Spam Email

I just got an email with the subject "Urgent message!" from the "Arizona Federal Credit Union". I really should switch banks, because a state federal credit union sounds about as confused with federalism as I am with finance.

Marmaduke Explained

Marmaduke Explained is a Joe Mathlete creation. Joe Mathlete also puts out such quality blogs as Joe Mathlete Draws a Nipple on Ziggy's Nose, and Joe Mathlete Will Draw Anything You Ask Him to on an Index Card. Mr. Mathlete has clearly struck a vein in the gold mine of the internet universe and is one of our buddies (like Ticor) who we don't know, but we figure is pretty kick ass. I bet getting wasted with Joe Mathlete is a trip.

Some quality Marmaduke's explained:
The literary Marmaduke
Hippies
The Oedipus Complex
Nuts in Sprinkler

Is it possible to get fired your 2L summer?

Yes, as a matter of fact it is. From Above the Law: Their Summer Associate of the Day was fired from Katten in Chicago because:

(a) he allegedly engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with female summer associates, variously described as "repeatedly smack[ing] the asses of female summers" or "playing grab ass with female summers," and (b) he allegedly made racially insensitive jokes, in front of multiple attorneys.

In dude's defense, the JP is aware of many female summer associates actively seeking a game of grabass. Maybe he thought this was one of those "no means yes" situations? The comments on ATL really don't portray dude in a good light though:

Truths:
-SA - white kid at a top 10 law school.
-VERY stupid comments made, which he doesn't understand would be taken the way they were. Racial comments (real ones, in the N-word level) and unwanted physical contact.

I wonder if he combined the two by grabbing a girl's ass while hurling racial epitaphs at her. JP thinks you should stick to one or the other, at least until they hire you.

Make it Stop, For the Love of God!

John, I am in awe. You were -5 through 11 and really looking like you were going to make a run at the top of the first day leaderboard. I just want to ask: What happened to you after that eagle on 11? Nothing but eagles, birdies and pars to that point: Nothing but pars, bogeys, double bogeys, and triple bogeys after that.

Daly played the last seven holes in +8 to finish with a respectable (total-blowup) score of 74 (+3) and in a tie for 96th as of right now. Following John is like following no other golfer. There are Forrest Gump undertones: You really never know what you're gonna get.

John Daly is Totally Out of Contention at a Major

After double bogeying the 12th and parring 13, John Daly put up a snowman 8 to make triple-bogey on the par 5 14th. For someone like John, making an 8 will probably ignite the fuse that is his golf game: At this point, if he gets off the course without hurting himself or anyone else, we'll call it a successful day for the big man.

JOHN DALY'S NO LONGER WINNING A MAJOR!!!

After eagling 11, Daly promptly made a double bogey 6 on the par 4 12th. He's now in a three-way tie for second. Any man who can take back-to-back par 4s in a major and go 2-6 is awesome.

JOHN DALY'S WINNING A MAJOR!!!

As of right now, John Daly is -5 through 11 holes and has first place all to himself on the first day of the British Open. Daly just made eagle 2 on the par 4, 383 yard 11th hole to go one shot ahead of Paul McGinley. He won the PGA in 1991, after getting into the tournament as the 9th alternate, and the British in 1995.

To take a line from Napoleon Dynamite, John Daly is basically the greatest golfer ever. He's been divorced several times (it was a chapter in his book that made "All my ex's wear Rolex's" famous), he smokes several packs of cigarettes (even in tournaments) per round, and his swing is a miracle of modern physiology. There's no way a man that size should be able to nearly hit the ground with the head of his club on the backswing.

Wikipedia has some great John Daly lines as well:

-Daly does not fly to tournament sites, but instead travels in a personal recreational vehicle. Daly's career has been interrupted from time to time by off-course personal incidents: He recorded an autobiographical album titled My Life, featuring guest performances by Darius Rucker, Willie Nelson, Johnny Lee, and Daron Norwood. He will being doing background vocals on an upcoming Kid Rock album entitled 'Rock And Roll Jesus'.

-Daly once claimed that he drank a fifth of Jack Daniel's every day during the year he was 23 years of age, and the various reported incidents include being removed from a British Airways airplane by airport security for harassing a flight attendant while drunk. He has entered into various alcohol addiction programs, including the Betty Ford Clinic, at least three times, and has experienced three divorces since becoming a professional golfer.

