Bradley LaShawn Fowler wants $60 million from Zondervan and $10 million from Thomas Nelson over hurt feelings from the editorial handling of the scriptural passages in question. Yes, the suits are pro se, and the judge won’t be appointing a lawyer at public expense to handle them, which still leaves the question of whether employing coercive legal process in such a manner should be free of a price tag in the form of Rule 11 sanctions. (”Man sues Zondervan to change anti-gay reference in Bible”, Grand Rapids Press, Jul. 9)(updated link should be working again).

More: Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Success has a copy of the hand-written complaint (PDF), as well as other commentary and links. James Taranto also comments. And Bill Poser, Language Log (via our comments), on the translation issues raised by the complaint.

The federal judges in the Northern District of Georgia decided to place curbs on the famously litigious inmate who’s filed more than 1,000 lawsuits nationwide naming celebrities and politicians as members of hallucinatory cabals against him. In March the judges enjoined him from filing more suits without permission in the district, which he can do only if he agrees to be prosecuted for false statements. (Miami Daily Business Review, Jun. 12, also with some discussion of Jack Thompson and of a few other Florida litigants who’ve had their acts shut down after filing (e.g.) 18, 20 and 60+ meritless or inappropriate actions.)

The order in the Northern District of Georgia has not prevented Riches from continuing to file lawsuits against celebrities and public figures elsewhere, as in the federal District of South Carolina. (Rachel Barron, “Vinod Khosla Slapped With $43M Lawsuit”, Greentech Media, Jun. 20).

Cyrus Sanai tells Patterico that his triggering an investigation of Judge Alex Kozinski’s web site is all “part of a litigation strategy” but does not reveal what the other two steps of his three-step strategy is, or more insight into his strategic genius.

Continue Reading »

We had a request to post the District of Minnesota opinion dismissing the meritless Sinclair v. Obama litigation (discussed May 15), so I have uploaded the magistrate’s thorough report and recommendation in Case No. 08-cv-00360-JMR-RLE (D. Minn.).  Sinclair failed to file objections to the February 25 report, and Judge James M. Rosenbaum adopted it in a summary order dated March 19, issuing final judgment the same day.

Note that the magistrate applied 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B)(i) to dismiss the plainly frivolous case sua sponte without requiring the victimized defendants to expend legal fees in responding; in December 2006, I discussed the underuse of this provision in pro se litigation.  More on delusional pro se cases.

We’ve had a lot of Montgomery Blair Sibley coverage over the years:

• His meritless suit against the DC Circuit (followed by a self-defeating appeal to the Supreme Court, where there was no quorum because he had sued seven of the justices)
• his follies in the Palfrey case and in an earlier 2006 Florida prostitution case; and
• his vexatious pro se work in family court.

And we didn’t even mention his work representing Larry Sinclair (the fellow who unsuccessfully sued Barack Obama for denying Sinclair’s implausible claim that he had engaged in a homosexual tryst with him) in a lawsuit against three anonymous bloggers. (DBKP blog, Mar. 14.)

After years of over-the-top abusive litigation, the state bar finally took action, and he has been suspended by the Florida bar for three years. No doubt, this will result in a new round of frivolous pro se collateral litigation. It took a contempt-of-court citation for failure to pay child support before the Florida bar took action, so this can hardly be considered a rousing success of the bar in policing its own, even for someone as over-the-top as Sibley. (Florida Bar v. Sibley; ABA Journal, Apr. 25; MPGS blog, May 14; h/t S.G.).

Update: Two commenters (who never appeared on Overlawyered before) implausibly defend Sibley, both posting from BellSouth accounts in Atlanta, GA. Nothing about a divorce requires one to sue seven Supreme Court justices for “judicial treason” for denying a (frivolous) certiorari petition from a frivolous lawsuit. He should have been disbarred a long time ago; that he is only being suspended, and then only because of failure to obey court orders, is appalling. He’s been a hazard to his clients and to taxpayers; so, no, I don’t think he’s a “damn good lawyer.”

Update, May 16, 2:45 AM: We originally repeated a second-hand report sent to us that Sibley had also been suspended in DC as part of reciprocal discipline. It is possible that our correspondent confused a Rule 8.1 report, made by the DC Bar counsel recommending reciprocal suspension, with an actual suspension. If a Rule 8.1 report was filed, Sibley is entitled to file a response; no oral argument is scheduled at this time (though none is required to be scheduled) and no DC Board on Professional Responsibility report is listed as having issued with respect to Sibley. Rule 8.4 of the DC Board on Professional Responsibility Rules of Procedure is titled “Conclusive Effect of Adjudication in Other Jurisdiction,” which would appear to give Sibley nothing to argue in DC, and would likely make discipline inevitable, but the District of Columbia, in its typical competence, has posted the wrong text for 8.4 on its website, so I cannot say that for certain. Montgomery Sibley is, as of May 16, still listed on the DC Bar’s website as a member in good standing. If the error is ours, rather than that of the DC Bar website, we regret the error. Without written confirmation of the suspension, we retract the original statement that the DC Bar has suspended Sibley in response to the Florida bar’s three-year suspension of Sibley.

