Gay man sues Bible publishers

Bradley LaShawn Fowler wants $60 million from Zondervan and $10 million from Thomas Nelson over hurt feelings from the editorial handling of the scriptural passages in question. Yes, the suits are pro se, and the judge won’t be appointing a lawyer at public expense to handle them, which still leaves the question of whether employing coercive legal process in such a manner should be free of a price tag in the form of Rule 11 sanctions. (“Man sues Zondervan to change anti-gay reference in Bible”, Grand Rapids Press, Jul. 9)(updated link should be working again).

More: Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Success has a copy of the hand-written complaint (PDF), as well as other commentary and links. James Taranto also comments. And Bill Poser, Language Log (via our comments), on the translation issues raised by the complaint.

Update July 2015: A federal judge soon tossed the hand-scrawled complaint out of court. But the case was destined to take on an urban-legend life of its own, with mostly conservative social media outlets re-reporting it in mid-2015 as if the case were a new and significant legal development, typically omitting its date, circumstances, and disposition. One site alone at last report had reaped more than 90,000 Facebook shares from its July 2015 version.

July 9 roundup

  • Significant if true: Ninth Circuit may have finally decided that judges should stop micromanaging Forest Service timber sales [Lands Council v. McNair, Adler @ Volokh]
  • GMU lawprof/former Specter aide whose law review output grabbed big chunks of others’ work without attribution doesn’t belong on the federal bench, though he may have a future at Harvard Law [Liptak, NYT; WSJ law blog]
  • Update on gift card class actions (earlier) filed by Madison County, Ill.’s mother-daughter team of Armettia Peach and Ashley Peach [MC Record; more background here and here]
  • If you regard demand letters from attorneys as menacing and aggressive, maybe you’re one of those “lawyer-haters” with cockamamie notions of loser-pays [Greenfield, and again]
  • Just wait till Public Citizen goes after those “charities” that spend more on telemarketing than they raise by it — oh, wait a minute [LA Times via Postrel]
  • U.K.: nursery schools urged to report as “racist” incidents in which pre-schoolers say “yuk” about spicy foreign foods [BBC, Telegraph, Taranto; the author speaks, via Michael Winter, USA Today]
  • Blawg Review #167 creatively assigns each of 50+ blog posts to its own “state”, though it took some doing to associate us with “Maryland” [Jonathan Frieden, E-Commerce Law]
  • I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… [Daily Business Review, earlier]
  • “‘I’m thinking of getting disability.’ … This individual figured that [it] was tantamount to a career choice”. [physician blogger Edwin Leap]

Next: Esquire magazine vs. all those lawyers?

The developer of a $3.9 billion casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip with the proposed name Cosmopolitan is being sued for trademark infringement by Hearst, publisher of Cosmopolitan magazine. A local IP attorney not involved with either side says the claim could “go either way” and is “not a frivolous lawsuit”. Does this mean there is evidence that the casino people were seeking to sow confusion about which business was which, or just that another valuable English word is falling prey to the trademark Enclosures? (Arnold Knightly, “Fashion mag publisher sues Strip project”, Las Vegas Business Press, Jul. 2).

Hospital probed after calling cops on patient

Yesterday the New York Times reported on the longstanding problem of patient assaults on medical personnel, particularly in psychiatric care: citing Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, it said “half of all nonfatal injuries resulting from workplace assaults occur in health care and social service settings”. (David Tuller, “Nurses Step Up Efforts to Protect Against Attacks”, Jul. 8). So it’s worth noting what happened to Northfield City Hospital in Northfield, Minnesota when a man showed up at the emergency room at 2 a.m., ranting and yelling in an increasingly agitated manner. Hospital staff finally called the police, who arrived on the scene at 7 a.m., assessed the situation and tasered the man. (He was uninjured otherwise and was subdued without losing consciousness.) “Now federal and state health officials have cited the Northfield hospital for violating the patient’s rights,” a development that has outraged hospital officials in the state. The state health department says it believes that staff at the facility, a small one with fewer than 100 beds, “needs more training in deescalation techniques”. The hospital has hired two security guards and is negotiating other steps with the state (Maura Lerner, “Hospital calls cops and feels the sting”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jun. 15). A commenter at KevinMD asserts:

A few years ago, Medicare tried to prohibit physicians from discharging a patient for any reason, up to and including physical attacks on physicians and staff.

Just as the doctors were required to hire translators at the doctor’s expense, they would be required to hire security at the doctor’s expense.

They backed off then, when they physicians called them on it. Not surprised they would try again.

Schwartz Zweben and the Ms. Wheelchair pageant, cont’d

Three years ago we noted (following reporting by Ed Lowe and J.E. Espino of the Appleton, Wis. Post-Crescent) (more) that

Representatives of the Hollywood, Fla.-based law firm of Schwartz Zweben & Associates have played a substantial role behind the scenes in helping organize, promote and support the Ms. Wheelchair America pageant and some of its state affiliates. And lawyers with the firm have filed more than 200 lawsuits in at least seven states and the District of Columbia on behalf of at least 13 pageant participants, “including state and national titleholders, state coordinators and pageant judges”.

Now the Birmingham, Ala. News follows up on the case of Colleen Macort, Ms. Wheelchair Florida 2002, who has filed more than 73 disabled-accessibility actions in Alabama “but has never spent a day in court because of settlements”. Local law provides that Macort cannot be compensated for filing the lawsuits, but the Wisconsin paper reported that the firm of Schwartz Zweben had engaged her as a consultant on other cases. The reporter is kind enough to quote me and mention this site (Liz Ellaby, “Bessemer woman crusades to address disability act violations, provoking critics”, Birmingham News, Jul. 3).