-Despite prodigious consumption of cigarettes and Diet Coke, Daly has never conquered his weight problem; he refused to partake in the British Open Champions Dinner because "You can't get this fat boy into a suit." He has admitted the only reason he does not lift weights is because the health club does not let him smoke there, and he would get sick after he worked out.

-On June 8, 2007, Daly and his wife Sherrie got into a fight at a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, site of that week's tour stop, the Stanford St. Jude Championship. Daly claims that later that night his wife attacked him with a steak knife. He showed up for his 2nd round on Friday afternoon with cuts and scrapes across his face. Authorities were contacted by him and came to his house, but his wife had already fled the scene and taken their children with her.

Everyone needs a role model; JP may have found his.

What in God's name

has gotten into all these abstinence nuts?

When Jami Waite graduated from high school this year in this northeastern Texas town, her parents sat damp-eyed in the metal bleachers of Bobcat Stadium, proud in every way possible. Their youngest daughter was leaving childhood an honor graduate, a band member, a true friend, a head cheerleader — and a steadfast virgin.

Maybe it's a sign of our society's total lack of self-control that the controlling adults believe the only way for the youth not to get drawn into temptation is to make a steadfast decision that "no, I will never do this."

JP really hates that kind of attitude. Repression is the mother of disastrous binge-style freedom. As we all grow up, the rules fade away. Quoth David Sedaris:

When I was young, we weren't allowed to say "shut up," but by the time [his brother] Paul reached his teens, it had become acceptable to shout, "Shut your motherfucking mouth." The drug laws had changed as well. "No smoking pot" became "No smoking pot in the house," before it finally petered out to "Please don't smoke any pot in the living room."

Most people reading this probably encountered the sheltered bombshells at their undergraduate institutions: The kid who starts fall semester saying he'll never drink and finishes it in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, for example. Rules for the sake of rules make you resent them; experience for the sake of experience at least allows kids to understand why some decisions are good ones (and should be repeated) and why others are bad ones (and should be avoided).

Example: When JP was growing up, he had a bedtime until he started high school. I don't remember when it was or why I didn't fight it to the death, but it was always there: I grew up going to sleep because there was a rule saying I had to. Now, JP has awful sleeping habits and trouble convincing himself that it is, in fact, time to go to bed. Why? I think it's because I never properly learned that you go to bed early because you don't want to be tired tomorrow: I learned to consider bedtime as an artificial rule, and now I break it constantly. Congratulations, me.

So, I guess I'm saying that strict abstinence isn't going to allow kids to develop a healthy relationship with sex. I'm not saying we should encourage every high schooler to be a slutbag, but, if you're dating someone for a year or whatever and want to try the horizontal polka, for fuck's sake, you should probably do it. If you don't, you'll end up resenting that rule in the future by breaking it in situations that you actually shouldn't.

At least this girl is cuter than the British one. Her choice not to have sex may actually cause her not to; the girl with the ring could choose to be a megahobag and her life would probably be exactly the same (minus one stupid little ring).

Hardest Bar Exam in the Known World

From ATL. Of course, here in Wisconsin, bar exam chit-chat doesn't really flip our flapjacks. Since we're God's country (*cue Chevy commercial*) we do not require your petty human examinations to find us qualified to practice the divine craft. In fact, there are rumors that Wisconsin was formed after God and Walter J. Dickey engaged in intergalactic fisticuffs in the early 70's. When Dickey destroyed God's soul, it fell to earth, and hardened into what we now call Wisconsin.

Guam, however, must be what springs up when God's able to spill Walter's soul. Now we know why the lawyers aren't good enough.

Michael Vick & The Funnies

Michael Vick got indicted today on federal dog-fighting and conspiracy charges. JP could care less.

Witty commentators on hot sports blog Deadspin? JP's there:

"At least he can still count on Len Pastabelly as a character witness. That guy will do anything for snausages."

"So did he kill any with his arm? or could he only beat them with his feet?"

"just goes to show you how racist the media is. brett favre has been running underground kitten fights for years and no one seems to care."

"I can't wait to see how much Vick goes for in our auction draft this year. And which poor sap says, 'Joey Harrington, one dollar.'"

Harry Potter 7

JP has obtained a Harry Potter VII spoiler copy and is approximately 230 pages through. It's the one CNN.com noted here: Some dude took digital pictures from the book and posted them on torrent sites.

The normally-sacrosanct-as-a-freshly-carved-gavel JP had some misgivings both about downloading the book and about telling people he did it. I read the first six Harry Potter books the summer before entering the path of the just and righteous at JPSLS, right after the sixth came out, by borrowing them from a friend. JP loved him some HP. I even dressed up as Hawwy Pawtah for Halloween last year: I learned that the "Get me a beer" spell succumbs to the law of diminishing returns.

