Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘pro se’

Search engines are not common carriers

The First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protect search engines’ decisions about what content to carry; Google can’t be forced to run ads or “honestly” rank websites, according to a federal judge in Delaware. Eric Goldman has the details.

Goldman notes that this particular case, filed by a pro se litigant, was clearly frivolous, but the decision is still useful for Google, which, as the dominant player in the search engine game, faces suits elsewhere based on similar theories.

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A “fixture” in Gotham courthouses

Michael Melnitzky, whose wife filed for divorce in 1994, “has sued virtually everyone involved: one of his former lawyers, his wife’s lawyer, three banks, five judges and a psychiatrist appointed by the court to evaluate his mental health. In unrelated cases, he has sued a neighbor, a thrift shop, the city and his former employer. And he has almost always lost.” “I used to be an art restorer,“ says Melnitzky, a pro se litigant. “Now I’m a litigator. If you’re going to attack me or assault me on a legal front, and I don’t hit back, I would feel dishonorable with myself.” (Ray Rivera, “The Marriage Lasted 10 Years. The Lawsuits? 13 Years, and Counting”, New York Times, Feb. 19; Above the Law, Feb. 20).

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Update: Indictments in Roberts sex/extortion case still pending

We first covered the case of Ted H. and Mary Schorlemer Roberts Jun. 13, 2004 and Sep. 3, 2005:

According to a story in the San Antonio Express-News, husband-and-wife legal partners Ted H. and Mary Schorlemer Roberts received money in a curious sequence of events. Mary, claiming to seek “no strings” discreet encounters, would seduce men over an Internet dating service. Ted would then write the men (in legal documents sometimes typed by Mary) and notify them that he planned to seek intrusive and public civil discovery to investigate whether the affair brought forward potential causes of action that were flimsy at best; the men would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a release and confidentiality agreement.

Now:

Two San Antonio, Texas, lawyers, married to each other, face a trial on theft charges based on allegations that the wife had sexual liaisons with four men whom the husband subsequently threatened with litigation unless they compensated him for his emotional distress.

You’ll never guess how the Roberts’ lawyer defends them:

[Michael] McCrum contends the state is trying to prosecute his clients for something that civil lawyers do all the time — send demand letters and present petitions they plan to file under Rule 202.

“By stretching statutory words to an unprecedented interpretation, the state seeks to criminalize as “theft the presentment and subsequent settlement of potential claims authorized under the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure,” Mary and Ted Roberts alleged in one of several motions to quash their indictments that Harle dismissed in October 2006. …

[Baker Botts attorney Rod] Phelan says there is “a kernel of truth” in the point that McCrum is making. “The line between extortion or blackmail and making a demand to settle a colorable claim is gray,” he says.

The prosecutor distinguishes the two by noting that Ted Roberts was acting pro se. (Mary Alice Robbins, “Married Lawyers Face Trial for Payment Demands After Wife’s Affairs”, Texas Lawyer, Feb. 6). Note that these are theft, rather than extortion charges, however; a stretch, to be sure, but the prosecutors decided that Texas law does permit extortion in these circumstances. (It does seem rather appalling under the prosecutors’ view that the only thing Roberts needed to accomplish his blackmail is to expand the conspiracy to a third person.) Unfortunately for the extortion victims, their identities were revealed by the indictment and the Texas Lawyer coverage. A job for ReputationDefender?

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Slow typist sues law school

According to Adrian Zachariasewycz, a/k/a Adrian Zack, of Woodlyn, Pa., some exams given at the University of Michigan Law School reward fast typists with a chance at higher scores. So he’ll see school administrators in court, in a pro se lawsuit that also names as a defendant the Wilmington, Del. law firm of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, where his associate’s gig didn’t work out. He’s suing two of the law school’s career counselors individually for alleged bad advice, too. (WSJ law blog, Jan. 26; complaint in PDF format). More: Feb. 5.

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Author: Penguin tagged my book as “black interest”

Many large bookstores carry sections devoted to works of African-American interest, and a number of book clubs and other specialized selling channels do a thriving business by specializing in black themes and authors. In October, however, Florida-based author Nadine Aldred, who writes under the pen name “Millennia Black“, filed a pro se lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against her publisher, Penguin Group, on the grounds that Penguin (she alleges) insisted on steering her work into black-interest channels although she would rather have been marketed as a general-interest author. On the Wrong Side of the Alligator has reprinted excerpts from the complaint (Jan. 6).

The estimation of whether a particular author’s work will sell better if marketed to a niche or to a more general audience is inescapably going to depend on case-by-case judgment (assuming that marketing dollars and available cues of cover design, etc. are limited and cannot be dispatched in both directions at once). It is not immediately apparent why Penguin would not have an interest in taking a path that maximized its author’s sales. Aldred’s suit asks $250 million. See also Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Why book industry sees the world split still by race”, Wall Street Journal/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 6.

P.S. Disclosure, for whatever it’s worth: Penguin was my publisher on my first book (The Litigation Explosion).

