"The Way We Were" lawsuit

Years Later, Lawsuit Seeks to Recreate a Wedding

Excerpt:

... it is not particularly surprising that one groom, disappointed with his wedding photos, decided to sue. The photographers had missed the last dance and the bouquet toss, the groom, Todd J. Remis of Manhattan, said.

But what is striking, said the studio that took the pictures, is that Mr. Remis’s wedding took place in 2003 and he waited six years to sue. And not only has Mr. Remis demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography, he also wants $48,000 to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer.

Re-enacting the wedding may pose a particular challenge, the studio pointed out, because the couple divorced and the bride is believed to have moved back to her native Latvia.

Although Justice Doris Ling-Cohan of State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed most of the grounds for the lawsuit, like the “infliction of emotional distress,” she has allowed the case to proceed to determine whether there was indeed a breach of contract. But she displayed a good deal of amusement about the lawsuit’s purpose in an opinion in January that quoted lyrics from the Barbra Streisand classic “The Way We Were.”

“This is a case in which it appears that the ‘misty watercolor memories’ and the ‘scattered pictures of the smiles ... left behind’ at the wedding were more important than the real thing,” the judge wrote. “Although the marriage did not last, plaintiff’s fury over the quality of the photographs and video continued on.”

Comment: The Way We Were. Without "the bride" would be more like "The Way I Was"!

Law School economics

Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!

Excerpt:

The basic rules of a market economy — even golden oldies, like a link between supply and demand — just don’t apply.

Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes — a step that, for them, means almost pure profits — even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history.

It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.

In short, law schools have the power to raise prices and expand in ways that would make any company drool. And when a business has that power, it is apparently difficult to resist.

How difficult? For a sense, take a look at the strange case of New York Law School and its dean, Richard A. Matasar. For more than a decade, Mr. Matasar has been one of the legal academy’s most dogged and scolding critics, and he has repeatedly urged professors and fellow deans to rethink the basics of the law school business model and put the interests of students first.

“What I’ve said to people in giving talks like this in the past is, we should be ashamed of ourselves,” Mr. Matasar said at a 2009 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. He ended with a challenge: If a law school can’t help its students achieve their goals, “we should shut the damn place down.”

Given his scathing critiques, you might expect that during Mr. Matasar’s 11 years as dean, he has reshaped New York Law School to conform with his reformist agenda. But he hasn’t. Instead, the school seems to be benefitting from many of legal education’s assorted perversities.

N.Y.L.S. is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country, but with tuition and fees now set at $47,800 a year, it charges more than Harvard. It increased the size of the class that arrived in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded. It reported in the most recent US News & World Report rankings that the median starting salary of its graduates was the same as for those of the best schools in the nation — even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount.

Comment: Fundamentalist Seminaries is another place where there is no link between supply and demand

Sue Dad .... get out of school debt

That’s One Way to Get Out of Student Loan Debt

Excerpt:

It’s not news that some children, especially as they hit their teenage and college years, don’t get along with their parents. But even experienced attorneys say it’s rare when the disagreements grow to a point where litigation is required.

So consider the odd case of Dana Soderberg, who went to court to force her father to live up to a deal to pay her tuition at Southern Connecticut State University.

After Ms. Soderberg’s parents divorced in 2004, she convinced her father to sign a contract committing to pay for the costs of her education until she reached age 25. He lived up to the deal for a while, but then stopped paying before her senior year of college began, the article says. Earlier this month the judge ruled that the father had indeed breached the contract.

Comment: My kids are wondering: Now where was that contract?

Homemade 100-lbs BOMB destroys Truck!

Big boom could land amateur bomb maker in huge trouble

The New Tolerance--Believe Evolution, or "You're Fired!"

In March of 2004, biologist Nathaniel Abraham, Ph.D., was fired from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a highly esteemed research facility based in New England. The cause? His religious beliefs differed from those of his supervisor. Dr. Abraham believes that God created the world. His supervisors believe that the process of evolution explains all that now exists.

Dr. Abraham, a scholar and noted research scientist whose specialty is the zebrafish, was fired after revealing to his supervisor in a private conversation that he believed in Creation, a belief that is somehow widely discouraged and disapproved of in today's scientific community. Dr. Abraham’s private beliefs did not affect his ability to do the job for which he had been hired, but his supervisors refused to tolerate his private faith. Although the tenets of evolution cannot be proven in laboratories any more than Creation can be proven according to the scientific method, most scientists would rather place their faith in evolution than in a Creator. And they are now apparently attempting to require that everyone who works in the field of science share their personal faith in evolution or be banned from that profession.

The Christian Law Association is representing Dr. Abraham in a lawsuit against WHOI to test whether America’s courts will permit this sort of blatant religious discrimination, which would result in limiting those working in the field of science to only those that share a common faith in the tenets of evolution.

To read more about this ongoing case, click on one of the following links:

onenewsnow.com

foxnews.com


Comment: From Christian Law Association Email Alert

Magna Carta .... mega-bucks!

1279 Magna Carta expected to fetch $30 million

Excerpt:

More than 800 years later, about 17 copies survive, and one of those, signed by King Edward I in 1297, will go up for sale December 18 at Sotheby's.

The document, which Sotheby's Vice Chairman David Redden calls "the most important document in the world," is expected to fetch a record $20 million to $30 million.

While earlier versions of the royal edict were written and then ignored, Redden said, "the 1297 Magna Carta became the operative version, the one that was entered into English common law and became the law of the land," ultimately affecting democracies around the world.