In the state of Washington, Ms. Wheelchair Washington 2005, Michelle Beardshear, has teamed up with the Florida firm to file 15 lawsuits, of which twelve have been settled, against enterprises in Clark County (Kathie Durbin, “Advocate for disabled not hesitant to sue for access”, The Columbian, May 27 courtesy Chamber ILR). And in March, Schwartz Zweben & Slingbaum (as it is now called) swooped down to sue twelve defendants in the Tucson area, including a number of well-known restaurants, alleging ADA violations. (Josh Brodesky, “12 Tucson businesses facing suits alleging Disabilities Act problems”, Arizona Daily Star, Mar. 28).

July 8 roundup

  • Business groups have signed off on dreadful ADA Restoration Act aimed at expanding disabled-rights lawsuits, reversing high court decisions that had moderated the law [WSJ; more here and here]
  • U.K. man to win damages from rail firms on claim that trauma of Paddington crash turned him into deranged killer [Times Online]
  • Patent cases taken on contingency lead to gigantic paydays for D.C.’s Dickstein Shapiro and Wiley Rein [Kim Eisler, Washingtonian; related last year at Eric Goldman’s]
  • Fort Lauderdale injury lawyer disbarred after stealing $300K in client funds; per an ABA state-by-state listing, Florida has not enacted payee notification to help prevent/detect such goings-on [Sun-Sentinel; more]
  • I’ll pay top dollar for that spot under the bridge: tech firms hope to outbid patent trolls for marginal inventor rights [ABA Journal]
  • Enviro-sympathetic analysis of Navy sonar case [Jamison Colburn, Dorf on Law, first and second posts via Adler @ Volokh]
  • Obama proposal for youth national service “voluntary”? Well, schools will lose funds if they fail to meet goals [Goldberg, LAT; bad link fixed now]
  • Not-so-independent sector: under pressure from Sacramento legislators (Feb. 6, PoL May 30), California foundations pledge to redirect millions toward minority causes [CRC]
  • James Lileks on lawyer-friendly Microsoft Minnesota settlement [four years ago on Overlawyered]

“What is the role of the courts in making social policy?”

If blogging from me is light the next three days, it is because I somehow snuck in to the all-star cast of judges and scholars and attorneys participating in a on-line roundtable on this question sponsored by Common Good’s new website, NewTalk.  Participants include Walter Dellinger, Ken Feinberg, Mark Geistfeld, Gillian Hadfield, Lord Leonard Hoffman, Philip Howard, Robert Joffe, Judge Edith Jones, Alan Morrison, David Schoenbrod, Peter Schuck, Stuart Taylor, Michael Traynor, and Russell Wheeler.

Ky. fen-phen foreman: “There’s a lot of people that should have been on trial that weren’t.”

Louisville Courier-Journal:

After 52 hours of deliberation over eight days, a federal jury yesterday declared it was hopelessly deadlocked in deciding whether attorneys William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr. defrauded clients of $65 million in Kentucky’s 2001 fen-phen settlement.

After the judge declared a mistrial, the jury foreman, Donald Rainone of Erlanger, said jurors were stuck at 10-2 to acquit the defendants, and had been at that vote for much of their deliberations.

“We felt the prosecution just didn’t have a strong enough case,” Rainone said in a phone interview in which he strongly criticized the prosecution for being unprepared and focusing its case on only Gallion, Cunningham and a third lawyer, Melbourne Mills Jr.

“There’s a lot of people that had their hand in this,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that should have been on trial that weren’t.”

Rainone declined to say who else should have been on trial, saying he didn’t want to “get sued.”

Of course, that the prosecution failed to indict participants in the fen-phen scam who also stole from tens of thousands to tens of millions doesn’t explain why one votes to acquit the criminal defendant attorneys who stole millions–except for the fact that the defendants were able to blame the empty chair for their actions. If the defendants’ allegations about Stan Chesley’s role are half true, the question remains why Ohio disciplinary authorities have not so much as opened an investigation, much less failed to disbar him. But we will perhaps learn more as the civil trial progresses. Meanwhile, as Peter Bronson writes, “giving immunity to someone so powerful, wealthy and politically wired was everything that destroys public trust in the justice system.”

Judge William O. Bertelsman, who has taken senior status, has recused himself from the retrial; the new judge, Danny Reeves, will likely be requested to lower the eight-digit bond for Gallion and Cunningham, who remain in jail. Melbourne Mills, who was acquitted, says he has already spent the $20 million he was paid for his role in the case–a case his lawyer told a jury that he was too drunk to work on and didn’t understand the underlying law. Nice work if you can get it.

Off-the-record reports I am receiving about the trial blame prosecutors’ performance (such as failing to object to defendant expert opinion that contradicted the facts) and Judge Bertelsman’s instructions to the jury; it also seems to me that the defendants were given far too much leeway to argue the law before the jurors when the judge should have given a straightforward instruction that the underlying case was or was not a class action covering all future Kentucky claimants rather than allow argument over that simple legal question. (Answer: it wasn’t. The settlement with AHP explicitly says it’s a lump-sum settlement for existing plaintiffs requiring the attorneys to comply with Rule 1.8, and there is no indemnification provision contrary to defense testimony arguing otherwise.)

Claim: Rachael Ray food show scorned anorexic

Aaron Ferguson, who used to work as an accountant for the popular cooking show, says executives there made caustic comments about the skinny physique of the show’s executive in charge. These comments apparently wounded and offended Ferguson, who says that he himself suffers from the eating disorder anorexia. There’s a retaliation claim, too: Ferguson says that after he went to HR to complain, his boss began to treat him badly. (“Rachael Ray Employee Claims Anorexia Bias”, CBS/AP, Jul. 3; “Rachael’s Show Hates the Skinnies”, TMZ, Jul. 3)(via PopeHat).