The Ninth Circuit has upheld a jury’s $15 million award to three Los Angeles Police Department officers who said they were wrongly arrested and made scapegoats in the notorious Rampart evidence-faking scandal. Two of the three officers who will share in the award were in fact convicted by a jury of obstruction of justice in an earlier case arising from the scandal, but the judge later concluded that she had committed an error at trial and set aside the verdict; the case was not reprosecuted. Which jury erred: the first, the second, or are there theories on which both might be accounted right? (Maura Dolan, “Federal appeals court upholds $15-million civil award for Rampart police officers”, Los Angeles Times, Jul. 15; Metropolitan News-Enterprise).
Archive for July, 2008
Lied on job application about having brutally murdered his wife
But Quebec courts have ruled that’s no reason Jean-Alix Miguel should lose his job as a teacher at a Montreal vocational school. Miguel spent seven years in prison for the murder. (Julia Kilpatrick, “Law says convicted killers can teach and practise law — but experts disagree”, Canwest/Victoria (B.C.) Times Colonist, Jul. 13)(via Wingless).
Title IX quotas for science?
Federal civil rights enforcers wouldn’t be crazy enough to wreak havoc in science programs the way they’ve wrought havoc in men’s college athletic programs, would they? Don’t assume they wouldn’t. (John Tierney, “A New Frontier for Title IX: Science”, New York Times, Jul. 15).
Federal judge: eBay needn’t police Tiffany fakes
The ruling (Slashdot) seems relatively unsurprising given the favorable posture of U.S. law toward online middlemen like eBay, but a number of readers have asked about how it relates to the ruling the other week by a French court in favor of much more sweeping claims against eBay by luxury goods maker LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). The answer, unfortunately, may not be simply that the various eBay sites have to follow different local rules depending on where they are based or to whom a purchase is being shipped. Per Roger Parloff’s Fortune piece, the earlier ruling “applies to all eBay sites worldwide to the extent that they are accessible from France, and not merely to the company’s French site at ebay.fr, according to [French lawyers on both sides]”.
July 15 roundup
- New York attorney suspended from practice after attempting as guardian to extract $853,000 payday from estate of Alzheimer’s victim [ABA Journal, Emani Taylor]
- Bought a BB gun to fend off squirrels, now his 20-year-old son faces three years for bare possession [MyCentralJersey.com via Zincavage]
- U.K.: “Sports clubs face being put out of business following a landmark court ruling forcing them to be liable for deliberate injuries caused by their player to an opponent.” [Telegraph]
- Prosecutors in Norwich, Ct. still haven’t dropped their case against teacher Julie Amero in malware-popup smut case. Why not? [TalkLeft, earlier]
- Dealership protection laws, deplored earlier in this space, work to make a GM bankruptcy both likelier and messier [The Deal]
- Strange new respect for talk show host Joe Scarborough in quarters where conservatives are ordinarily disliked? Some of us saw that coming [NYMag]
- Following Rhode Island rout of lawsuit against lead-paint makers, Columbus, Ohio drops its similar case [PoL, Akron Beacon Journal editorial]
- In latest furor over free speech and religious sensitivity in Europe, Dutch authorities have arrested cartoonist “suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities” [WSJ; “Gregorius Nekschot”]
“Is fan fiction legal? Fans are understandably nervous.”
…many commentators, and indeed, many fans themselves, operate on the rueful assumption that fan fiction does in fact infringe copyright.
Undaunted by this, Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Georgetown University, and a keen fan fiction writer herself, wants to take fan fiction out of the legal shadows where it has operated, more or less at sufferance, for decades, and carve out a legal place for it within the US doctrine of fair use. She has recently helped found the Organization for Transformative Use, with the mandate to establish fan fiction within the parameters of legal, non-infringing use.
(Grace Westcott, “Friction over Fan Fiction”, Literary Review of Canada, Jul./Aug., via A&L Daily; our posts on fans as infringers).
Med-mal: the real cost of a $7500 settlement
Before depositions are even taken, a plaintiff agrees to accept $7500 on a dubious case arising from an allegedly undiagnosed pregnancy, and the defense lawyer is delighted to have made the case go away for essentially nuisance value. But the real costs go far beyond the cash (The Blog That Ate Manhattan, Jul. 7, via Notes of an Anesthesioboist).
“Cancel his subscription” wasn’t enough
So that this man can make his point, North Carolina taxpayers — and people with legitimate cases in that state’s courts — are just going to have to put up with a little extra burden:
A News & Observer subscriber is suing the newspaper for cutting staff and the size of the paper.
Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court. He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages.
The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper’s contract with him….
In a phone interview today, Hempstead, 42, said he could cancel his subscription but filed the suit to make a point.
Hempstead, a former reporter himself at a different paper who says he “loves” the N&O, has duly gotten a fair bit of publicity, certainly more than if he had just sent out a complaining press release or something. (Leah Friedman, “N&O subscriber sues the paper for cutting staff”, News & Observer, Jul. 10).
July 13 roundup
- Nothing new about lawyers stealing money from estates, but embarrassing when they used to head the bar association [Eagle-Tribune; Lawrence, Mass., Arthur Khoury]
- Unusual “reverse quota” case: black job applicant wins $30K after showing beauty supply company turned her down because it had a quota of whites to hire [SE Texas Record]
- Who knew? Per class action allegations, pet food contains ingredients “unfit for human consumption” [Daily Business Review]
- U.K.: “A divorcee who won a £1.4million payout from her multi-millionaire husband is suing her lawyers because she claims she should have got twice that amount.” [Telegraph]
- UW freshman falls from fourth-floor dorm window after drinking at “Trashed Tuesday”, now wants $ from Delta Upsilon International as well as construction firm that put in windows [Seattle P-I, KOMO]
- After giant $103 million payday, current and former partners at Minneapolis law firm are torn by feuds and dissension — wasn’t there a John Steinbeck novella about that? [ABA Journal and again, Heins Mills]
- Small firm that used to make Wal-Mart in-house videos sets up shop at AAJ/ATLA convention hawking those videos for use in suits against the retailer [Arkansas Democrat Gazette, earlier]
- When the judge’s kid gets busted [Eric Berlin; Alabama]
Update: Virginia beer-sicles
A year ago (Jun. 26, 2007) guestblogger Christian Schneider reported on the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control’s suppression of a “frozen beer pop” specialty offered by the Alexandria restaurant Rustico. Now the state legislature has enacted a bill sponsored by Del. Adam Ebbin and Sen. Patsy Ticer (both D-Alexandria) re-legalizing the cooling treats, which went back on sale July 1 in such flavors as framboise, cherry kriek, cassis, plum, and chocolate stout. (Erin Zimmer, SeriousEats.com, Jun. 25; Gillian Gaynair, “Rustico brings back beer pops for summer”, Washington Business Journal, Jun. 20)(& welcome The Agitator and Reason “Hit and Run”, Belgian ladmag ZV, Christian Schneider/WPRI readers).