Archive for the ‘Fun with Law’ Category

Via Pharyngula, we get the story of a small-town Texas bar owner squaring off against a local church:

In a small Texas town, (Mt. Vernon ) Drummond’s bar began construction on a new building to increase their business.. The local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayers. Work progressed right up till the week before opening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.

The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means.

The church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the building’s demise in its reply to the court.

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. At the hearing he commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

This story seems to be popping up all over the interwebz of late, although the site linked by Pharyngula is down as of this writing. Alas, the story does not appear to actually be true. According to Snopes:

Our earliest sighting of the item comes from a July 2007 blog post, where the incident was presented as having happened in “a small, Midwestern conservative town” (rather thanMt. Vernon, Texas) to a lightning-struck watering hole identified solely as “a new tavern” (rather than “Drummond’s Bar”).

The story isn’t supposed to be read as relating something that happened in real life; it’s a modern day admonition to churchgoers not to allow transient secular needs to get in the way of their faith. What a person believes or will stand up for shouldn’t change because there’s a monetary factor involved; otherwise, it’s not true belief. As the fictional judge points out, there is something untoward about a congregation so willing to put worldly matters first that it denies it believes in prayer.

While the tale is an exaggeration of its underlying moral, that overstatement is a way of prompting folks to measure the contents of their hearts against those of the fictional congregation to see if they themselves aren’t at times engaging in a bit of religious distancing. Do they set aside their faith, and their pride in it, when faith becomes inconvenient? Or do they stand up for their beliefs and proudly proclaim them, even when doing so is to their disadvantage, financial or otherwise?

That’s too bad. I would have loved to have seen a witness list and deposition notices.

The Lawyerist has a good post on what to write on a law-related blog. I’m not sure I really do any of these, so it’s good to review.

• Reviews
• How-to Posts
• Rant
• Lists
• Interviews
• Questions
• Searching For Blog Post Ideas

I’m ahead of the curve on lists, as this entry shows. (How meta of me.)

It’s also a “how-to” post on how to kill time.

Finally, perhaps this post is itself a search for blog post ideas.

I’d rant, but I’m in an okay mood right now.

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This week I am at the Advanced Family Law CLE seminar in San Antonio. Some may be tempted to ask “Why?”, which is a good question. As I sit here with about 500 other lawyers, I ponder my decision to step away from family law yet immerse myself in it this week.

1. Keeping my skills up. Legal skills are a good thing to have. The mind needs exercise.
2. Reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m in for four days of tale after tale of familial acrimony and bitter feuding, plus advice on how to facilitate such conflicts. I’m positively giddy about looking for a job.
3. Reminder of why I did what I did. For every tale of vindictiveness and strife there is a story of someone genuinely helped by a lawyer through a difficult process. I am proud to have been part of that system.
4. I already paid for it. I got a discount for being a solo, but this thing still ain’t cheap.
5. CLE credit. This 4-day seminar gets me 22.5 hours of credit. Since I’ve always been an overachiever where CLE is concerned, by Thursday I’ll be covered through 2015 or so.
6. I’m in San Antonio! I’m not sure if this is an argument in favor of or against my attendance :p

This will be an interesting few days. More to follow, I’m sure.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

For whatever reason, I’ve started a Tumblr blog for random legal-related things that I find.

I’m a little embarrassed I used the word “bling,” but no one ever accused me of being a stodgy lawyer type. Anyway, here’s the new decor for the blog:

This was prepared by matt_vd at fiverr.com, a cool site where various services are available for $5. It’s worth a look.

The video is also up at Facebook and Vimeo.

Maybe it’s just a sudden onset of perceptual vigilance, but it seems like defamation suits are breaking out all over the place. This is just from today’s ABA Journal update:

• Lawyer Responds to Kids’ Video Dissing His Daughter with Cease-and-Desist Letters, Lawsuit
• Tripadvisor Review Complaining of Bedbugs Results in a Lawsuit
• ‘Twittersquatter’ Sued by Company Targeted in Sarcastic Tweets (technically this is an infringement claim, but I suspect questions of defamation will intrude).

It will be interesting to see where this all goes. For those unfamiliar with the concept, defamation is generally defined as follows:

Defamation—also called calumny, vilification, traducement, slander (for transitory statements), and libel (for written, broadcast, or otherwise published words)—is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image. It is usually a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant).

I think I am much more partial to the term calumny. To each their own, I suppose.

Remember the Rule Against Perpetuities?  If you’ve never been to law school, then hopefully the answer to that question is no. (WARNING: this post is likely to be one giant lawyer inside joke.)

Black’s Law Dictionary (via Wikipedia) helpfully defines the Rule as:

[t]he common-law rule prohibiting a grant of an estate unless the interest must vest, if at all, no later than 21 years (plus a period of gestation to cover a posthumous birth) after the death of some person alive when the interest was created.

If you did not find that definition helpful, you are not alone. The Rule Against Perpetuities has been the bane of first-year property classes throughout the ages.  I learned it well enough to get a B in my property class and then promptly forgot it.

I was therefore quite surprised to learn that the Rule was recently applied in a real estate dispute that has stretched over almost a century:

Remember the rule against perpetuities? It played out in real life concerning a cantankerous Michigan lumber baron’s will, finally putting an end to a $100 million waiting game for his heirs.

Not allowed to collect their share of Wellington Burt’s fortune until 21 years after the death of his youngest grandchild in existence when the patriarch cashed in his chips, the 12 great-, great-great- and great-great-great-grandchildren among Burt’s surviving descendants are expected to see his trust open by the end of the month, the Associated Press reported. The heirs range in age from 19 to 94 years old.

Burt died in 1919.

It’s good to know that those weeks spent learning the Rule weren’t completely for naught. It provided us with hours of hair-pulling madness, and now, no matter how difficult a legal question may be, at least it’s not as bad as the Rule Against Perpetuities.

Plus, it led to at least one awesome parody:

HB Litigation Conferences is hosting a “Fracking Litigation Conference” in Philadelphia in September:

HB’s Fracking Litigation Conference is set for September 9, 2011 in Philadelphia. The increased use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas from underground rock formations has raised environmental and legal challenges and will be the topic of discussion by attorneys, professors and scientists at this program.

Fans of Battlestar Galactica will know why I find this geekily funny.

Hey, a lawyer is entitled to geek out now and then.

Figuring a picture is worth a thousand words, I have prepared a little primer on collaborative law for your enjoyment:

This year’s winners are in for the Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch “Wacky Warning Label” contest.

As a lawyer, I must say that my favorite is this one: “The Vanishing Fabric Marker should not be used as a writing instrument for signing checks or any legal documents.”

I wish I had taken a picture at the time, but I remember seeing a warning sign at Yosemite National Park near the top of a waterfall.  The sign read, approximately, “If you enter the water and go over the falls, you will die.”