May 8 roundup

Tasteless lawyer-ad Hall of Fame

“Life’s short. Get a divorce,” proclaims the Chicago billboard of the law firm of Fetman, Garland & Associates. Flanking the message: big pictures of a buxom temptress in black lace bra and, on the other side, a half-clad muscleman. Reaction has been strong:

“It’s grotesque,” said John Ducanto, past president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “It’s totally undignified and offensive.”

“It trivializes divorce and I think it’s absolutely disgusting,” Rick Tivers, a clinical social worker at the Center for Divorce Recovery in Chicago, told ABC News. …

One of the genuine lions of the American divorce courts — New York’s Raoul Felder — said the ad was a new low for the profession.

“This has to be the Academy Award of bad taste,” Felder told ABC News. …

[The billboard] peers down into an area of Rush Street known as the “Viagra Triangle” for its three, trendy singles bars in an affluent section of Chicago known as the “Gold Coast.”

(Chris Francescani, ABCNews.com, May 7). Update May 10: billboard pulled down after alderman reports it to building inspector as lacking a permit.

Pants fallout?

This is still speculative, but Judge Roy Pearson, the judge who is now-infamous for suing his dry cleaners for $65 million for a pair of pants, may be facing some repercussions for his abusive lawsuit. We don’t know at this time if it’s significant, but his employee biography page at the Washington DC Office of Administrative Hearings now results in the terse message The requested article is no longer published.

Previous Pearson coverage: Apr. 26, May 1, May 4.

(Hat tip: The Conservative Voice.)

Update: And his name is not listed in the OAH Directory of judges.

Where are they now? Larry Klayman watch

How the mighty have fallen. Once able to harass the president of the United States, professional gadfly Larry Klayman — former head of Judicial Watch — is now reduced to filing lawsuits over zoning issues. The town of Pompano Beach approved plans by the Islamic Center of South Florida to build a mosque; at least one resident of the neighborhood disapproved, and hired Klayman:

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims the leader of the mosque, Imam Hassan Sabri, has repeatedly been associated with others who are tied to terrorist groups including Hamas, al-Qaida and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The connections outlined in the filing appear loose and there is no accusation of direct wrongdoing.

Having reviewed the complaint (PDF), it appears to range from meritless to frivolous; this about sums up Klayman’s argument:

Larry Klayman, the lawyer for Wright, said the filing does not amount to an anti-Muslim action but maintained that the mosque sacrificed public safety.

“The mosque is radical, the imam is radical,” Klayman said. “We believe they will go out and recruit people in the African-American community to do their bidding.”

I may not be a fan of “radical” Muslims, but as you can imagine, a church being “radical” and “recruiting people” are protected activities under the First Amendment. And while Klayman failed to name the town that approved the allegedly-suspect rezoning as a party in the case, he sued the completely unrelated Council on American-Islamic Relations for some inexplicable reason. (I suspect the phrase “cheap publicity stunt” may be the answer.)

By the way, one of these things is not like the others:

Klayman also has brought cases against Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden, Fidel Castro and the Teamsters, as well as his own mother.

(Previous coverage of Klayman: Apr. 2002, Jul. 2005, Apr. 2006)

Glendora v. Savarino: Bob Hope photos prove unavailing

Rather than even try to summarize the case, we’ll let Law.com do it for us: “A New York judge has limited a public-access TV personality’s use of small claims courts following her repeated abuse of the system. In dismissing her claim that a Cablevision employee ‘poisoned’ her sponsors’ minds, the judge noted that the woman, who goes by the name Glendora, submitted 360 handwritten pages of documentation, including ‘multiple copies of a 60-year-old photo of the plaintiff with Bob Hope … [and] commentary about the impressive geographic expanse of the City of Yonkers.'” (Mark Fass, “Old Photos of Bob Hope Fail to Carry the Day for Litigious TV Personality”, New York Law Journal, May 3).

P.S. Glendora’s website is here (plays video)(hat tip Gunner of No Quarters Blog, who suggests checking out show # 4260 for more on the hostess’s style in suit-filing).

U.K.: “Teachers say greedy lawyers promote false abuse claims”

Great Britain continues to grapple with the repercussions of its decision to join the U.S. in permitting contingent-fee legal representation:

Lawyers who encourage parents and pupils to make speculative allegations of abuse against teachers in the hope of winning financial compensation risk are destroying the reputation of thousands of teachers, a teaching union has said.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that lawyers working on a “no win, no fee” basis were fuelling a rise in malicious allegations against teachers, made in the knowledge that local authorities would often pay complainants without even investigating their allegations.

(Alexandra Frean, Times Online, May 5).

Wayback Machine: we won’t archive pages if owners object

According to an Apr. 25 announcement, “Internet Archive, a library of historical Web site content, and Suzanne Shell, the author and owner of the Web site www.profane-justice.org, jointly announced today the settlement of their lawsuit, which stemmed from the archiving of Ms. Shell’s Web site in Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. … The Internet Archive said, ‘Internet Archive has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms. Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation. We are happy to have this case behind us.'” The Wayback Machine allows interested persons to go back to examine what particular web pages looked like at earlier dates. Jason Lee Miller has more at WebProNews (Apr. 25) as does John Ottaviani at Technology and Marketing Law Blog (Mar. 14 and May 1), both focusing on Shell’s theory that visiting spiders are capable of creating contractual relations. We covered a case raising some of the same issues on Jul. 13, 2005.