“Sunda Croonquist, whose shtick for years has been to describe her life as a half-black, half-Swedish woman who marries into a Jewish family, was sued two years ago after her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and brother-in-law said her jokes were holding them up to public ridicule.” A federal judge in New Jersey, however, has now ruled that the comedy routines were not actionable: many were opinion, not susceptible to being taken literally or otherwise protected under the First Amendment. [AP/MSNBC, earlier] More: Tim Cavanaugh, Reason “Hit and Run”.
Archive for 2010
Suit alleges “Jersey Shore” show is criminal enterprise
The suit claims the hit MTV reality show profits “from showing fights that cast members deliberately provoked.” A New Jersey judge has denied a motion to dismiss. [AP/Daily Caller] More: Courthouse News, Asbury Park Press.
Liability issues doom spectacular Australia treehouse
BoingBoing has the details. From a commenter: “shouldn’t these kids be playing violent video games or something?”
“The FTC and those GM ads”
I’ve got a new post up (my first, in fact) at Cato at Liberty taking issue with my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute over their petition to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate General Motors’s ridiculous bailout ad campaign.
May 5 roundup
- Jury rules for Disney in case of man who said Tower of Terror theme park ride caused him to have stroke [Orlando Sentinel]
- The most dangerous place on earth is getting caught between Dick Blumenthal and a television camera.” Craigslist snipes back against demagogic Connecticut AG [Craigslist blog, Antle/American Spectator, earlier]
- U.K.: prisoner falls from bunk bed, wins £4.7m [Times Online]
- New York Times jealously guards its own sources’ right to speak with anonymity, doesn’t feel quite that way about others’ [Stoll]
- SUNY Buffalo mathematician/HuffPo blogger: why’d they let that awful Eugene Volokh into the country? [Volokh vs. Jonathan David Farley, Greenfield, background]
- College journalist won’t face criminal trespass charges after all in showdown over photographing escaped cows [Romenesko and update]
- Regulating “the American palate” — by what authority? [Healy, Examiner] More links on FDA salt regulation [Compton/CEI, ShopFloor (on CSPI), earlier here, here, etc.]
- Why one putative beneficiary decided not to file $2 claim after settlement of AT&T class action [Chidem Kurdas, Christian Science Monitor]
Blawg Review #262
This week the traveling roundup of law-related posts is hosted by a nonlawyer — one who got sued over his blogging — in celebration of World Press Freedom Day. [Public Intellectual via Popehat; earlier coverage of the case]
Suing critics, competitors not a winning business strategy
Or at least it wasn’t for one video firm [Paul Alan Levy, Consumer Law and Policy]
Joining Cato, and a farewell to the Manhattan Institute
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow, effective this week. As most readers of this site know well, Cato is the premier voice for individual liberty in our nation’s capital, and a think tank of tremendous accomplishments across the board. Its program on law, led by Roger Pilon, includes such outstanding thinkers as Tim Lynch, Ilya Shapiro and Robert Levy. Cato is particularly known as a place where free speech, civil liberties, and the Bill of Rights are given the centrality they deserve in legal thinking, and it’s also a powerhouse in studying the ill effects of government regulation. In fact, the publication where I got my real start in the policy world, the magazine Regulation (originally published by the American Enterprise Institute), has made its home at Cato for many years now. In short, it’s hard to imagine a better fit with my writing and research interests.
I’ll be saying goodbye to my colleagues and kind friends at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which has long supported my work in the most patient, good-humored and uninterfering way I could have hoped for. I’m immensely fortunate to have been part of MI for more than 25 years and I know I’ll learn much more from its formidable thinkers in years to come. While I’ll continue to contribute occasionally to MI’s blog/web magazine Point of Law, I’ve left its editorship, and I’m happy to say the Institute had the good idea of hiring as my replacement none other than Ted Frank, of Overlawyered and CCAF fame.
Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute has some extremely kind things to say at Point of Law about our long association. The blog Think Tanked reprints the MI’s generous announcement.
I’ll still be posting as usual here at Overlawyered, and I’ll also be joining as a contributor at the excellent group blog Cato at Liberty, which you should promptly place in your RSS feed if you haven’t already. In months ahead I’ll have more to say about some new projects I’ll be pursuing at Cato, as well as existing projects many readers already know about, like my forthcoming book on bad ideas from legal academia, Schools for Misrule.
P.S. Cato’s press release and bio page for me are up, as is a welcoming post from Roger Pilon at Cato at Liberty. And thanks for the very generous words to Dan Pero at American Courthouse, Carter Wood at NAM ShopFloor, and Alan Lange at Y’AllPolitics.
$60 for an 8-word courtesy email
A small businesswoman in New York asks for a bit of legal help in dealing with a sublease, and sets herself up for an unpleasant surprise: “How Do Lawyers Get Away With This Stuff?” [Jennifer Walzer, NY Times “You’re the Boss” via Balasubramani]
“Lawsuit accuses GPS firm of aiding domestic abuse”
“Jane Doe” has sued a Missouri company, Foxtrax Vehicle Tracking Inc., in a Wisconsin court, saying it aided and abetted her domestic partner in tracking her whereabouts, thus enabling him to commit assault and battery on her. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via Masnick/TechDirt and Siouxsie Law]