Via R.L., the Shugar Law Offices’ web ad for traffic law clients features a blonde wearing a police cap and a too-small halter top. Maybe she’s one of the associates. Related: Corri Fetman, who posed for her law firm’s tasteless billboard in a low-cut bra.
Archive for 2008
Alex Beam on Eskimo global-warming suit
Don’t expect the much-hyped Kivalina suit to bring down Big Energy, the columnist says, but it might just keep the lawyers at Hagens Berman in BMWs:
The Inupiat Eskimos are perfect, jury-worthy plaintiffs. They have occupied their tiny barrier reef, just a few feet above sea level, “since time immemorial,” according to the lawsuit. They are poor. They live in harmony with nature, according to the documentary. (Pay no attention to those all-terrain vehicles zipping around town, and the kid flashing the gang sign.) …
Some judges may be liberal, but they’re not idiots. They know that utilities sold electricity to Americans because their customers wanted to jack up the AC. In fact, there isn’t a utility in America that hasn’t spent the past 20 years begging its customers to use less oil and gas. There is an inconvenient truth if I ever saw one.
Not to be missed (“Eskimos, whales, and luaus…Oh my!”, Boston Globe, May 24).
Red light cameras, cont’d
Turns out their economic appeal for municipalities isn’t so closely related to whether drivers are plowing through cross traffic against the stop light: “In Los Angeles, officials estimate that 80% of red light camera tickets go not to those running through intersections but to drivers making rolling right turns”. (L.A. Times via Bainbridge and Drum).
Judges to doctors’ rescue?
Well, at least some doctors are hoping to discern such a trend on the strength of two data points: the case Ted has covered in which the Ohio Supreme Court struck down a $30 million verdict because of the shenanigans of attorney Geoffrey Fieger, and a Michigan case from March in which an appeals court overturned a $500,000 verdict against a Flint doctor and ordered a new trial. In the latter case the appeals court “noted the trial judge ‘valiantly and repeatedly attempted’ to restrain Konheim [Southfield, Mich., plaintiff attorney Joseph Konheim]. ‘There is a point, however, when an attorney’s deliberate misbehavior becomes so repetitive and egregious that it necessarily impacts the jury, notwithstanding the judge’s efforts. That point was reached here,’ the unanimous opinion states. It also says that Konheim belittled witnesses on the stand and made ‘irrelevant’ and ‘disparaging’ statements that diverted the jury’s attention from the case’s merits. Konheim is asking the court to reconsider.” (Amy Lynn Sorrel, “Lawyers’ misconduct triggers new liability trials”, AMedNews (AMA), May 5).
Site overhaul latest
Yes, I’m working through this lovely Memorial Day holiday on this.
1) Thanks in part to a very helpful plugin from developer Alex King, most individual post URLs from the old site now redirect seamlessly to the new. (Some still don’t work properly, but we’re probably not going to be able to fix that).
2) URLs are shorter with the “index.php” now gone. Again, this should redirect seamlessly so it shouldn’t matter if you’ve bookmarked an address that uses the longer version.
3) The new crisis is that monthly archives in the new site are fritzed. At work on restoring them. Update 5:45 p.m.: back working now.
P.S. And now we have a site map too.
Who’s linking to us this week?
If you’re reading our blog, you might be interested in some of the blogs that link to us, which include the ones in our sidebar to the right, Judgepedia, Right Thinking, Adam Smith Institute, Patterico, The Objective Eye, Locomotive Breath 1901, Lumpen, Rougblog, New Age, A Brief History, Tai-Chi Policy, Moorewatch, DBKP, Jane Genova, BuffaloG, Not Frequently Updated, Not PC, Nobrainer, and Walker.
Voter fraud: If Dahlia Lithwick repeats a lie often enough, maybe it will become true
The notion that present-day Democrats regularly steal elections by engaging in concerted efforts to vote multiple times in funny mustaches is a myth, unsupported by data or fact.
— Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, May 24
As outlined at trial, the vote fraud scheme infected not only the actual voting process in November, but also the voter registration process preceding the election. Several persons, including the defendant Cusack, falsely registered to vote by claiming to reside at addresses within the precinct when they actually resided elsewhere. The actual residents at these addresses were asked to place name-tags on their doors that bore the names of the non-resident registrants. The defendants, and several others acting under their direction, also participated in a canvass of the precinct …. Although the canvass disclosed that a number of persons who were registered to vote in the precinct had died, moved away, or for some other reason had become ineligible to vote, these persons were not struck from the list of eligible voters. Finally, on election day the defendants, either personally or by acting through others, caused numerous false ballots to be cast for the straight Democratic ticket.
— United States v. Howard, 774 F.2d 838 (7th Cir. 1985)
[T]he U.S. Attorney in Chicago at the time, Daniel Webb, estimated that at least 100,000 fraudulent votes (10 percent of all votes in the city) had been cast. Sixty-five individuals were indicted for federal election crimes, and all but two (one found incompetent to stand trial and another who died) were convicted.
— Hans A. von Spakovsky, Heritage Legal Memorandum #23
Update: Some commenters complain that the 1982 example is irrelevant to Lithwick’s claim, because it is modified by “present-day.”
Present-day examples include 2007 cases in Hoboken, NJ, Noxubee, MS, and King County, WA—not to mention the unprosecuted voter fraud in Washington state in 2004, which affected the gubernatorial election. There may be many more examples, except Democrats are using lawsuits to block attempts to compare voter rolls with addresses.
Lithwick’s argument against present-day voter fraud is that there are very few prosecutions, and that therefore prevention measures are not needed. This is akin to arguing that, because very few people are ticketed for running red lights, there is no need for traffic signals. If there’s less voter fraud today, it’s in large part because of the prosecutions in the 1980s. Given Senator Obama’s appalling block on the van Spakovsky nomination to the FEC, and the liberal activism against preventing vote fraud, one worries that an Obama Justice Department will cease prosecuting voter fraud, and that there will be a return to the bad old days, in which case 1980s examples from when the DOJ first started prosecuting vote fraud are quite relevant.
Claim: allergic to wi-fi
“A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they’re allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings. … [Arthur] Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The city attorney is now checking to see if putting up Wi-Fi could be considered discrimination. But City Councilor Ron Trujillo says the areas are already saturated with wireless Internet.” (Gadi Schwartz, KOB, May 20).
Fingerprinting mortgage professionals?
If the feds are really in search of types of jobholders with a high risk of scandal and defalcation, we could probably come up with some other nominees for them. (John Berlau, CEI “Open Market”, May 23). New York apparently has such a system already (North Country Gazette); see also Reason comments (employees of SEC-regulated financial institutions).
Kentucky Fund for Healthy Living
The name does have a clean, daisy-fresh smell to it, like a good laundry. In this case the laundering being done was of settlement money in the Kentucky fen-phen scandal. (WSJ law blog, Louisville Courier-Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader, Krauss @ PoL).