Category Archives: Law: Everything Else

At last! A companion case to US ex rel. Mayo v. Satan and His Staff. The Omaha World-Herald reports,

Judge Marlon Polk threw out Nebraska Sen. Ernie Chambers' lawsuit against the Almighty, saying there was no evidence that the defendant had been served. What's more, Polk found “there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant.”

Contrast this result to the famous Jewish story about the Rabbis sent to a concentration camp who decide to put G-d on trial for allowing the Holocaust to happen. Not subject to the FRCP, they hold a trial on the merits, and find the Defendant guilty of abandoning them and of allowing this great evil to happen.

And then, after the trial was over, they said evening prayer.

I don't know how well they publicized yesterday's meeting in Coral Gables (see Florida Courts Hearing on the Future in Coral Gables Tomorrow), but it wasn't all that well attended — not much more than 20 people. But the presentations were fairly interesting.

I had planned to hold my peace, as it seems to me that there are already court committees working on all the major judicial tech issues (and, from what I can tell, doing a very good job of it too), but given the shortness of the queue I figured I might as well make a plea for three small things I'd love to see the Florida Supreme Court do.

1. Mandate web-friendly citation forms and document formats for all state judicial opinions. This would include web friendly file naming, formatting, and paragraph numbering. This would cost almost nothing.

2. Provide law clerks for the trial court judges (this would require an appropriation from the Legislature) — most states have them, our appellate courts have them, but our hard-working trial court judges don't get their own law clerks. (Disclosure: this proposal would create more jobs for our graduates, but I think it's a very good idea on its own merits — judges who are in court need the back-office help.)

3. (This is a pipe dream) Remove unreasonable barriers to entry of lawyers who move here from out of state. Florida's rules are an archaic barrier to entry in a national economy and globalized world. Unlike just about every other state, there are no provisions for experienced lawyers to waive into the Florida bar. Worse, the application process for experienced lawyers requires so much paperwork that it would be struck down as a barrier to entry if the anti-trust law applied. I know the bar is against this, but I think it would serve the public interest.

The panel took notes on the first point, agreed vigorously if not particularly optimistically with the second, and were polite about the third — but I'm not holding my breath.

You can make your own comments in writing by Nov. 1, to:

Task Force on Judicial Branch Planning
Office of the State Courts Administrator
Strategic Planning
Florida Supreme Court
500 South Duval Street
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-1900

Zero tolerance gone mad.

Boing Boing, Fourth grader suspended for using broken pencil sharpener. Note that the “use” was his trying to sharpen a pencil, not threaten someone.

I am no great fan of McDonalds — I don't think I've been inside one more than twice in the last decade — but I think they deserve praise for this letter responding to the threat that has now matured as this boycott campaign.

(found via Good as You, AFA will try to tarnish Golden Arches)

Note that I support the right of people to organize boycotts against companies whose policies they don't like, indeed celebrate it as a valued form of citizen activism. And I also support the right of the rest of us to make fun of misguided boycotts.

Today is the last day to file a claim online (or have one postmarked) in the In re Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation (MDL 1409) case. You are a member of the plaintiff class if you used a Visa, Master Card and/or Diners Club credit or debit card abroad between Feb 1, 1996 and Nov. 8, 2006.

(See I Am A Plaintiff for more details.)

I took option two, having calculated that I was abroad for 394 days during the relevant period. That's a lot of days.

Susan Crawford, Why Block C matters

Bottom line: nothing is gonna change for some time.