More: Charles E. Petit of Scrivener’s Error writes to say:

The real problem in this instance is not with Penguin. The real problem is an antitrust nightmare: the book distribution system, which is probably the paradigmatic example of “one man’s antitrust is another man’s economy of scale”–at least until you look into the financing and terms of doing business, which makes me ask “What economies of scale?” The _distributors_ are the ones who demand “pigeonholing” of books, and Penguin’s best defense will be to point out that books that are released _without_ a category tend to stay in distributors’ warehouses unshipped. In other words, “We had to put _some_ category on it as a business necessity, and this is the one that in our commercial judgment was the best fit.”

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Because we all love wacky pro se suits: Ward v. Arm & Hammer

Via the District of New Jersey, please find attached the order dismissing the case in Ward v. Arm & Hammer [sic], 341 F.Supp.2d 499 (2004): no, a baking soda manufacturer has no legal duty to warn users that using baking soda to cook crack cocaine is illegal. (See David Lat’s blog for the complaint.)

We can still find something to complain about, though: the district court has the power under 28 U.S.C. § 1915 to dismiss the case sua sponte as frivolous, which this case was in even the most narrow and technical senses of the word, or even just to dismiss the case for failure to state a claim without waiting for briefing. Church & Dwight Co., the makers of Arm & Hammer, was forced to retain Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to file multiple briefs in the federal court at not inconsiderable expense to rid itself of this nuisance suit.

More on product liability, including many successful cases not much less wacky than this one, on our product liability page.

Update: The post originally protested the granting of in forma pauperis status; David Giacalone correctly points out in the comments that IFP status is automatic without a showing of bad faith, and that my complaint was with the failure of the court to exercise its sua sponte powers to dismiss. I’ve corrected the post accordingly.

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December 15 roundup

  • Pro se suit against baking soda manufacturer for failing to warn that baking crack is illegal. [Lat]
  • Plaintiffs’ expert: when you asked for the documents I reviewed, I thought you meant the documents I viewed twice. Judge doesn’t buy it. [Lattman; Des Moines Register]
  • Judges stymie popular will in California death penalty cases. [The Recorder; Will @ WaPo]
  • And coincidental update of breaking news: California federal judge strikes down all lethal injections in state. [Bashman roundup]
  • Via Hans Bader, but not on-line or covered in the mainstream press: DC City Council considering amendment to Human Rights Act barring employment discrimination against ex-convicts. Ex-convict Marion Barry is the sponsor; business community strangely silent. [Legal Times ($)]
  • Virginia plaintiff’s attempt at milk regulation through litigation blocked. Lawyers shamelessly promise to forum-shop. [WaPo]
  • UK insult to injury: adulterer has right to prevent cuckolded husband from writing about affair. [Bashman roundup]
  • Florida Supreme Court stumbles onto a correct answer: no litigation tourism for “snowbirds.” [AP; State Farm v. Roach]
  • Has the Federal Circuit emasculated the “obviousness” rule? An argument that it has. [The American]
  • Wonder how those “bad toy” lists get generated? [Point of Law]
  • More on the “Coercive Abortion Bills” in Michigan, which passed the House, and threaten to criminalize men who end relationships with pregnant women. [Fox News]
  • Lawsuit: please bar publication of yearbook unless it includes photo of my son wearing chain-mail and a sword. [Krauss @ POL]
  • Should we be afraid of hedge funds? [Marginal Revolution]
  • Peter Huber on the emphasis of glue over learning in school. [Forbes]
  • Judge Posner to “furry”: “Your tail is great.” [NWN blog; Eminent Domain blog via Bashman]
  • A commenter here suggested that certain little-read websites are attacking us just to generate traffic. I’m beginning to believe it what with three different writers posting in the last 36 hours attacking me and sometimes Walter, with insults and arguments in varying combinations of baseless, sloppy, and thoughtless. So, while I’m happy to engage thoughtful analysis, no link or response here, since doing so just seems to create perverse incentives, not to mention takes away time from meaningful writing.
  • As contrast: Peter Nordberg critiques posts by me and Walter on the rollover suit and cigarette polonium, as well as interesting posts by Bill Childs and Derek Lowe on the torcetrapib withdrawal. [Blog 702]

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Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, New York landlord-tenant edition

Is the 78-year-old George Pavia a bully resident-landlord who is trying to intimidate his tenants? Or is 67-year-old James Couri, convicted on federal fraud charges in the 1980s, a litigious pro se tenant whose addition of Pavia to his list of legal adversaries is a scheme to get out from paying rent? Six years of legal battles (helped by Couri’s ability to find Pavia’s technical violations of the regulatory morass facing NYC landlords) will culminate in a jury trial in 2007, though the personal enmities involved suggest that there will be years of appeals afterwards. Couri tried to enlist other tenants against Pavia in a suit claiming that Pavia overcharges tenants, but, inspirationally, the other tenants refused, feeling that their rents were reasonable regardless of what New York’s arcane rent control laws say. Pavia has not been able to evict Couri though the former feels harassed by his involuntary neighbor and the latter hounded a gay designer out of the building; one of Pavia’s lawyers explains, “Apparently, there are certain judges in New York who would rather take arsenic than evict a tenant.” For the Coasian effects of such judges, see POL Nov. 28; but see Giacalone for an opposing view that isn’t quite responsive. Moral: tenant background checks are your friend. (Ron Stodghill, “A House Divided: Uncivil War on E. 73rd”, New York Times, Dec. 10).

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