- Some California attorneys hoping to restart lucrative construction-defect litigation [Frith, Cal Civil Justice]
- Jury awards Seattle bus passenger $1.3 million for stair mishap [KOMO, Seattle Times]
- “Louisiana Bill Would Outlaw Insulting an Under-17-Year-Old By E-Mail” [Volokh, earlier] Update: bill watered down before passage, but still bad news for speech;
- “Attorney Fee Fight Gets Ugly in World Trade Center Litigation” [Turkewitz and more]
- Preventive detention law shows why we need to confine Congress [Sullum, Greenfield]
- Mass Fifth Circuit recusals in Comer v. Murphy Oil global warming case [Wood/PoL, Jackson] More: Shapiro, Cato, Wood/ShopFloor (a strategy to provoke recusals?)
- “By some estimates, circa 40 percent of cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions” [Graeme Wood, The Atlantic]
- Lawyers who sued Facebook over “Beacon” to get $2.3 million in fees, class $0.00 [Balasubramani, SpamNotes]
Filed under: California, child protection, class action settlements, construction defect, Facebook, Fifth Circuit, global warming, Louisiana, recusals, Seattle
3 Comments
South Africa had laws against witchcraft until recently. However, their purpose was not to outlaw witchcraft per se but to prosecute those who used it to defraud or physically harm others. With a large, uneducated rural and very superstitious population such cases are more common than most people think.
Some US states still have similar laws against fraud by fortune tellers and the like.
The acceptance of the witchcraft law by people trained in the law is startling, but the item concerned an African country. However the Massachusetts appellate court accepted as valid the use of a modern day witch hunter, Daniel Brown, and the application of the discredited theory of repressed memories against Father Shanley.
Massachusetts vs. the Central African Republic. There is no real difference.