John Wesley Hall Jr., a vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys and author of the standard text on defense ethics, calls [Sibley’s tactics in the Palfrey case] “spiteful” and “over the line,” and says it “doesn’t serve any purpose but to harass and embarrass people.”
Earlier: Mar. 27. The ABC News report on Sibley and Palfrey airs tonight.
This week, Roy Pearson, the Judge With the Missing Pants, has replaced Duke Lacrosse prosecutor Mike Nifong as the symbol of lawyers run amok in the United States. And after hearing the story of Pearson’s lawsuit, approximately 65 million people — one for every dollar Pearson is demanding — have asked me in exasperation what it takes for a lawyer to get disciplined in this country. Well, perhaps one reason it’s so difficult to discipline an attorney can be illustrated by a case handed down on Thursday in the Ninth Circuit, involving an attorney named Richard Canatella. Mr. Canatella has a rather… spotty disciplinary history. As described by the California State Bar:
Canatella stipulated to filing numerous frivolous actions in courts in San Mateo, San Francisco, and Santa Clara county courts, as well as in the California Court of Appeal and federal district and appeals courts.
[…]
Canatella’s involvement in nine other matters also was the subject of discipline.
Sanctions were ordered against him or his clients 37 times. Courts repeatedly found him responsible for frivolous, meritless and vexatious actions. Sanctions totalled more than $18,000 in one matter, and the opposing parties were granted all fees and costs in another.
In one case, a federal judge said, “This complaint is a paradigm for ‘frivolous.’” Wrote another federal jurist: “Plaintiff’s repeated attempt to challenge the sanctions and judgments . . . in the face of clear authority that his claim is frivolous evidences his bad faith and wrongful purpose.”
So what did Canatella do? You guessed it: he sued the California Bar and various Bar officials for publishing this disciplinary record online, claiming that it violated his civil rights. The California Appellate Report elaborates:
You’d probably freak out too if that’s what they said about you. Mind you, Cantanella offers the following defense (?) of his conduct in his second amended complaint, and alleges that he was not actually sanctioned 37 times, but was instead “investigated” for 47 “purported sanction orders” over a nine year period and was sanctioned on at least 26 “separate” occasions by federal and state courts between 1989 and 1998. Once you hear that, by the way, do you think the judges have a pretty good sense regarding whether Cantanella’s a particularly sympathetic figure? Or, perhaps, think — shockingly — that a person sanctioned this pervasively is precisely the type of person who would file the present action?
Not surprisingly, Canatella lost his suit. So, showing the same level of sense that got him sanctioned all those times, he appealed. He lost again, in the decision handed down yesterday.
This wasn’t the first suit he filed against the Bar, by the way.
So, it’s not hard to see why state bar officials may be a little cautious in disciplining attorneys.
We often discuss regulation-via-litigation, but usually there’s at least a little bit of metaphor in that phrase. But apparently some people might be taking it entirely too literally. Eugene Volokh points us to this story in the Philadelphia Daily News, in which a City Councilman named Darrell Clarke has come up with a new strategy to pass gun-control laws, despite the fact that the state legislature won’t allow him to do so:
What’s different is that he says Council also is preparing to file a legal complaint related to the Legislature’s inaction.
[…]
Asked how Council can move forward on the bills without a state enabling law, Clarke said, “We think that with our complaint, we will show in our theory that the state has been negligent in terms of enacting good-sense legislation. We think we have a compelling case.”
Indeed, why bother with state legislatures at all? Just let lawyers decide what laws would be “reasonable,” and then get courts to pass those laws.
(Think of all the time and money we could save by abolishing elections.)
Just what we need: more causes of action. If you’ve ever wondered why this country is overlawyered — besides greed and lack of personal responsibility, I mean — you might want to look to our law schools, where law professors with too much time on their hands spend some of it thinking of new ideas for increasing litigation. The latest example, from Fortune.com’s The Browser:
The mere act of forwarding an email or posting an exchange to a website is grounds for legal action, according to University of Arkansas law professor Ned Snow. In a paper to be published in the Kansas Law Review this summer, Snow contends that one of the most common acts of the digital age is a violation of privacy and warns that our courts are running headlong into this issue.
But don’t worry; Snow’s only trying to help:
His paper is a result of that curiosity, and he’s hoping it will serve as a roadmap for the courts in an issue that is bound to come into the spotlight. “Most of the time, when you forward emails, there’s no harm. But when you can show the harm, there’s reason to go to court,” he says. “I’m trying to offer insight to the courts, who will be grappling with this issue.”
And if there’s big money to be made somewhere along the way, well, I guess that’s just the price we all have to pay.
What DNA testing is telling us about the reliability of our court system — even the criminal side of it, where “beyond a reasonable doubt” and other procedural protections are supposed to guard against false positives (Virginia Postrel, Apr. 29).
Outrage continues to spread over Roy Pearson, Jr.’s $65 million suit against a Washington, D.C. Korean dry cleaner over a lost pair of suit pants (Apr. 26, May 1). The Washington Post editorially wonders whether Pearson should continue in his position as an administrative law judge given the “serious questions” raised by the case “about his judgment and temperament”. (“Kick in the Pants”, May 3). Associated Press coverage is circulating worldwide: Lubna Takruri, “Judge sues cleaner for $65M over pants”, AP/Kansas City Star, May 3. And Alex Spillius in London’s Daily Telegraph (“Judge sues dry cleaners over lost trousers, May 3) notes that Pearson
reached the figure of $67,292,000 as follows: Washington’s consumer protection law provides for damages of $1,500 per violation per day. Mr Pearson started multiplying: 12 violations over 1,200 days, times three defendants (the Chungs and their son)….
