Doggone
2/14/13
By Caitlin Tremblay
A Chinese man has filed a lawsuit over a facelift gone wrong
- a facelift for his dog.
The owner, who has a dog farm in Shunyi district and goes by
the name of Yu, is seeking more than $140,000 from the
veterinarian who performed a facelift that killed his 2-year-old
Tibetan Mastiff, according to Global Post. The dog died during
the procedure from a heart attack as a result of complications
from the anesthetic.
Yu told the Global Times that he scheduled his pup for a
facelift in order to make him more attractive to owners of
female dogs so they would pay a higher price to mate their dog
with his. "The skin of my dog's head was very flabby, so I
wanted to cut part of his forehead and straighten the skin. And
also in this way, his hair would look longer as the rear part of
the head will have more hair," Yu said.
Yu is seeking the full price of his dog back, 880,000 yuan
(about $140,000). The breed is pricey because it's become a sign
of wealth in China, and one of them sold for 20 million yuan in
2012.
No love lost
2/14/13
By Anna Louie Sussman
Michigan lawyer Walter Bentley has a keen sense of irony, a
big heart or both. The former prosecutor turned family law
attorney offered two women free divorce filings for Valentine's
Day, the MLive news site reports.
Bentley received over 500 submissions after he announced the
"2013 Free Divorce Valentine's Day" contest on his Facebook page
on Jan. 31, he told ABC News. Today he announced there would be
two winners, Tara Fleek and Debi Cloonan, because he "just
couldn't choose," he said on Facebook.
While other law firms offered Valentine's Day divorce
specials, ABC News reports, Bentley's office was the only one
that appeared to cover all of the filing fees. He told the
program that the winners would be saving $1,500 to $3,000 total
and that they "won't have to take out their wallet for
anything."
Cloonan's submission detailed how the death of one of her
sons had slowly decimated her marriage to her husband, John.
Fleek said that, despite being a mom and full-time worker, she
was having trouble making ends meet and was filing for
bankruptcy.
The contest was only open to Michigan residents seeking
uncontested divorces. Bentley said on Facebook that those who
didn't win would be contacted soon by his firm with advice,
resources and offers.
The Nelson affair
2/14/13
By Dan Brillman
Former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller originally saw
drugs as a social problem, rather than a criminal one, reports NPR. But after seeing the results of tough drug laws in Japan,
he did an about-face in 1972, coming up with the strict
sentencing guidelines known as the "Rockefeller drug laws" that
put even low-level criminals behind bars for decades.
Rockefeller aide Joseph Persico tells NPR that when the
governor announced that the punishment for drug pushing would be
a life sentence, with no parole and no probation, his advisors
were initially stunned. The laws were nevertheless enacted in
1973, against the backdrop of a heroin epidemic, and they soon
had clones nationwide, says NPR. The station is producing a
year-long series with the Prison Time Media Project examining
the impact of the Rockefeller-style laws.
Reverberations were felt immediately. Prisons nationwide
went from a total population of 330,000 in 1973 to 2.3 million
in 2008. Almost half of those people serving time in federal
prisons are there for nonviolent drug offenses.
New York rewrote its sentencing rules in 2009, according to
NPR, and nine prisons in the state closes as a result. Persico
told the network that it is time for comprehensive reforms. "I
concluded very early that this was a failure," he said. "This
was obviously unjust...unwise; it was ineffective."
Death of an icon
2/14/13
By Suhrith Parthasarathy
The death of American law philosopher Ronald Dworkin from
leukemia today at 81, has prompted an outpouring in the legal
press, where he's being lauded as the man behind some of the
most influential theories of law and morality. In his 2011
"Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin articulated his belief that the
right way to determine what the law should be is to examine the
moral truth. The book took its title from a speech attributed to
Greek poet Archilochu ("The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing") and an essay by the philosopher
Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."
In addition to a stint as a clerk for Judge Learned Hand of
the 2nd Circuit appeals court, Dworkin also worked at Sullivan &
Cromwell, taught law at Yale and later University College London
and New York University. For The New York Review of Books he
tackled a wide range of issues, ranging from assisted suicide to
President Obama's healthcare law and even the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "He remained an unapologetic, indeed proud, liberal
Democrat," writes Godfrey Hodgson in The Guardian, "unshaken in
his loyalty to the New Deal tradition set by his hero Franklin
D. Roosevelt, even as such ideas became less and less widely
held."
In The New York Times, Adam Liptak says Dworkin's approach
is echoed in the writings of Supreme Court Justice Anthony
Kennedy, whose vote often swings the high court's decisions.
Summing up Dworkin's life work, Hodgson writes that he
"rejected both the traditional view, that judges must conform to
established authority, and the belief of American liberals, that
judges should seek to improve society, with a new emphasis on
the judge's responsibility to uphold individual and collective
morality."
On a quest
2/14/13
By Dan Brillman
There's a new place to go for all things clerky,
particularly hiring tips, news and gossip: Clerkship Quest. The
site is modeled on the crowdsourcing-style discussions of
PrawfsBlog, with comment sections divided by federal circuit and
state courts, with subsets devoted to district and magistrate
courts. (What, nothing for the Supreme Court?)
Clerkship Quest's inaugural post concerns the District of
Columbia Circuit's decision to abandon the Law Clerk Hiring Plan
(aka "The Plan"), the voluntary attempt to standardize a hiring
schedule for prospective clerks. The blog's founder, Emory Law
Professor Sarah Shalf, says she was inspired to create Clerkship
Quest because she figured other circuits would also dump their
hiring plans and she felt there was a need for a place for
clerks to exchange information. "We'll be relying on your
comments here to provide a clearinghouse of information to all
involved," the blog reads.
Clerkship Quest is not the first blog seeking to mine the
territory. Clerkship Scramble disappeared last summer, at least
its legal content did, and now seems to be a nice site to peruse lighting fixtures. (This site seems to house a smattering of
archived posts from February 2012.)
Good luck, Professor Shalf, and happy clerking everyone.
Summary Judgments for February 13
Summary Judgments for February 12
Summary Judgments for February 11
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