I had plans on going out and buying the book the day (not the night) it came out and reading it with everyone else. But.

(1) It was easy to find and download. Only about 72MB and the pages, once you adjust the brightness a bit, are very readable. My buddy from undergrad told me where to get it, it was there, took a few minutes, and I was off.

(2) I'm going to Chicago this weekend to visit the another buddy from undergrad, and I really didn't want to hear somehow over the weekend how the book ends. As I've read HP7 info online for the last two years, I've secretly been afraid Rowling would croak before getting 7 out. The way she creates worlds is amazing, and anyone who still considers the Harry Potter series to somehow be below them intellectually couldn't be more wrong. Literature isn't about using big words; it's about creating rich worlds. I've never read anyone (JP majored in English as an undergrad) who does that as well as JK. I would have been very disappointed if 7 was spoiled.

(3) I don't own any of the first six books, and so I'd really rather wait for the box set to come out in a year or two and get them all at the same time. I have no problem paying Rowling to read her books; I just didn't see a real need to end up with two copies of 7. I will definitely read them all again in a few years, straight through one to seven.

What's wrong with the British these days?

Fighting to wear a pledge of your virginity around your finger to school? The JP's generally so tuckered out that he won't even fight to keep his pants on.

But that's neither here nor there: This whole situation would remind me eerily of Reese Witherspoon's character from Cruel Intentions if young Lydia Playfoot was a little hotter.

Do the Dems Really Intend to

pull an "all-nighter" on Iraq? I don't know who they're trying to fool, but JP knows what it means when you have to stay up all night to get something done from many such an experience in the hallowed halls of JPSLS: unprepared.

Sauce

JP had a delicious beer-tasting afternoon on Saturday with his colleagues Dr. Hubert J. Nugz and the O-Dog. Among the selections were Rogue's Shakespeare Stout and Dead Guy Ale, Central Waters' Bourbon Barrel Stout, Dale's Pale Ale, Left Hand's Milk Stout, and Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout. The most impressive was the Bourbon Barrel Stout: O-Dog said it smelled like vanilla, but that was just the bourbon barrels speaking. It was really thick and delicious. The Shakespeare Stout was probably next.

Just for kicks, I picked up a sixer of Left Hand Sawtooth Ale the next day, and it's really good too. Left Hand is a great brewery in Colorado with a super cool all-flash website.

No big wigs in the UK

In case you haven't heard, there is some sad news in the UK: judges are no longer going to wear wigs during civil cases. (I suspect that criminal trials would be too serious without them.) Apparently they're expensive and uncomfortable, but I think the Brits should have kept the wigs. Tradition is one thing. Hilarity is another. That's two reasons.

If I didn't have such a spectacular mane of my own, I'd try to reinstate them here. After all, you sometimes have to think: it's 1787--and then ask yourself: what would William Cushing do?

Molotov Cocktails on Trial

... to see if they can burn the whole courthouse down. Another gem coming out of the Seventh Circuit today involves John Ewing, a man who's a few stouts short of a six-pack, and his attempt to murder the judge who wouldn't enforce his $25 million consent decree. Maybe because it wasn't a consent decree: It was summary judgment against him. I love Ewing's no-lose attitude.

Ewing has a history of paranoid schizophrenia dating back at least twenty years. During that time, he has intermittently taken medication and resided at various mental health facilities. A recurring symptom of his mental illness is a delusion that society is engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to read his thoughts through the aid of supercomputers. Ewing also persists in believing he was awarded a $25 million judgment by consent decree in a slip-and-fall civil lawsuit he filed in 1988 against a grocery store in Champaign, Illinois. In reality, that lawsuit was dismissed on summary judgment by Judge George Miller of the Champaign County Circuit Court. After numerous unsuccessful written attempts to convince Judge Miller that he was owed $25 million, Ewing decided to attack the judge with a Molotov cocktail. At the time Ewing was living in a nonrestrictive mental health community in Peoria and was off his medication. On April 8, 1997, Ewing traveled by bus to Champaign. Once he arrived, he purchased and filled a gas can at a gas station near the Champaign County courthouse, then purchased a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor from a nearby liquor store and a knife from a local pawn shop. He next checked into a motel, where he used these materials to prepare a Molotov cocktail. From there he walked to the courthouse, entered Judge Miller’s courtroom with a hood up around his face, threw the device at the judge, and fled. Judge Miller ducked to avoid the firebomb, sustaining a head laceration. The incendiary device fell at the foot of the judge’s bench, the bench caught fire, and the courtroom was engulfed in flames. At the time of the attack, Judge Miller was presiding over a civil trial. The jurors, litigants, and courtroom personnel escaped the burning courtroom in a panic; no one was seriously injured. Firefighters responded and suppressed the fire, but everything in the courtroom was destroyed.

