In North Philadelphia, ten-year-old Porsche Brown was pulled out of class, handcuffed and taken to the police station after scissors were found in her book bag. “School district officials acknowledged that the girl was not using the item as a weapon or threatening anyone with it.” (Susan Snyder, “Scissors get girl in legal trouble”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 11) (via Balko). The police and schools chief have now apologized. (Maryclaire Dale, “Police? school chief apologize for schoolgirl?s arrest over scissors”, AP/Lansdale Reporter, Dec. 15).
Archive for December, 2004
Vt.-Va. lesbian custody battle
Lawyers’ pro bono obligations
Robert Starr, a Manhattan lawyer who is director emeritus of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, suggests that working for groups like NYSTLA that oppose litigation reform should count as pro bono work for lawyers. According to the New York Law Journal, “In April, the [New York] state bar House of Delegates voted to expand its definition of pro bono to include: activities to improve the law, the legal system or the profession; financial assistance to legal services organizations and services to organizations that protect civil rights, liberties or public rights; or when standard legal fees would ‘deplete the organization’s economic resources.'” (Elizabeth Stull, “Many Solo, Small Firm Attorneys Lack Time, Resources for Pro Bono”, New York Law Journal, Dec. 13)(via Giacalone). Update Jan. 23: more controversy.
Punch the Vote
An Ohio federal court judge held that punch-card balloting is not, in and of itself, racially discriminatory. The ACLU sued for a declaration that the punch card ballots in Ohio discriminated against minorities because minorities live predominantly in counties that use punch card systems. The full AP story is here.
The lawsuit alleged that most of the 92,000 ballots that did not have a vote for president recorded were punch card ballots.
Judge David Dowd held that:
Judicial Hellholes III Report
The American Tort Reform Association today released its third annual Judicial Hellholes report — ATRA’s report on the worst court systems in the United States where “‘Equal Justice Under Law’ does not exist.”
Here is the press release from ATRA. The highlights, including the top nine worst areas (seven counties and two regions — all of West Virginia and all of South Florida) and a salute to Mississippi for its tremendous and far-reaching tort reforms are on this page. The full report is in PDF format here.
But there may yet be hope:
The New Napster?
Major Hollywood studios, through their industry representative the Motion Picture Association of America, are suing more than 100 operators of computer servers that relay digitized movie files through on-line computer file-sharing networks, according to the Associated Press. The MPAA views the primary file-swapping services, eDonkey and BitTorrent as Napster-for-movies. The question is whether the argument will work.
Self-Introduction
Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of . . . pseudonyms and a small blog.
Greetings. I am The Monk, founder and primary author of The Key Monk a small politics-and-sports blog I started in April and which my old high school buddy and I now work on in our spare time.
I am a lawyer in Texas who has run the law firm private practice gamut: large general practice firm to medium-size insurance defense firm (where I was on the frontlines in the asbestos wars) to a small commercial litigation boutique. No, I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot. I now practice primarily appellate litigation, which I prefer because it is analytical and there’s no discovery in appellate litigation. I have also worked as a prosecutor in North Carolina, a pro bono lawyer in Boston and was a journalist of sorts as the sports editor and advertising manager of my college newspaper.
The best work I’ve done as a lawyer is easy to select: my pro bono work for the Shelter Legal Services Foundation (formerly the Veterans Legal Services Project) — a foundation dedicated to providing legal help to homeless and indigent veterans, battered women and other people in the Boston area who cannot afford most legal services.
Hopefully I can bring some perspective as a practicing attorney who has worked in a variety of legal settings. I look forward to contributing to Overlawyered.com — long one of my bookmarks (sycophancy alert!) — for the next week.
Land of junk-fax lawsuits
Illinois lawyers have established their state as the new hotbed of junk-fax litigation, according to Chicago Business. “In 2002 in Downstate St. Clair County, a Circuit Court judge ordered Seventeen Motors Inc. to pay $7 million for sending about 33,000 unsolicited faxes.” Cleveland-based Charter One Bank recently “agreed to pay $1.8 million for sending unsolicited faxes to about 70,000 phone numbers.” And “Cook County Circuit Court Judge Patrick McGann alone has since 2002 presided over more than 100 lawsuits, all seeking class action status, filed against senders of junk faxes.” Particularly active in the business: Daniel Edelman and his firm of Edelman Combs Latturner & Goodwin LLC. (Shruti Dat? Singh, “An IL industry: junk-fax law suits”, Chicago Business, Dec. 12). For more on junk-fax litigation, see Mar. 19, 2004, Jul. 19, 2003, etc.
Guestblogger tomorrow
Quite a few promising candidates responded to our call for guestblogger volunteers and we expect to be hearing from several of them in coming months. The first will be debuting tomorrow.
Mutiny of the bounty-hunted, cont’d: Calif. schools
Under California law, if school districts do not comply with public records requests within a stated period, they can be liable for requesters’ legal fees. In July and early August, as many officials were leaving for vacation, various Bay Area districts received requests for “school board members’ statement of economic interest — a document that details an elected official’s investments”. When the statements were not forthcoming within the prescribed period, lawsuits promptly followed demanding legal fees. The requesting organization, which calls itself Nolex Group, turns out to be run by a lawyer and to have no immediately visible purpose other than filing the requests. The Emery Unified district settled for a reported $2,500, but others resisted, with one defendant’s lawyer calling the action a “holdup lawsuit” and another saying that “These guys are trying to line their pockets at the expense of schoolchildren.” After the local news media took an interest, Nolex, which appears to be based from the Walnut Creek home of attorney Scott Hammel (with help from attorney Byron Done), “said it planned to drop six suits it had filed against San Mateo County school districts.” Hammel has vehemently denied improper motivations. (Jahna Berry, “Calif. Schools Blast Records Request as ‘Holdup Lawsuit'”, The Recorder, Nov. 24; “Lawyers Target Schools For Easy Money”, KRON, Oct. 21; Ethan Fletcher, “Alleged shakedown suit dropped”, San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 7).