Update, May 20: We were right the first time.

Another bunch of things not to do if you’re a member of the legal profession.

• Send insulting letters to opposing counsel. (G.F. Pignato, ordered to write an article about civility.) [Legal Profession Blog via ABA Journal]
• Leave your innocent client in jail by failing to act on new evidence. (William S. Gebbie, surrenders his California license; also accused of stealing client funds.) [ABA Journal]
• Use the NY Yankees trademark without permission in advertising for asbestos clients. [ATL]
• Make “jerk-off” motions in court. (Adam Reposa, Texas, sentenced to ninety days for contempt of court; many in blogosphere are appalled at what they call an overreaction.) [ATL; Simple Justice; Mark Bennett and again; and Patterico notes an interesting coincidence]
• Mock the plaintiffs’ attorney at a jury trial with “Overruled” signs and soccer-style red cards. (Judge James M. Brooks, admonished.) [ATL]
• As a prosecutor, conceal exculpatory evidence. (Former Sonoma County Deputy District Attorney Brooke Halsey Jr., suspended.) [ABA Journal]
• And even if you’re a pro se, don’t send a death threat to opposing counsel by fax. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

Earlier: Feb. 24.

The Third Circuit speedily dismissed (PDF) an appeal by pro se litigant Dylan Steven Jayne of his losing case against the search engine’s founders. Earlier: Sept. 25, 2007 (h/t Bob Young).

• Speaking of privacy, consider what happens when lawyers get a hold of your email. (When will we see law professors eager to create new causes of action consider the privacy-destroying implications of ediscovery?) [Fulton County Daily Report/law.com; Toronto Globe & Mail; Point of Law] Earlier: Jan. 9 and links therein.
• Speaking of privacy and reputation, Mary Roberts goes to trial, but Above the Law doesn’t mention our coverage (June 2004; Sep. 2005; Feb. 6; Mar. 19; May 17), and misses the juicy details.
• Oy: “Woman who ‘lost count after drinking 14 vodkas’ awarded £7,000 over New Year fall from bridge.” News from the compensation culture not entirely bad: damages were reasonable, and the court did hold the woman 80% responsible, the exact opposite of the McDonald’s coffee case. [Scotsman.com]
• No good deed goes unpunished: Sperm donor liable for child support, judge rules. [Newsday/Seattle Times]
• Bad attorney gets fired, sues DLA Piper for discrimination, represents herself pro se, demonstrates firsthand why she got fired: law firm wins on summary judgment. [ABA Journal; update: also New York Law Journal]
• Romney on tort reform; McCain on medmal. [Torts Prof Blog; Torts Prof Blog]
• Another day, another Borat lawsuit. I’m still waiting for the consumer fraud lawsuit from moviegoers upset that it was not actually a Kazakh documentary. [Reuters; earlier]

In the Fall 2006 semester, Brian Marquis got a C in his “Problems in Social Thought” class at the University of Massachusetts. Apparently attempting to prove he learned more about the problems than about the solutions, he immediately proceeded to file a federal class action lawsuit alleging that the school, its trustees, his professor, and various deans violated his constitutional right to get an A.

In a rare case of speedy resolution, it took the court just four months from the time the lawsuit was served on the defendants for the court to dismiss the case; that might have had something to do with the fact that Marquis was proceeding pro se, and drafted a semi-grammatical complaint with no legitimate causes of action. (For instance, he listed a racial discrimination statute as one of his causes of action, despite being white and failing to allege that race played any role in the matter.)

Still, that hardly means the suit was cost-free; as one of the defendants put it, “It ended up just wasting a lot of people’s time and money.” Moreover, Marquis says that he’s thinking of appealing. But lest you think that Marquis just had sour grapes, he had a good reason for filing the suit:

Marquis - who salts his comments with “strike that” - acknowledged he was alarmed the C might lower his grade point average and make him less attractive to a law school.

