Bob Spagat, an employment lawyer in the Winston & Strawn San Francisco office, perhaps following the footsteps of Gerald Skoning’s list, “pay tribute to court opinions that ‘score high on the list of cases you hate to have to explain to your client.’” The Ninth Circuit, unsurprisingly, owns the category. Overlawyered readers have already seen several of the nominees:

• Dark v. Curry County, Dec. 6, where a man prone to epileptic seizures had a cause of action for being fired from heavy equipment operation;
• Syverson v. IBM, where the Ninth Circuit invalidated the freedom to contract to standard release agreements, which now have to meet a Golidlocks standard of not too complicated, but not too simple either.
• Jespersen v. Harrah’s Operating Co., where some judges were willing to hold a casino liable for a makeup requirement.

The winner? Josephs v. Pac Bell, where Pac Bell won summary judgment on a claim that it illegally fired a worker who lied about his criminal history—but was held to have broken the law for refusing to hire him back. This raises American employment law to the level of self-parody (though Canada is chasing us). Matthew Hirsch quotes Spagat on Josephs:“This case stands for the proposition that it doesn’t matter what the facts are, you should always think to settle a case before it gets to the Ninth Circuit.”

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