Mr Pearson has set the Chungs and their lawyers a long list of questions, which includes: “Please identify by name, full address and telephone number, all cleaners known to you on May 1, 2005 in the District of Columbia, the United States and the world that advertise ‘SATISFACTION GUARANTEED’,” according to the Washington Post.
We’ll agree: the posters at the AutoAdmit/Xoxohth board—like commenters on DailyKos, Google and Yahoo! boards, Legal Underground, The Volokh Conspiracy, and even Overlawyered—can be distasteful or obnoxious, and all the more so because in Xoxohth’s case because the board is largely unmoderated. Posters have engaged in racial slurs and misogynist remarks; they are notorious for threads where posters evaluate the looks of female attorneys and law students. (Even my girlfriend was the subject of a brief thread.) The site has recently had negative publicity from a Yale Law student who blames a thread there for an inability to find a job and from a Boalt Law student who is facing expulsion because he briefly posted to AutoAdmit and quickly withdrew a poor-taste-joking threat of a Virginia-Tech-copycat at Hastings that resulted in the latter school being shut down for a day.
A Penn Law student who was an administrator on the site resigned in response to some of the shenanigans on the board in March. The WSJ Law Blog is reporting today that that was not enough for his future employer, Boston law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, which withdrew its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, who (to my knowledge) is not accused of making any objectionable remarks himself. Now, an employer can reasonably decide that it does not wish to associate with a controversial employee (though the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act imposes on private employment relationships in some circumstances what are in most other states thought of as constitutional speech and freedom-of-association protections applicable only to governmental relationships, which may mean that Ciolli has a cause of action against the firm).
But the decision of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge to find Ciolli’s association with the AutoAdmit board disqualifying is curious if only because one of the attorneys at the same office of the law firm has been indicted for felony homicide for allegedly killing a man in an auto accident while driving under the influence of sleeping pills. (Three and a half pills were missing from a three-hour-old Ambien prescription, and the attorney allegedly admits “tasting” them.) Now, that attorney is entitled to a presumption of innocence in his criminal trial (he pled not guilty in the summer of 2006, a motion to dismiss was denied later that year, and I cannot find any reference to the current status of his case). But if you ever wanted to know how damning it is in the modern legal community to be associated with a controversial website accused of misogyny, you now have an answer: it’s worse than being accused of killing someone.
More blogosphere commentary: Concurring Opinions; Above the Law.
It’s gotten the religious group sued, again, by the EEOC. I’ve gathered some links on the story at Point of Law.
In June 2006 (Overlawyered), a Maryland resident named Arthur Hoyte, in conjunction with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, sued Kentucky Fried Chicken for selling food made with trans fats; he claimed that he didn’t realize (despite being a medical doctor!) that fast food might not be the healthiest option for his diet. And this, of course, was KFC’s fault.
Yesterday, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, pointing out that it didn’t even identify any injury suffered by Hoyte, and mocking him for pretending not to realize that fast food might contain trans fats. (“The suggestion is that, by its silence, KFC misled plaintiffs into believing that its products did not contain harmful trans fat. This is a questionable premise at best […] Especially since, as plaintiff submits, consumers have a ‘growing awareness of trans fat and the need to avoid it.’ If consumers are increasingly aware of trans fat, where do they expect to find it if not in fast food restaurants?”)
This is a big victory for restaurateurs — as KFC pointed out in its motion, under the logic espoused by Hoyte (who was seeking class action status), effectively everyone who ever ate a meal at a restaurant would have a cause of action against the restaurant, and could claim a minimum of $1500 in damages. (Although Hoyte’s claim was about trans fats, the same reasoning would apply to virtually every other ingredient in existence, since any one of them might represent a potential health risk if eaten to excess.)
But it certainly won’t end the CSPI’s attempt to achieve via litigation what it can’t through regulation; Hoyte’s claim failed only because D.C. courts have narrowly interpreted the badly-drafted D.C. Consumer Protection Act to require that plaintiffs demonstrate an injury before suing, and because he wasn’t creative enough in drafting his complaint to allege the right kind of injuries. This suit was no more frivolous than the similar suits filed against McDonalds, some of which courts have been extremely tolerant of. (See, e.g. Sep. 2006)
Update: Hans Bader comments over at CEI’s Openmarket blog, noting the irony that at one time, CSPI actually used to teach that trans fats were safer than saturated fats.
Fortune is reporting that Don Imus has hired a lawyer and is planning to sue CBS for the 40 million left on his contract. The argument would apparently be that Imus was only doing what CBS hired him to do, and therefore it was a breach of contract to fire him for his statements. He may well have a plausible case.
But Imus has hired one of the nation’s premiere First Amendment attorneys, and the two sides are gearing up for a legal showdown that could turn on how language in his contract that encouraged the radio host to be irreverent and engage in character attacks is interpreted, according to one person who has read the contract.
The language, according to this source, was part of a five-year contract that went into effect in 2006 and that paid Imus close to $10 million a year. It stipulates that Imus be given a warning before being fired for doing what he made a career out of – making off-color jokes. The source described it as a “dog has one- bite clause.” A lawsuit could be filed within a month, this person predicted.
If he does proceed, it won’t be the first Imus-related suit filed since his firing; that honor goes to CBS itself, which sued a Southern California radio station for copyright infringement for rebroadcasting Imus shows after it was pulled from the air. The case settled a week later, with the station agreeing to stop and CBS agreeing not to seek damages.