are supposed to instruct the rest of us how to comply with the law, but they can’t figure it out themselves:

New Jersey’s biggest purveyor of legal education has notified 15,000 customers that they may owe years of back taxes.

The Institute of Continuing Legal Education recently learned it should have been charging sales tax on the books, CDs, videotapes and audiotapes it sells and is working with the state to try to collect the money. …

[ICLE Executive Director Lawrence] Maron says ICLE was operating on the basis of a legal opinion, which turned out to be wrong, that, as a nonprofit entity, it did not have to collect sales tax. …

[New Brunswick, N.J. solo attorney Ann] Kiernan says she particularly resents that ICLE plans to turn over a list of who bought what to the state but has not offered to give lawyers information about their own past purchases.

(Mary Pat Gallagher, “CLE Customers Told They Have to Pay Back Taxes on Products”, New Jersey Law Journal, Jul. 11).

Attorney Steven Irwin of Monmouth County, N.J., whose specialty is tax appeals, is apparently not trying to win any neighborhood popularity contests: he argued to the county tax board that his neighbors weren’t paying their fair share and that their property taxes should be raised as much as fourfold. The board unanimously ruled against him without comment; an assessor had testified that a couple of the neighbors had carried out major improvements, but only after the official cut-off date for taking such improvements into account in the tax valuation. (Bob Jordan, “Man loses try to hike neighbors’ taxes”, Asbury Park Press, Jul. 2; “Belmar man loses bid to boost neighbors’ property taxes”, AP/Newark Star-Ledger, Jul. 2).

• To hold a party in the public parks of Bergenfield, N.J., you’ll need homeowner’s or renter’s insurance to throw on the line [Bergen Record]
• More on suits against Victoria’s Secret over allegedly hazardous bras, thongs, and undergarments, including an aspiring class action over contact rashes [Heller/On Point News]
• Supreme Court will review Navy sonar controversy, which we’ve long covered in this space [Adler @ Volokh]
• Hope of legalized online gambling fades, and you can blame Republicans on Capitol Hill for that [Stuttaford, NRO "Corner"]
• Disney said to be behind bad proposal to soak foreign tourists to fund visit-America promotions [Crooked Timber]
• “Squishier than most”: Nocera on A.M.D.’s predatory-pricing antitrust suit against Intel [NYT]
• Process serving company lied about delivering SEC witness subpoena and falsified later document, judge rules, awarding victim $3 million [Boston Globe]
• Revisiting the false-accusation ordeal of Dr. Patrick Griffin, and how it relates to pressure to have needless chaperones at medical procedures [Buckeye Surgeon, Dorothy Rabinowitz Pulitzer piece]
• Overlawyered turns nine years old tomorrow (more). Commenters: how long have you been reading the site? Any of you go back to its first year?

Courts up to now have maintained a bright-line rule of not entertaining palimony claims unless a couple has cohabited, such a rule significantly improving people’s degree of certainty about which former romantic partners might suddenly emerge with a financial claim. But of course when you have bright-line rules of this sort, not as many people get to sue, so the New Jersey high court has now made itself the first state high court to overthrow the rule, inviting claims where the totality of the facts and circumstances “would cause one of the partners to believe a relationship existed, that it was similar to a marriage,” to quote Chatham, N.J. lawyer Alan Zegas (Tom Hester, “Palimony ruling sets precedent in Jersey”, Star-Ledger; NJLJ; AP/Cherry Hill Courier-Post*). Earlier here.

* Okay, there you go, AP, I didn’t quote even the five words from your story. But you also notice I gave the Star-Ledger first billing.

Mark Herrmann has details of Sinclair v. Merck.  The decision also suggests that the New Jersey Supreme Court is going to affirm the intermediate McDarby decision rejecting the use of consumer-fraud law for product-liability claims in New Jersey.

* New Jersey: “A federal judge in Camden last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by a band of American Indians seeking to reclaim land they said the state sold out from under them more than 200 years ago. The Unalachtigo band of the Nanticoke-Lenni Lenape Nation demanded the return of 3,044 acres of the former Brotherton Reservation, which sits mostly in Shamong Township in Burlington County.” [Philadelphia Inquirer; Camden Courier-Post/Red Lake Net News, 2006 (expensive law firm of Reed Smith was representing tribal band, which was angling for casino rights)].

* A new C$550 billion land claim launched by the Whitefish Lake tribe (or “First Nation”, to adopt progressive Canadian terminology) includes the entire city of Sudbury, Ontario [Timmins Press, Sudbury Star]

* Second Circuit panel due this week to hear appeal on upstate New York Oneida claim, in which ejectment of current landowners is apparently (for the moment) off table as option [Rome [N.Y.] Sentinel; earlier on Indian land claim litigation].

AP reports a Texas court has thrown out the infamous Ernst $26 million judgment; a New Jersey court has tossed $9 million of the judgment in McDarby. More details on Point of Law as available.

Ernst was the first Vioxx suit to go to trial. A jury awarded $253 million. Mark Lanier waited months before asking for a final judgment; at the time, I suggested that this was because he knew the case would be reversed on appeal, and did not want the bad publicity. Indeed, the appellate decision perhaps comes too late for Merck: the number of lawsuits increased from 6000 to 60000 in the months following publicity over the jury verdict, costing Merck billions of dollars in the later extortionate settlement.

With these two decisions, only three plaintiffs’ verdicts in favor of Merck remain.

Update: I still haven’t seen the McDarby decision, but an updated AP story indicates that it upheld the compensatory damages of $4.5 million, overturned the $9 million punitive damages verdict, and overturned the consumer-fraud judgment (which also saves Merck millions of dollars in plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees).

New Jersey: “An Essex County jury has ordered Newark to pay $4.1 million to the family of a murdered Seton Hall University student because of mistakes made by a police dispatcher and 911 operator during her abduction. The jury’s verdict came after the attorney for Sohayla Massachi’s family argued that prompt action by the Newark police may have prevented her murder after she was abducted by a jilted boyfriend in May 2000.” The jury attributed 25 percent of its $5.5 million award to Seton Hall and its security agency, Argenbright Security Inc., but those defendants had already settled. (William Kleinknecht, Newark Star-Ledger, May 16).

“A New Jersey couple, whose son was struck in the chest with a line drive, is planning to sue the maker of a metal baseball bat used in the game.” The family of Steven Domalewski “contends metal baseball bats are inherently unsafe for youth games because the ball comes off them much faster than from wooden bats. The lawsuit will also be filed against Little League Baseball and a sporting goods chain that sold the bat.” (AP/FoxNews.com, May 18). Earlier: Apr. 19 and Dec. 30, 2002.