- @carney John Carney on short selling “I want a personal uptick rule. No one can be mean to me unless it’s preceded by good news about me.” #
- Megan McArdle on the run on money market funds, thanks @petewarden Atlantic #
- George Will implicitly endorsing Obama? Sure looks like it WaPo #
- Kevin LaCroix keeps a tally of credit crisis investor lawsuits D&O Diary thanks @lilyhill #
- Moose causes 9-car pileup right here in the NYC suburbs, Sarah come help White Plains Journal-News #
- Politicshome USA is pretty neat election site even aside from their flattering the heck outta me Overlawyered #
Couple’s contract for ‘exclusive relationship’ goes to court
My girlfriend and I are celebrating our fifteenth unmarried anniversary in the coming days. While the idea of marriage has never appealed to either of us, I have always viewed contract marriage–and by contract I mean an explicit contract rather than the rudimentary implicit social contract–as slightly better than the traditional alternative. Still, the concept of contract marriage (like the prenup) has the downside of being a bit too much like a business arrangement for my liking.
I have often wondered if, were courts to fully embrace contract marriage, they might also recognize a status short of it: something akin to a relationship contract. That’s the issue facing an Illinois court right now Read On…
Guestblogging
Greetings. I’m Baylen Linnekin. I am a 3L at American University in Washington, DC–where I serve on the editorial board of the Administrative Law Review–and co-proprietor of the libertarian food blog Crispy on the Outside.
I’m a big fan of Overlawyered and will be guestblogging here for the remainder of the week. (You may have noticed my first posts yesterday.) I’m particularly interested in food law–foie gras and bacon dogs are under legal attack, you know–and will likely be offering a few thoughts in that area in the coming days.
PoliticsHome “Online 100”
PoliticsHome.com offers “minute by minute coverage of campaign ’08 — all on a single screen”; it’s the developing U.S. branch of an innovative British site launched earlier this year. Among its features is an “Online 100” poll (see right-hand column)
The PoliticsHome Online 100 Panel consists of the 100 leading online voices in the United States. Each day until November 4th, the ‘Online100’ panel will answer 5 strategic questions anonymously and the results will be posted on PoliticsHome. Find out how the blogosphere is calling the election on PoliticsHome.
The panel includes Arianna Huffington, Karl Rove, Joe Klein, Joe Trippi, Mike Allen, Mark Halperin, Mark Blumenthal, Dana Milbank, Jonah Goldberg, John Fund, Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan.
I’m not nearly as well known as many of the above names, but they’ve included me in the Online100 as well, and we’ve been answering questions about various campaign issues (the consensus is that Obama’s response to Palin was his worst strategic mistake lately; as for predictions of who’s going to win, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat at the moment.) Especially if you’re a politics junkie, check it out today.
Update: “Gambler’s $20M lawsuit against casinos tossed”
Parody, nastygrams, and Star Wars’ George Lucas
If only we could all resolve threatening letters from lawyers as neatly as the editors at MAD magazine were once able to do:
The book [MAD About Star Wars] is liberally sprinkled with sidebar anecdotes telling stories of MAD and Lucas’s relationship to each other (for example, the Lucasfilm legal department sent a threatening letter to MAD about one of their parodies; the same parody generated a personal fan-letter from George Lucas — MAD simply sent copies of each letter to the other sender and the problem went away)…
(Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, Sept. 5; & welcome readers of Blawg Review #179, at Securing Innovation).
U.K.: “Government to ban suicide-promoting websites”
One assumes that in the U.S., the First Amendment would restrain the government from regulating this variety of online content. Not so in Britain, where parliamentarians frankly avow their intent to shut down websites that morbidly encourage notions of self-destruction. “I would recommend that publishers who moderate all comments on their forums or chat rooms should silence discussions that encourage suicide, and sites that rely on others to complain about material before they review it should take down such discussions if complaints are received,” said technology lawyer Struan Robertson. What would have happened to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther? (Out-Law News, Sept. 18, via @lawtweets).
Microblog 2008-09-22
- I’ve renamed these telegraphic roundups “microblog” which seems more approachable than “Twitter”. Better name suggestions are welcome.
- Many countries had booms in housing finance, why was our meltdown worst? EconBrowser #
- Hail of dead cats from blogosphere for Paulson bailout plan PoL #
- Stunningly bad McCain idea: have Andrew Cuomo run SEC Mickey Kaus #
- Business historian John Steele Gordon on origins of mortgage meltdown NYT Freakonomics guest post #
- Going after lawyers in mortgage mess? New York Law Journal #
- Obama to pick centrists for high court? Not if advisers Minow and Tribe can help it Kerr @ Volokh #
Bankruptcy clouds judgment
Last year a Connecticut court convicted Illinois contractor Mark R. Koch of larceny and ordered him to repay nearly $40,000 given him by Connecticut businessman Mark Poveromo to construct a building to house the latter’s pet food shop. So why did a Missouri bankruptcy judge order Poveromo to pay the money back to Koch? (John Christoffersen, AP, “Bankruptcy judge orders victim to pay back thief”, Sept. 22).
Keep my finger, vote Labour
Newcastle, England leaflet distributor (and former Labour Party council member) Mark Hunter is suing a dog owner whose Jack Russell terrier, the imaginatively named Jack, allegedly bit off the tip of the leafleteer’s finger as he pushed election paraphernalia through a front-door letterbox. While both Hunter and dog owner Mark Monroe seem to agree that part of Hunter’s bloody finger did indeed end up on the floor of Monroe’s home, it’s unclear how Jack could have bitten Monroe through the letterbox–which boasts a contraption known as a “letterbox guard”. Also unclear: why Monroe put Hunter’s finger in his freezer (keeping it for several months before ultimately tossing it in the rubbish), and why neither Hunter nor Monroe immediately reported the incident to police. Hunter is seeking about $25,000.
Though Monroe froze the finger, he was kind enough not to toss it in the chili. (“Labour campaigner’s ‘finger bitten off by dog’ as he pushed leaflet through letterbox”, The Daily Mail, Sept. 22).