The C has rendered his transcript a “dismal record of non-achievement,” his suit said. Marquis, who enrolled at UMass-Amherst in spring 2006, said he has roughly a B-plus average.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that “Has a history of filing lawsuits against his school and his professors” on his résumé isn’t actually going to make him more attractive to a law school. (Although his 2004 lawsuit against his previous school didn’t keep him from being admitted to the University of Massachusetts.)

(h/t Kerr @ Volokh)

Fifty years ago, conspiracy theorists could rant in bars, or perhaps write letters to the editor. Twenty years ago, conspiracy theorists could call talk radio. Now? Through the magic of qui tam laws, conspiracy theorists can wage their war against sanity in the courts.

While reading Bizarro-Overlawyered’s paean to 9/11 lawsuits — guess what? They’re not (just) about the money! They’re really about helping the public “know what happened”! — a commenter on the site provided a link to Morgan Reynolds’ 9/11-related lawsuit. Reynolds, a former economist at the Department of Labor, became unhinged sometime after 9/11 and began ranting on the internet about the various conspiracies that brought down the World Trade Center. (Hint: government laser beams from space, not airplanes.) In the past, that would have been the end of it. Even if Reynolds wanted to take legal action, he couldn’t — he wasn’t injured by 9/11, so he would have no standing to file a lawsuit against anybody.

Ah, but that doesn’t take into account the False Claims Act. The qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act allow private individuals to sue on behalf of the government whenever the government is defrauded, and collect a portion of the money owed to the government. So all one needs to do is find a creative legal hook to claim that the government has been cheated, and all of the sudden one has standing to sue. What was Reynolds’ claim? He argues that when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — a government agency — prepared its report on the collapse of the World Trade Center, it paid various companies to consult with it. Since none of those consulting companies mentioned the government laser beams from space, they obviously defrauded the government.

So he sued… well, he sued everyone. To be precise, he sued:

Science Applications International Corp.; Applied Research Associates, Inc.; Boeing; Nustats; Computer Aided Engineering Associates, Inc.; Datasource, Inc.; Geostaats, Inc.; Gilsanz Murray Steficek Llp; Hughes Associates, Inc.; Ajmal Abbasi; Eduardo Kausel; David Parks; David Sharp; Daniele Venezano; Josef Van Dyck; Kaspar William; Rolf Jensen & Associates, Inc; Rosenwasser/Grossman Consulting Engineers, P.c.; Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Inc.; S. K. Ghosh Associates, Inc.; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Llp; Teng & Associates, Inc.; Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.; Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.; American Airlines; Silverstein Properties; and United Airlines

Those are engineering firms, airlines, consulting firms, defense contractors, building contractors, and real estate firms. All of which get to deal with his lawsuit. (Will it eventually be dismissed? Yes. Will Reynolds be ordered to pay defendants’ costs? Probably. (Assuming he could afford those costs, which seems unlikely given how many defendants he sued.) But thanks to the notion that private citizens can sue without suffering any injury, it superficially states a valid claim. And, hey, it isn’t that much kookier than the actual 9/11 families who seek to blame the airlines, the World Trade Center, etc. for 9/11. Incidentally, this isn’t one of those wacky pro se lawsuits; Reynolds has an actual lawyer, albeit one who’s also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.)

(No links in this post; no need to encourage these people. Google if you want to find it.)

• Picture of farmer with goose appears on greeting card, he wants $7.5 million [Roanoke Times; earlier]


• More class actions filed over Apple iPhone [Ars Technica on roaming and battery claims, O'Grady's PowerPage, iPhoneWorld; earlier]


• L.A. Times quotes attorney Stephen Yagman on prison overcrowding, but forgets to mention that he was lately convicted of thirteen felonies [Patterico]


• Bad idea watch: compulsory national service [Somin @ Volokh]


• Doing well representing the little guy: Gerry Spence lists his Wyoming residence for sale at $35 million [WSJ/Chicago Daily Herald]


• “Appropriate”, not “perfect”, justice needed: “We simply have to stop killing litigants with kindness,” says chief judge of Australia’s largest state [The Australian]


• Toddler killed after wandering into heavy traffic, trucker should have been more on guard against such a thing happening [Salt Lake Tribune]


• Pennsylvania pro se litigant sues Google, says it spells his social security number upside down [Ambrogi] More: Coyote says “Up next, the owner of Social Security number 71077345 sues Shell Oil for the same reason.”


• Once billed as “King of Torts”, Miami asbestos lawyer faces fifteen years behind bars for stealing $13 million from clients [Sun-Sentinel]


• Groom sues bride, saying she took the ring and presents and never got the wedding paperwork straightened out leaving them legally unmarried [ClickOnDetroit]


• Surgical resident on the hook for $23 million in Wisconsin case; she was the only one of the docs involved not covered by damage limits [Journal Sentinel via KevinMD]

I discuss in today’s American.

