If Fox News is going to have to hire lawyers to defend the accuracy of its “Fair and Balanced” against MoveOn.org’s silly and abusive complaint (see Jul. 20), how many other media outfits are going to need to worry about backing up their puffish slogans? David Giacalone, guest-posting at Legal Underground, has a funny post (Jul. 24) listing various newspaper slogans that publishers might wish to reconsider, from the Atlanta Journal’s “Covers Dixie Like the Dew” (substantiation, please) to the Toledo Blade’s “One of America’s Great Newspapers — In One of America’s Great Cities”.
Posts Tagged ‘Atlanta’
ABA study of criminal punishment released
The American Bar Association today released the report of the so-called “Justice Kennedy Commission.” Its bottom line: “America’s criminal justice systems rely too heavily on incarceration and need to consider more effective alternatives.” The report’s long list of recommendations — including the repeal of mandatory minimum sentences — will be taken up by the ABA House of Delegates at the annual meeting in Atlanta in August. (The full text of the report can be downloaded here.)
Archived by the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress, as part of a project that aims to preserve press coverage of the 2002 campaign, has archived this site as it appeared in the fall of that year, along with dozens of other weblogs. LiveJournal user “UKSubs” pays us a nice tribute in a list of favorite sites, writing: “I am still shocked by the number of ridiculous frivolous lawsuits filed in this country and others on a daily basis. Overlawyered works by finding a nice tone that is firmly between mocking and anger. Everytime I read Overlawyered, a part of me screams, what have I gotten myself into.” And we got a great big influx of traffic from Neal Boortz’s popular site (see Mar. 1-3, 2002) when the Atlanta-based radio host linked to our Jun. 1 item on the lawyer who hopes to offer “post-traumatic slave syndrome” as an excuse for an Oregon defendant accused of murder.
It’s a mad, mad, mad Madison County
As we noted Apr. 15, Griffin Bell, who served as U.S. Attorney General in the Carter Administration, called last week for a federal law enforcement probe into the handling of asbestos litigation by the courts of Madison County, Ill. What happened next: state court judge Nicholas Byron (more: Mar. 24, Apr. 4-6, Apr. 30, 2003), who presides over Madison County’s asbestos docket, declared that lawyers from King & Spalding, the big Atlanta-based law firm with which Bell is associated, would be unwelcome in his courtroom. Reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “A lawyer who was before Byron Friday morning said that Byron twice told a capacity crowd of lawyers in his courtroom for an asbestos lawsuit hearing that he was barring King & Spalding. The lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said Byron asked, ‘Is anyone here from the Atlanta firm of King & Spalding? I’m banning them from practicing in the county.’ ‘He clearly wasn’t joking,’ the lawyer said.” Bell, who served for many years as a federal judge before becoming Attorney General, appears to have taken the news in stride: “He can debar all the defense lawyers, but then again, he’d run into the constitutional problem that you are allowed to have a lawyer of your choice.” “Bell, 85, said that his firm does not handle asbestos litigation and to his knowledge had no cases in Madison County. ‘I don’t know that we would have lost anything by being barred anyway,’ Bell said. ‘If Judge Byron feels that way, I doubt he would give us a fair hearing.'” (Paul Hampel and Trisha Howard, “Criticism of court leads to ban on Atlanta law firm”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Apr. 17).
Update: stripped of her big award
The Georgia Court of Appeals has stripped Vanessa Steele-Inman of her million-dollar jury award against the owners and managers of Atlanta’s Pink Pony nightclub over alleged irregularities in the 1997 Miss Nude World International pageant (see Jul. 26-27, 2000, Mar. 23-25, 2001). (Jonathan Ringel, “Miss Nude Contestant Stripped of Court Victory”, Fulton County Daily Report, Mar. 30).
Cheeseburger bill passes House
By a vote of 276 to 139 with most Democrats opposed, the House gave its approval to a bill that would bar lawsuits against the food industry over obesity. (Christopher Lee, “House bill bans suits blaming eateries for obesity”, Washington Post/San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 11). The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate; similar legislation is pending in many state legislatures and has passed in Louisiana. Jacob Sullum at Reason “Hit & Run” has two good commentaries on the bill. It’s “disconcerting to see Congress instructing state courts to dismiss patently absurd lawsuits. I worry that it’s not really necessary. I worry more that it is,” Sullum writes. (Mar. 9). Sullum also catches GW law prof John Banzhaf talking out of both sides of his mouth about whether obesity lawsuits have been successful (Mar. 10).
