Circus number one:  The NBA.

Circus number two:  A show on VH1 about the wives of NBA players called “Basketball Wives.”

The three-ring circus that encompasses all of these:  A series of law suits brought by various NBA players over their depictions, or the depictions of their loves — or in some cases, their wives — by the program, including legal claims in the suit filed by Chris Bosh claiming infringement of something called “life rights.”

The latest suit, this one by Gilbert Arenas, focuses on alleged false inferences concerning a relationship between him and someone called Govan:

A significant issue Arenas raises in this lawsuit is the fact that the show uses a mix of current and ex-wives and girlfriends. In using the title Basketball Wives, it creates an inference that they’re all wives of players. Some of the promotional material mentioned below would also indicate they are still involved in the players’ lives and can comment accordingly.

However, some of these women have been through messy breakups with their respective NBA player. If Arenas were to win his lawsuit and prevent the inclusion of Govan, one has to wonder whether other players would file suit to prevent their ex’s from taking part in the show. Arenas makes the argument that the title of the show is misleading as it applies to him. In reality it’s misleading as it applies to most of the participants. As ridiculous as this whole case may seem, it could lead to the end of this show or at least a title change to accurately reflect the participants involved.

I wouldn’t count on that.

Evidently basketball players have little to do during their extremely brief off-seasons.  The “Basketball Wives” claims, however, look like sloppy law but fine sport in themselves — the kind we big-boned types handle so much better than we do layups.

Yes, if God hadn’t invented the entertainment-sports industrial complex, we lawyers would have had to invent it.  Or did we?  Either way, what could be better summer fun?  The circus is in town!

Would you like to fly in my beautiful lawsuit?

A judge refused to issue a gag order on attorneys involved in a lawsuit by the owners of a Coachella [California] olive farm aimed at preventing hot-air balloon companies from flying over their property, and also rejected a bid to have the case moved out of Indio. . . .

JCM attorney Andrew Rauch had asked Superior Court Judge Randall D. White to issue a gag order to prevent attorneys from speaking with the media. . . .

Rauch said attorneys for the balloon companies are “using the media to publicly vilify us” and are attempting to “try the case in the press.”

Defense attorney Robert Gilliland said Rauch last month withdrew a separate request to seal the court records involving the case.

White rejected the gag order request, saying such an order should only be issued if there were extreme circumstances calling for it, and he did not consider such a situation to exist in this case.

Well, that’s one way to keep a case out of the press:  File a motion seeking a virtually unheard-of gag order in a routine civil case about fairly silly issues.

It’s just not a very good way.

(Younger readers may click here if they have any interest in “getting” the clever reference in the opening sentence of this post.)

If there is one universal banality about the perjury trial of Roger Clemens available on the sports pages and talk radio stations today, it’s the following, which is a composite of actual quotes and for which I am providing no link, because the sentiment is ubiquitous:

Did Clemens lie?  A trial will never really answer that question.  Everyone has already formed his opinion on whether Clemens is telling the truth.

Either way, we all know a huge chunk of players took PEDs in the 1990s. That era of the game is forever stained regardless of the outcome of this trial. What is this trial going to accomplish?  Is this really the best use of taxpayer money?

I just hope this trial is a short one, because I’d rather focus on the games being played now.

This being Overlawyered, one might suppose the appropriate point of view here would be along those lines.  Certainly, from a libertarian point of view (when in Rome…), it’s hard to be sympathetic to any investigation or prosecution whose roots are in substance abuse.  If taking steroids was or is a violation of a contractual obligation running from players to Major League Baseball, that would be an entirely private matter.  Evidently it wasn’t, or to the extent that it was, MLB would rather not pick at that scab.  Major League Baseball keeps lawyers busy with other things.

But we all acknowledge that prosecutors do and should, to some extent anyway, concern themselves with the laws that are “on the books,” which brings us back to that Sports Guy trope:  “What difference does it make?  Who cares?  Why are you distracting me with those shiny objects?”

Dumb, dumb, dumb, Sports Guy!

Point One:  It isn’t overlawyering to prosecute people who mislead law enforcement officials or lie under oath.  Yes, people mislead police and prosecutors every day and aren’t prosecuted for it — but famous people often are, because civil disobedience by them can make for a very bad example.  What better example of an example-setter is Bill Clinton, a one-man Chief Executive as sexual revolutionary, who had to turn in his law license to avoid a perjury conviction?

Clemens’s main problem was that he was put, rather unavoidably as Scott Greenfield explained at the time, in a perjury trap: Read On…