(Earlier: Dec. 25 and Aug. 20).

Kai Falkenberg’s September 3 story in Forbes quotes me (though I promise I told the fact-checker that the Chung’s legal bills were only $83,000) and Overlawyered guest-blogger Steve Hantler. The sidebar to the article lists a number of cases Overlawyered readers might be familiar with.

Before David Giacalone jumps down my throat, let me say that I had a lengthy interview with Falkenberg, detailing my views on pro se litigation, but only the throw-away anecdote about Roy Pearson’s pants suit made it in. (Interestingly, the Supreme Court’s decision this spring in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly helps resolve the problem I complained about in that December post.)

Update: Falkenberg writes to let me know that “Regarding the Chungs, the $100,000 references not just the $83,000 in legal fees but other costs associated with Pearson’s claim and was confirmed with their lawyer, Chris Manning.” Fair enough (though I think Manning is including lost sales from Pearson’s picketing the Chungs’ shop, which one might argue does not really reflect legal costs). Let me clarify that I thought that Falkenberg wrote an excellent piece, especially given the limitations of space. Quote of note:

In a study of pro se suits brought between 1995 and 1999 in the federal district court in Manhattan, attorney Jonathan Rosenbloom found that a “disturbing” number of pro se cases were dismissed for asserting claims that were “delusional” or “wholly incredible.” … Rosenbloom also found a lot of frequent filers: Nearly half of the study’s 765 pro se litigants filed at least one previous suit in that court, including one who filed 57 complaints in one year.

Second Milberg Weiss Justice Fellow, same as the first? Bizarro-Overlawyered twists itself into contortions over the infamous $54 million Judge Pearson pants-suit. Cyrus Dugger’s replacement as Milberg Weiss Justice Fellow, Kia Franklin, recognizes that the anti-reform cause can’t be seen endorsing the patently-ridiculous lawsuit that is the laughingstock of the world. So, she dances over the issue: yes, this case is frivolous, but frivolous cases are rare, so there are no lessons to learn from the fact that a small business was forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars litigating an overbroad consumer-fraud claim, to the point that it was willing to pay $12,000 over a pair of pants to make the lawsuit go away and stop the financial bleeding.

Her evidence is a Public Citizen study—but she ignores our 2006 post noting that Public Citizen got its math wrong, and even distorts the distorted statistic beyond what Public Citizen claimed. (Public Citizen gerrymandered its claim to falsely say businesses were 69% more likely to be sanctioned for frivolousness than individual tort plaintiffs, but Franklin misreads that to say individuals, which is false even by Public Citizen’s numbers, which found by its own measure that individuals were sanctioned for frivolousness 86% more often than corporations. Note also the difference between the inaccurate “more likely” and “more often.”)

The really funny thing is that, under the Public Citizen narrow definition of “frivolous lawsuit” used in its study, Judge Pearson’s suit is not frivolous! When politicians speak of “frivolous” cases, they use it in the everyday English sense of “silly”: they mean the meritless cases, where, because of far-fetched legal theories, junk science, or overbroad liability rules, plaintiffs seek or realize recovery far beyond what makes good social policy—cases like Roy Pearson’s. Public Citizen’s study, however, in a typical litigation-lobby bait-and-switch (see, e.g., the Kerry/Edwards malpractice reform plan), defines “frivolous” with the narrow technical legal definition so that it can conclude (like Franklin) that frivolous litigation is “rare” and thus not a problem. (Amazing how many problems disappear when you assume them away.) The definition is so narrow that Pearson’s suit is outside of it: Pearson defeated motions to dismiss and for summary judgment, and received a $12,000 offer of judgment. (Pearson is apparently sufficiently emotionally troubled that he thinks he has a better shot seeking tens of millions from a couple of immigrant Korean dry cleaners than the thousands of dollars offered in settlement for a pair of pants, even though the judge who will be ruling on his case has given him plenty of hints that he has no hope of success.) The Pearson suit would have been excluded from Public Citizen’s count of frivolous suits for a second reason: Public Citizen ignored pro se lawsuits brought by attorneys like Pearson in its count of frivolous suits, as it had to to deflate the number of sanctions issued against individual tort plaintiffs and falsely claim that corporations are sanctioned more often.