One activist quoted in the new coverage is Ben Kelley, who in cooperation with Prof. Richard Daynard has taken a prominent role in organizing conferences advising lawyers on how to sue the food industry (see Elizabeth Lee, Andrew Mollison, “Food fans weigh in”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 10). It turns out that this is none other than the same Ben Kelley we covered ten years ago when we examined how litigation consultants working with trial lawyers have successfully promoted bogus media coverage of alleged auto hazards, including NBC’s famous use of hidden incendiary devices to portray GM trucks as prone to explode (Walter Olson, “It Didn’t Start With Dateline NBC”, National Review, Jun. 21, 1993.) The pro-foodmaker Center for Consumer Freedom has more on Kelley’s recent activities: see Dan Mindus, “McLawsuit Lies”, National Review, Oct. 29; “Trial Lawyers Up Demands On Food Companies”, Oct. 30; “Update: Obesity War Loses Discredited General”, Nov. 4.
MedPundit Sydney Smith thinks (Mar. 10) that the much-headlined new study purporting to find that obesity claims more lives than smoking “is, all things considered, a very weak study. Certainly too weak to be the foundation of sweeping public policy.” For more of our coverage of obesity litigation, see Aug. 11, Jun. 20, Sept. 4, Aug. 6, Jul. 21, Jul. 3, Jul. 3 again, Jul. 1, Jun. 24, and a great deal more here. More: Radley Balko dissents from the bill on federalist grounds (Mar. 11)(& letter to the editor, Mar. 18).
Courts compete for bankruptcy cases
“As [energy company] Mirant’s Chapter 11 unfolds in North Texas, the region’s bankruptcy bar is keenly aware that the region is playing for high stakes. The area has been trying for years to bag a big-ticket bankruptcy. Its first catch was Mirant, the 10th-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. It’s been very, very good to Fort Worth.” Large-firm bankruptcies are enormously lucrative to lawyers, other professionals and support industries, but the competition for a business once dominated by Manhattan and Delaware puts pressure on judges to issue rulings pleasing to the managers and lawyers of debtor companies. “Judges who don’t deliver are dooming themselves and their local peers to backwater status: Let a big bankrupt company leave unhappy, and nobody else will come back.” In the 1980s, one-third of big bankruptcies were filed away from the bankrupt firm’s headquarters, an indicator of forum-shopping; since then the figure has risen to two-thirds (Margaret Newkirk, “Courts compete to bag big cases”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 29).
There goes the library budget
Atlanta, Georgia: “The Fulton County Commission has opted for an $18 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by librarians who claimed they were discriminated against because they are white. The settlement ends four years of litigation but represents more than half the entire library department’s budget for 2003, which was $29 million. It is also more than the county spends each year on functions such as planning and zoning, parks and recreation or family and children services.” The case was a reverse discrimination suit, which presumably means (or does it?) that conservatives are obliged to be happy about its success (“Fulton County settles $18 million bias suit by librarians”, AP/AccessNorthGa.com, Jan. 7). The “suit also accused the library system of shifting money away from ‘white’ libraries to ‘black’ libraries.” (“Librarians get $25 million in reverse discrimination case against Fulton”, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Jan. 16, 2002)(via George Lenard, who has additional comments).
Hall of reciprocity
Welcome visitors from GruntDoc, “Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas”, which has a pleasing graphically rendered blogroll as well as the expected reflections on medical and military matters. And Southern Appeal, “The random musings of a Southern Federalist and his co-conspirators”, notably including Prof. Michael DeBow of Samford U.’s Cumberland School of Law, who’s written some great stuff on the tobacco-Medicaid litigation. The site is also your one-stop resource for commentary supportive of the appeals court nomination of Alabama AG Bill Pryor. Speaking of such nominations, Prof. Bainbridge offers cogent thoughts about a much-criticized speech by appeals court nominee Janice Rogers Brown (Nov. 4; see Nov. 1) but did startle us several paragraphs before the end with a sudden rhetorical question about whether we personally at this site are “just wasting [our] time.” Alex Wellen, author of the much-talked-about new memoir Barman (relating his experiences as a graduate of a second-tier law school turned intellectual property litigator) has launched a new legal weblog in which he generously lists us among his “blog mentors”; when Wellen’s book tour took him to Manhattan we had a chance to meet and compare notes in person. And we got a great many visitors last week when Todd Dominey of Atlanta (WhatDoIKnow.org) called us “nice” and put us on his “Enjoying” list.
Query on site redesign answered
At least a dozen of our readers were generous enough to reply to our query of last Friday about how to replace relative with absolute links. We’ve now solved the problem to our satisfaction. Readers’ suggestions fell into three main categories: