Across the country, reports Court TV, prison inmates are harassing lawyers and court personnel by filing liens against them for supposed violations of the inmates’ copyright in their own names. The copyright-in-one’s-name premise may be supremely absurd — an egregious example of the homespun legal reasoning I once described, in the context of tax protests, as “folk law” — but it works surprisingly well as a means of harassment: the target’s credit standing may be frozen until he manages to get the lien on his house removed, which can be an expensive and time-consuming undertaking (Emanuella Grinberg, “What’s in a name? A fortune, some inmates say”, Court TV, Mar. 17). Curmudgeonly Clerk (Mar. 30) cites several federal cases that have arisen from this abuse (complete with an opinion by Judge Easterbrook) and points out that despite the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the system clearly has a way to go in curbing unfounded inmate litigation.
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