is Amber Taylor’s reaction to Professor Catharine MacKinnon’s boast that she obtained a civil injunction against Radovan Karadzic prohibiting him from engaging in genocide.
Archive for April, 2006
Asset forfeiture
We’re from the government, and we’ve come for your teeth. (Baylen Linnekin, Apr. 7; via Balko). P.S. Commenter Deoxy notes that the prosecutors erroneously thought the dental jewelry in question was removable, which means the episode is not as egregious as might appear on a quick reading — but see Mike’s follow-on comment.
Don’t
If you’re a judge who sentences violators to attend traffic school, don’t take kickbacks from the traffic school operators. Former Roane County, Tennessee Judge Thomas Austin has now pleaded guilty to three federal charges arising from allegations of that sort. Sentencing is expected in August (WVLT, Mar. 29).
17-year-old boys climb railroad cars
…and get in serious trouble with the 12,000-volt catenary wires atop them. Now a Pennsylvania federal judge has ruled that the resulting suit against Amtrak can go forward, including a claim for punitive damages — the doctrine of “attractive nuisance” applies, it seems, because the kids were after all legal infants. (Shannon P. Duffy, “17-Year-Old Trespassers May Use Attractive Nuisance Argument”, Legal Intelligencer, Apr. 11)(via Childs who got it from WSJ law blog).
“Chicago Schools Sue Over Breakup of League”
“Two predominantly black school districts are suing over the breakup of a suburban Chicago athletic league, saying racism led more than two dozen high schools to pull out and create their own, predominantly white leagues.” But an “attorney for several of the school districts leaving [the South Inter-Conference Association] said any charge that the breakup was racially motivated is ‘utter nonsense.’ He said the move was based on geography and school rivalries and had been discussed for several years. … ‘We are being deprived the opportunity to compete against other children and other different ethnicities,’ said Thornwood High School student Constance Stanley, who said her suburban Chicago speech team won’t have the same breadth of competition now.” (Mike Colias, AP/Washington Post, Apr. 21).
John Lott sues Steven Levitt for libel
Not the soundest means of establishing academic credibility or resolving academic disagreements. (Michael Higgins, “Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit”, Chicago Tribune, Apr. 11) (h/t Slim). (Full disclosure: Lott was a former colleague of mine at AEI, and once gave me a ride home.)
Update, via Bill Barth, here is the registration-free Bloomberg account by Kevin Orland. The case is Lott v. Levitt, 06-CV-2007 (N.D. Ill.) (Castillo, J.).
Second update: we have a copy of the complaint. See after the jump.
“Please don’t feed the trial lawyers” II
Once again, attorneys upset that their profession is held up to ridicule would have much less of a problem if attorneys were more concerned about the behavior that led to the ridicule than about the ridicule itself. Evan Schaeffer reraises the issue of the ILR billboard, and posts the first photo of the campaign. Here’s the full text:
Please Don’t Feed
The Trial LawyersLawsuit Abuse Hurts Illinois. Support Legal Reform.
Entertainingly enough, the billboard (previously described as insulting) doesn’t call lawyers names—it is simply based on the premise that the reader will already have a negative opinion of trial lawyers, which is hardly the fault of the ILR. The text of the billboard shows that Evan is mistaken when he accuses it of being aimed at juries: it is, rather, aimed at voters, as legal reform is an important election topic in 2006 judicial and legislative and gubernatorial elections, and the trial lawyers have their own campaign designed to get supporters of the litigation lobby in office and on the bench. (Evan may be correct that the billboard is “ugly and obnoxious,” though I can’t recall ever seeing a billboard that wasn’t.) Evan also has some snide remarks about the quality and intelligence of comments supposedly left by Overlawyered readers, so if you do visit Evan’s site, please be polite, even though the plaintiffs’ lawyers who comment there may be rude to you personally.
Contingency fee-o-rama
Anyone interested in the ethical, practical and philosophical case for and against the lawyers’ contingency fee (or contingent fee; usage varies) should be sure to check out two new resources:
* At Point of Law, the new Featured Discussion just underway pits George Mason lawprof Alex Tabarrok, who’s generally supportive of contingency fees, against Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, who’s critical;
* David Giacalone, who has written extensively on the problems inherent in protecting clients from overreaching by their lawyers, has now posted a four-part series (one, two, three, four) laying out his views on the pluses and minuses of the contingency fee more systematically than his blog posts have done up to now.
For my own views, see Chapter Two of my 1991 book The Litigation Explosion, which Point of Law has posted in PDF format.
Starbucks claims exclusive rights to “doubleshot”
We normally see Starbucks in this space when they’re being sued over hot coffee, much like the infamous McDonald’s coffee case.
A Tulsa, Oklahoma, coffeeshop, Doubleshot Coffee, however, has received a scary-lawyer letter from Starbucks, claiming that Starbucks has an exclusive right to use the term “double shot” in relation to coffee. The proprietor writes in his blog (via Romenesko):
So today, as a legal clarification, I would like everyone to know that we are not Starbuck’s Doubleshot. If we tricked you into coming in here, thinking you could get a can of Starbuck’s DoubleShot here, please let me know. And if you thought that $2 Tuesday was a sale on Starbuck’s Doubleshot, I vehemently apologize for the confusion and ask you to please not come in here anymore because stupid people annoy me.
The Do-Not-Shop List
According to the Washington Post, “The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains its ‘Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List’ to be easily accessible on its public Web site.” It is a list of foreign persons and entities suspected of certain terrorist or criminal activities and associations. Per federal law, American businesses are forbidden to engage in transactions with those listed, on pain of “harsh penalties that include 30 years in jail and fines up to $10 million against corporations, and $5 million against individuals, and civil penalties of up to $1 million per incident”.
Although the main regulatory impact of the law appears to have fallen on financial institutions and on big-ticket retailers such as auto dealers, per Maryland attorney Thomas B. Hudson of Hudson Cook LLP, the law’s regulatory reach is wider than one might think, because it “prohibits anyone, not just car dealers, from doing business with” those on the list, so that selling a newspaper, or a bottle of soda pop, or a shoeshine, to one of the malefactors, is equally unlawful. Purveyors of all these goods and services are apparently expected to get their customers’ names, and check them against the list, before doing business if they really want to feel secure they’re not breaking the law (Don Oldenburg, “Hit-and-Miss List: If You’re in This Directory, Forget Shopping”, Washington Post, Apr. 9). For more on the weird implications of the concept I once dubbed “merchandise laundering”, see my Reason piece of March 1999.