We’re excited to see Franklin join the world of reformers and recognize that many more lawsuits are frivolous than what Public Citizen recognizes. We encourage her to read the data and arguments of those she mistakenly claims to oppose, and to scrutinize those she mistakenly thinks are her allies a bit more closely. Why is it alright for wealthy white trial lawyers to extort billions from big business using the same ad terrorem tactics (and even the same consumer-protection laws!) as a poor African-American pro se did to extort $12,000 from a small business? We encourage Franklin to examine the Association of Trial Lawyers of America’s racial double-standard.

And since Franklin agrees that the Pearson lawsuit is frivolous, we are eager to hear how she would define a frivolous lawsuit, and hope that she uses that definition consistently for both the Milberg Weisses of the world as well as African-American city employees.

Updating earlier stories:

• The Judge Pearson consumer fraud suit starts today. It’s exceedingly silly, but ATLA’s attack on Judge Pearson is hypocritical: the only difference between this consumer fraud suit and the consumer fraud suits ATLA supports is that it’s an African-American pro se going against a shallow pocket instead of a well-funded bunch of millionaires going against a deep pocket. The Fisher blog @ WaPo notes a publicity-stunt settlement offer. [via TaxProf blog]
• Wesley Snipes playing the race card in his tax evasion prosecution would have more resonance if his white co-defendant weren’t still in jail while he’s out on bail. [Tax Prof; earlier, Nov. 22]
• “Party mom host set for Virginia jail term” for daring to ensure high school students didn’t drink and drive by providing a safe haven for underage drinking. Earlier: June 2005. [WaPo]
• Sorry, schadenfreude fans: Fred Baron settles with Baron & Budd. [Texas Lawyer; earlier Sep. 4]
• Blackmail-through-civil discovery lawyer Ted Roberts (Mar. 19 and links therein) seeks new trial. [Texas Lawyer]
• Second Circuit doesn’t quite yet decide Ehrenfeld v. Bin Mahfouz libel tourism suit (Oct. 2003). [Bashman roundup of links]
• NFL drops claims to trademarking “The Big Game” as a euphemism for the trademarked “Super Bowl” (Jan. 31) [Lattman]
• More on the Supreme Court’s “fake mental retardation to get out of the death penalty” decision, Atkins v. Virginia (Feb. 2005; Sep. 2003). [LA Times]
• What does Overlawyered favorite Rex deGeorge (Sep. 2004) have to do with The Apprentice? [Real Estalker]

Rather than even try to summarize the case, we’ll let Law.com do it for us: “A New York judge has limited a public-access TV personality’s use of small claims courts following her repeated abuse of the system. In dismissing her claim that a Cablevision employee ‘poisoned’ her sponsors’ minds, the judge noted that the woman, who goes by the name Glendora, submitted 360 handwritten pages of documentation, including ‘multiple copies of a 60-year-old photo of the plaintiff with Bob Hope … [and] commentary about the impressive geographic expanse of the City of Yonkers.’” (Mark Fass, “Old Photos of Bob Hope Fail to Carry the Day for Litigious TV Personality”, New York Law Journal, May 3).

P.S. Glendora’s website is here (plays video)(hat tip Gunner of No Quarters Blog, who suggests checking out show # 4260 for more on the hostess’s style in suit-filing).

Courtesy of Judicial Reports, a cautionary tale for lawyers: be careful when you accept litigious clients. The law firm of Wallace & Minchenberg wasn’t, and it came back to bite them:

Bennett A. Cohen kept getting hurt in elevators — or so he claimed. The lawyers he hired to exact compensation from the culprits responsible for the injuries he allegedly sustained in four elevator mishaps between 1989 and 1992 must have suspected that their litigious client might eventually turn on them, as he did. When the last of the elevator tort claims collapsed, Cohen sued the law firm for malpractice for allegedly mishandling his slam-dunk tort suits.

A lower court in Brooklyn refused to dismiss Cohen’s suits, but the Appellate Division said that law firms can’t be guilty of malpractice for failing to properly prosecute cases without any merit to begin with.

I’m sure that’s of great comfort to the elevator maintenance companies who were originally sued by the law firm on behalf of Cohen.

(Too bad Cohen was representing himself pro se in his lawsuit against Wallace & Minchenberg. Otherwise he could have sued the lawyers who represented him in this lawsuit for failing to win against his former lawyers.)

…resulted in a pro se suit from a black customer alleging that the airing of the popular country song constituted racial discrimination. The Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the suit against the Wichita, Kansas restaurant. (Brackens v. Texas Roadhouse in Wichita (PDF); Mississippi Law Blog, Feb. 6).

Incidentally, even before posting this item, this website already provides one of the very few current search hits on “Redneck Woman” + “Fifth Circuit”.