“Philly Inquirer sued over three-sentence restaurant review”

That’s Romenesko’s summary of this news item about a lawsuit by Chops Restaurant against food critic Craig LaBan over a review published in the city’s best-known newspaper, which the item rudely refers to as the InqWaster (Dan Gross, “Chops sues LaBan”, Philadelphia Daily News, Feb. 21). More on lawsuits over restaurant reviews: Jan. 3, 2006 (Dallas); Feb. 10, 2007 (Belfast).

February 26 roundup

  • High-school basketball player gets TRO over enforcement of technical foul after pushing referee. [Huntington News; Chad @ WaPo]
  • Madison County court rejects Vioxx litigation tourism. [Point of Law]
  • Faking disability for accommodation disqualifies bar applicant [Frisch]
  • DOJ antitrust enforcement doesn’t seem to be consistent with U.S. trade policy position. [Cafe Hayek]
  • Professor falsely accused of sexual harassment wins defamation lawsuit against former plaintiff, but too late to save his job. [Kirkendall]
  • Watch what you say dept.: Disbarred attorney and ex-felon sues newspaper, letter-to-editor writer, Illinois Civil Justice League. (His brother won the judicial election anyway.) [Madison County Record; Belleville News Democrat; US v. Amiel Cueto]

Thanks for listening…

I want to thank Walter Olson and Ted Frank for honoring me by giving me an opportunity to guest blog here while Ted is away this week.

First, I guess I should introduce myself, for those of you wondering who the heck I am. I’m an attorney licensed in New Jersey, with a practice which focuses on commercial litigation. Aside from myself, I have several relatives who are attorneys, so it should be clear that I have nothing against lawyers. (In fact, despite all the evidence to the contrary here on Overlawyered, I happen to think we perform a useful function.)

My axe to grind is with those (such as the folks over at the website Ted affectionately calls “Bizarro-Overlawyered”) who want to use the courts, not to enforce agreements or to compensate the victims of wrongdoing, but merely as a way to transfer wealth from corporations to trial lawyers, ostensibly on behalf of consumers.

One of my first close encounters with overlawyering was in the early 1990s, when a classmate of mine got drunk, climbed up on a train, and electrocuted himself; coincidentally, this old incident was mentioned on Overlawyered just a few weeks ago. At the time, I was perhaps naively shocked to find out that someone who was so obviously in the wrong could successfully point a finger elsewhere (or in this case, a lot of fingers) and cash in. The case had everything: a grossly irresponsible plaintiff, innocent defendants whose only fault was having deep pockets, and even the failure of immunity laws to prevent abuse of the tort system. Since then, I’ve become less naive, but I’m no less shocked at these types of stories.

Oh, and I used to blog about politics more generally at Jumping to Conclusions, although I haven’t updated that in quite a long while. In any case, I’m happy to be here.

Mississippi judicial bribery retrial

Retrial is getting under way in the high-profile case against prominent Gulf Coast plaintiff’s lawyer Paul Minor and two former judges. Earlier proceedings resulted in the acquittal of Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, Jr. of all charges and a mixture of not guilty findings and inability to reach a verdict in the case of other defendants. Our extensive coverage is here.

Stage fright

This supposed lawyer ad, on behalf of “Gene Butterfield” of “Glinder & Glinder”, is surely a spoof. It was posted by something called the Kaspar Hauser comedy podcast. Going before a camera can be frightening (tastelessness warning).

Rights for (some) stranded travelers

If an ice storm leaves you immobile and furious, the law surely must provide you with a remedy, at least if you’re at New York’s JFK airport, as opposed to being stuck on Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania. Right? (Steve Chapman, “The right protection for airline passengers”, Chicago Tribune/syndicated, Feb. 22; “The Politics of JetBlue” (editorial), Wall Street Journal/OpinionJournal.com, Feb. 24).

Microsoft told to pay $1.5 billion over music patents

“A federal jury in San Diego [Thursday] ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for violating two patents for a technology used by hundreds of companies that allows users to play digital music on computers, cellphones and other portable devices.” (Alan Sipress, “Microsoft Loses Big In MP3 Patent Suit”, Washington Post, Feb. 23). Washington Post tech blogger Rob Pegoraro (Feb. 23):

Alcatel-Lucent’s patent payday has all the things that patent-abuse critics hate:

* “Submarine” patents, invoked years after a contested invention has hit the market? Check
* Claiming ownership of a media format most people use all the time? Check
* A plaintiff that’s failed to commercialize its own alleged invention? Check
* Extortionate royalty demands? Check

(via Kevin Drum, Feb. 23).

Spank-ban solon will try for half a loaf

Or other bread product as appropriate: California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber concedes the votes “simply [are] not there” for her widely derided proposal to ban the spanking of small children (Jan. 22, Feb. 14), but she’ll still try to get the state’s regulatory nose into the nursery by pushing a law banning various parental disciplinary techniques, including spanking that employs an “instrument”. (Mike Zapler, “No-spanking bid softened”, San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 23).

A question of hubris: what’s our traffic?

We ask because we saw a couple of blogs speculating about our traffic, and making a mathematically incorrect calculation underestimating it by mistakingly assuming that our 2006 readership had not grown from 2001.

So how much do traffic do we have? The answer: we don’t know for sure. If one were to count raw page views, we served 1,176,741 pages in January 2007.

A naive, boastful or deceitful newcomer to the web might try to claim that number as readership. However, a significant share, for us as for any site, consists of spiders from search engines and other mechanical “visitors”, 404 pages not found, reloads and various other categories that inflate a proper readership, including periodic “storms” of a hundred thousand or even a million page requests that are unrelated to reader interests and appear to be either DoS attacks or some other form of static interference. (January did not include any major attacks of this sort; November had a big one, which brought its figure to 2.8 million.)

We do know that our PageRank is 7, the same as major blogs like Instapundit and Gawker or sites like Law.com. By comparison, the top law blog, Volokh, has a PageRank of 8; and my own personal unpublicized little-read rarely-posted-or-linked-to vanity blog with under 100 readers/day has a PageRank of 6.

Of course, we don’t suggest that people read our blog just because others are doing so or because it’s trendy or even because of all the awards and praise we’ve won (and those pages need about five years of updates); we hope you do so because you appreciate the unique analysis we provide here.