Today, its impact is felt by perhaps a third of the world's people, he said. This includes all of North America, India, Pakistan, much of Africa, Australia and other areas that made up the British Commonwealth.

"When it's something as enormously important as this, you try to get a handle on it," he said. "It is absolutely correct to say the Magna Carta is the birth certificate of freedom. It states the bedrock principle that no person is above the law -- that is the essence of it."

Only two copies of the Magna Carta exist outside Britain, one in Australia and the one Sotheby's is auctioning off.

An earlier Magna Carta version was loaned by Britain to the United States for its bicentennial celebration in 1976, but suggestions that it be made a permanent gift were rejected.

The 1279 Magna Carta was forced on Edward I by barons unhappy over taxes imposed to pay for his military campaigns in France, Wales and against Scottish rebel William Wallace. The levies were approved in the king's absence by his 13-year-old son, Prince Edward.

Written in medieval Latin on sheepskin that after 710 years remains intact and legible, the 1297 Magna Carta was owned for five centuries by a British family that put it up for sale in the early 1980s.


Wikipedia: Magna Carta

Comment: The Wikipedia article is very thorough!

DUI defense: Demand the source code

Doubts arise over fate of breathalyzer source code in Minn. case

Excerpt:

An attorney for a Minnesota man accused of drunken driving says he doesn't think the manufacturer of a breathalyzer will meet a court-imposed deadline of August 17 to turn over its source code.

If that happens, his client could go free.

As CNET News.com reported earlier this week, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled late last month that source code for the Intoxilyzer 5000EN, made by a Kentucky-based company called CMI, must be handed to defense attorneys for use in a case involving charges of third-degree DUI against a man named Dale Lee Underdahl. CMI's historic resistance to such demands has led to charges being dropped in at least one case outside of Minnesota.

Comment: The Minnesota Supreme Court opened the proverbial "can of worms"!

"the worst form of ambulance-chasing"

Comment: Let the lawsuits begin!

Question of liability rises

The state's liability is limited by law to $1 million, regardless of how many people were injured.
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No one involved in the bridge's construction or design could be sued successfully, said attorney Robert King, of the Lommen Abdo law firm in Minneapolis. State law generally places a six-year statute of limitations on a lawsuit against contractors, he added.
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Given those limitations, attorneys likely will focus on the private entities involved in the bridge's maintenance, particularly if state and federal investigators find that private firms bear any of the blame for the collapse. At least two firms and one university study have worked on or analyzed the bridge in recent years.

Comment: What follows is the worst part of the story:

Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in Minneapolis said he has received at least a dozen telephone calls from law firms, most of them local, since it became public knowledge that a pregnant Somali woman, Sadiya Sahal, and her 2-year-old daughter, Hanah Mohamed, were among those missing after the collapse.

The calls started coming about 4 p.m. Thursday, less than 24 hours after the collapse, and haven't stopped, Jamal said. Some of the attorneys have asked for telephone numbers and other personal information about Sahal's family, Jamal said.

"This is the worst form of ambulance-chasing," Jamal said. "The divers are still in the river looking, and the attorneys keep calling us."

Comment: Image from Laymen’s views of law in oral narrative. Quote: The trouble with lawyer jokes are: Lawyers don't think they are funny ... and civilians don't think they are jokes.

Legal David and Goliath

The Great American Pants Suit

Excerpts:

When attorney Roy Pearson filed suit demanding $67 million from the Chung family, whose Washington dry cleaners had mishandled his pair of trousers, he must have felt he was sitting pretty. Menacing a merchant who's annoyed you with terrifyingly high legal penalties--that's the way to show who wears the pants, right?

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It all began two years ago when Mr. Pearson walked into Custom Cleaners, a Northeast D.C. establishment owned by Jin Chung, Soo Chung and Ki Chung. He laid down $10.50 to have a pair of pants altered. The results dissatisfied him: The job wasn't finished on time, and he says the pants he was given were someone else's, which the Chungs deny. He demanded $1,150 for a new suit; the Chungs demurred. So it was off to court, with the claimed damages subject to alterations, in an expansive direction.

-------

The Chungs offered Pearson $12,000, which he turned down. The family says the suit has run through their savings in legal fees and harmed their credit, to say nothing of their peace of mind; they've even considered returning to their native Korea, which they left in 1992.

But what really gave legs to the story was this: while his lawsuit was afoot, attorney Pearson himself was overcoming a two-year spell of unemployment to win appointment as an administrative law judge in D.C. So don't dismiss him as just some random bully with a law license. For those in our nation's capital, he represents the majestic face of the law itself.


The lost trousers that landed dry cleaners with a law suit

Comment: The "everyman's" nightmare: a frivolous lawsuit that sucks one dry financially and emotionally. I pray for justice in DC!

2 years of litigation x 1 pair of trousers = headaches for family business

Suit over lost pants seeks $65 million

A customer got so steamed when a dry cleaner lost his trousers that he sued for $65 million. Two years later, he is still pressing his suit.

The case has demoralized the South Korean immigrant owners of the mom-and-pop business and brought demands that the customer — an administrative law judge in Washington — be disbarred and removed from office for pursuing a frivolous and abusive claim.

Comment: Can you say "frivolous lawsuit"!

Illegal Diplomacy

Did Nancy Pelosi commit a felony when she went to Syria?

Excerpt:

The Logan Act makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States." Some background on this statute helps to understand why Ms. Pelosi may be in serious trouble.