Let your fingers do the suing

11/26/12

By Dan Brillman

A lawsuit involving a Montana barbecue joint and a phone book ad has been settled, according to the Associated Press (hat tip: ABA Journal).

Bar 3 Bar-B-Q and its parent company, Big Sky Beverage, sued Dex Media after the phone book publisher placed a listing for the barbecue joint under "Animal Carcass Removal" in print and online directories. The restaurant claimed negligence, defamation and slander, saying the listing -- which became joke fodder for "The Tonight Show" -- was not a mistake but a retaliatory strike to punish Bar 3 for not buying an ad. The listing has hurt business and brand reputation, said the lawsuit, initially filed in federal court in September 2011.

The litigants entered settlement negotiations after a magistrate judge refused to dismiss, but they did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Decriminalizing suicide

11/26/12

By Suhrith Parthasarathy

The country's highest military appeals court is set to revisit a decades-old statute that criminalizes attempted suicide, reports the Los Angeles Times, and the ruling could reshape how the Armed Forces treats mental health.

In January 2010, while stationed in Okinawa, Japan, Marine Corps Private Lazzaric Caldwell slit his wrists and lived. Caldwell, of Oceanside, California, subsequently pleaded guilty in military court to a charge of "self injury without intent to avoid service" but has since reconsidered, according to Anchorage Daily News. On Tuesday, his lawyers will argue before the five members of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces that it is wrong for the military to punish troops whose mental problems cause them to attempt to take their own lives.

The code used in charging Caldwell stems from World War Two, when the military sought to punish soldiers who were seeking to avoid service. Navy Lieutenant Michael Hanzel, who is representing Caldwell, argues in a legal brief that Congress did not intend the code to be a strict liability statute used to prosecute mentally ill people. In a counter-brief, Marine Corps Major David Roberts argues that the law is clear and unambiguous, and it helps maintain discipline within the ranks.

This is the first time since the Gulf War of 1990-91 that the top military appeals court will consider the provision. The Army has designated September as National Suicide Prevention Month.

Mobile facts

11/26/12

By Erin Geiger Smith

In the wake of the David Petraeus scandal, Summary Judgments has talked a lot in the last few weeks about email privacy (see "The Bork factor") and the question of how to balance an individual's rights with the government's need for information. Now, to add fuel to the fire, it looks like the authorities are also going after cellphones and the data they contain.

The New York Times has a full report today on the phenomenon and notes how differently courts have treated evidence taken from suspects' phones. Courts are "all over the place" on the issue, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer tells the Times. The article does a great job of showing just how unclear the law is, pointing, for example, to a Texas federal appeals court which ruled that officials didn't need a warrant to track suspects through cell phones, as well as to a Rhode Island court, where a judge threw out a murder conviction and said cell phone evidence did require a search warrant. In Washington state, meanwhile, a court said that text messages were akin to voice messages that could be overheard by anyone and thus were not subject to state privacy laws.

The journey towards clarity might start later this week, when a U.S. Senate committee considers whether police should have to obtain a search warrant to search emails, no matter how old. Lawmakers in favor of warrants would have to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which in the past has been used to conduct searches without warrant of email and certain kinds of cellphone data.

Source material

By Erin Geiger Smith

11/26/12

"It is a common practice among law review editors to demand that authors support every claim with a citation," writes George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr in his new article, "A Theory of Law," published in The Green Bag - tagline: an Entertaining Journal of Law.

That opening line constitutes a huge part of the Kerr's tongue-in-cheek "article," which is, in total, about half a page of text. As Kerr points out, law professors and law review editors alike know the pains of making sure nearly every sentence -- whether a profound new thought or centuries old dicta -- is cited to a previous case or article.

To save some time, Kerr suggests his fellow academics simply cite his broadly-titled article. In his two paragraph tome, Kerr offers an example of when finding a source might be really difficult, including when potential citations are "so obvious or obscure that they have not been made before" or if they are simply "made up or false."

Kerr, a frequent contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, noted in a post in that blog on Sunday that he would usually "post an abstract along with the link to the full text, but this article is difficult to condense."

Summary Judgments for November 23 

Summary Judgments for November 21 

Summary Judgments for November 20 

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