Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

April 19 roundup

  • Environmental milestone? “Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans.” [JoNova via Coyote]
  • Add another to the list of judges who file suits over critical discussion of their rulings, in this case by the losing party, a newspaper [ABA Journal]
  • “Obama on presidential signing statements then … and now” [Bainbridge, Outside the Beltway]
  • “The never-ending stream of futile petitions suggests that habeas corpus is a wasteful nuisance.” [Joseph Hoffmann and Nancy King, NYT, via Lat, Frank] A different view: Scott Greenfield, The Briefcase.
  • Global warming suits “a misuse of the judiciary branch” [Laurence Tribe, Boston Globe via WLF]
  • Competing for the HuffPo reader? On link between chemical exposures and cancer, Salon.com perpetrates “utter nonsense” [Orac, Respectful Insolence]
  • Iqbal/Twombly: “Reports of pleading’s demise may have been exaggerated” [Wasserman, Prawfs]

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4 Comments

  • Did the Bolivians just legalize cannibalism? ‘All nature’ would mean the soy plants those Bolivian hippies get their tofu from would have the same rights as the hippies themselves, right?

    • By Dave

  • Amazing. First people said ‘Too many people are getting habeas corpus granted.’ So they passed AEDPA, which tightened the federal habeas standards to the point where obtaining habeas relief is virtually impossible. Now they say ‘Look at all these failed habeas petitions — habeas is obviously a waste of time and abusive and we should restrict it even further.’

  • I sued Mother Nature, and Won the Whole World!

    • By mojo

  • Constitutional case law protects media who can afford good lawyers from abusive libel lawsuits by non-judges, but not necessarily when the abusive libel plaintiff is a judge. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
    The legislature should impeach offenders for abuse of power, as well as the judges who enable them.