Posts Tagged ‘judges’

December 1 roundup

  • Hertz drops libel lawsuit against investor research outfit that claimed its solvency was at risk [Crain’s New York, earlier]
  • Report: New Jersey blogger jailed for threats against federal judges was on FBI informant payroll [AP]
  • “Bentley Photos Are Props in Willie Gary’s High School Motivational Speech” [ABA Journal]
  • Australian personal injury lawyers evade ad ban [Sydney Morning Herald]
  • Scott Rothstein’s alleged Ponzi scheme “targeted people who invested in law suits” [Steele/Legal Ethics Forum] “Two Inside Looks at Rothstein’s Firm, Lifestyle” [Ambrogi/Legal Blog Watch]
  • O’Quinn driving nearly twice speed limit on rainy pavement at time of crash [Chron]
  • “Support for UN religious defamation rule drops” [Media Watch Watch] On the other hand? “Envoy’s Speech Signals Softening of U.S. Hostility to International Court” [AP]
  • Rudely titled new book on how to avoid getting sued [Instapundit]

November 23 roundup

Judge Laurence Silberman interviewed

By Peter Robinson, at Uncommon Knowledge (site):

Lawyering is an essential component of democratic capitalism, but too much lawyering can be too much of a good thing. A disproportionate amount of our talent in the United States goes into law as opposed to business, which creates wealth. Lawyers redistribute the wealth, but they do not generally produce wealth.

Judge Silberman’s classic 1978 article, “Will Lawyering Strangle Democratic Capitalism?” — originally published at my old magazine Regulation, though before my time there — is available in PDF form from Cato here.

Related: “Scalia: ‘We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to’ Lawyering” [WSJ Law Blog]

There’ll always be a Cook County

Don’t miss: Abdon Pallasch of the Chicago Sun-Times takes a look “inside the beast” at how the Cook County Democratic Party “slates” its judges. Women with Irish-sounding names do best with voters:

That’s why lawyers of Jewish or other ancestry often legally adopt Irish names to run for judge here. That’s why when party leaders slate men without Irish names, such as William Haddad, who would have been the first Arab-American full-circuit judge in Cook County, the party must recruit Irish women lawyers to run as “ringers” or “stalking horses” to flood the ballot and fracture the Irish-woman vote.

There’s a Corboy & Demetrio angle, too. And the National Law Journal covers the controversy over the Cook County Clerk’s decision to accept paid lawyer advertising on her office’s website (earlier).

Fortune: “Las Vegas’s medical Mafia”

“Prosecutors say a group of top lawyers and doctors conspired to collect millions in inflated damages by pushing accident victims into dubious surgery.” Riveting, detail-filled account of the alleged involvement of numerous Nevada lawyers and as many as 20 doctors in what prosecutors say was boldly and systematically organized misconduct, with even some sectors of the judiciary in the state at best cowed by the scheme’s managers. An elegant touch: physicians who played ball are said to have been assured protection from malpractice suits from many feared attorneys, while those not in on the scheme appear in some cases to have been at extra peril. This looks to be one of the year’s most important ventures into investigative journalism on the underside of litigation — don’t even think of missing it [Katherine Eban, Fortune, Aug. 19] More: discussed by Darleen Click and commenters, Protein Wisdom.

Don’t

If you’re a judge annoyed at a court worker’s parking her car in a restricted parking space at the courthouse, don’t take it upon yourself to let the air out of her tires [Maryland circuit court judge Robert Nalley, who’s stepping down from an administrative post but not from the bench after conceding the bit of self-help in question; Washington Post]