Of course, Ewing's going to jail for awhile. How does that song about fighting the law go again? The real tragedy is what must have happened to the malt liquor in the 40 the dude made his Molotov out of: You don't really think he firebombed the courthouse drunk do you?

Same-sex employee-on-employee sexual harrassment

Bernier v. Morningstar, Inc. just came down today in the Seventh Circuit. The court found that where the employer didn't know about the employee-on-employee same-sex sexual harassment, there's no liability.

But, fortunately for the rest of us, they had to recite a wonderfully awkward set of facts to reach that conclusion:

Bernier alleges that in January 2003, Davis (a mutual fund analyst) started staring at him whenever the two passed in the hallway or when Davis was near Bernier's work area. Bernier experienced increasing discomfort with Davis's behavior. About a year later, on Friday, January 23, 2004, Bernier noticed Davis taking "an overt, purposeful, and glaring look" at Bernier's penis while they were both standing at the urinals in the men's bathroom on their floor. Bernier knew that Davis was gay . . . but he was not aware until this litigation commenced that Davis had a "lazy" left eye that sometimes made it appear that he was "looking off at something" when conversing.

If you've never plead the lazy eye affirmative defense, you're not a true lawyer.

Moral hazard

One of the problems with insurance is the moral hazard. If someone else pays for your car to get fixed, aren't you more likely to wreck it? Wikipedia (in an article citing to Tom Baker, the author of my pimpin' insurance law casebook from last semester) defines moral hazard as "the name given to the increased risk of problematic (immoral) behavior, and thus a negative outcome ('hazard'), because the person who caused the problem doesn't suffer the full (or any) consequences, or may actually benefit." Car insurance increases car accident rates due to the moral hazard.

So what do we think about Catholic Churches that can buy insurance against sex abuse suits?
From Slate: "Since the spike in sex-abuse lawsuits in the mid-1980s, churches have also had the option to take out extra liability policies for damages related to sexual misconduct."

The JP, wanting to diligently keep diddling priests away from young children around the nation (the world!), is a little surprised that this type of insurance isn't against public policy. It violates public policy in California to sell insurance that covers intentional torts, for example. Both California and Kansas make it illegal to insure against punitive damages for the same reason. These are types of liability over which the insured has nearly-unlimited control (the insurance company would have to prove intentionality to deny coverage) and so we want the person in control to be motivated to make good decisions.

How about we stop allowing churches to hand over $227 million worth of damages over to their insurer and just bankrupt them if they abuse too many children? If it were any other business, that's how it'd go, and this is a particularly hard place for the church to get holier-than-thou.

It'd be a lot of fun to be a judge

There was some sissy legal hullabaloo last week about the judge last week who led off his dissent with "I concede that this short opinion of mine does not consider or take into account the majority opinion. So I should disclose at the outset that I have not read it."

Hey, you and me both buddy. It would be hypocritical of any student to decry Jacobs for not reading one mf opinion, right? But still, when we omit reading assignments, we sit in the back and hope to baby Jebus that our ignorance doesn't become the new subject of class discussion. To say: I dissent from your opinion, and I don't even know what you said, is a pretty $$$ way to lead off.

It really does get better though. The case was about college students who were pissed because many years ago at their institution an election was run and re-run, because the college president found out that somehow the student newspaper was commandeered and that messed up the election. What Jacobs wrote after his line about not reading the majority opinion is even better:

This is a case about nothing. Injunctive relief from the school’s election rules is now moot (if it was ever viable); and plaintiffs’ counsel conceded at oral argument that the only relief sought in this litigation is nominal damages. Now, after years of litigation over two dollars, the majority will impose on a busy judge to conduct a trial on this silly thing, and require a panel of jurors to set aside their more important duties of family and business in order to decide it. See Amato v. City of Saratoga Springs, 170 F.3d 311, 322-23 (2d Cir. 1999) (Jacobs, J., concurring) (noting that a trial over one dollar is a “wasteful imposition on the trial judge and on the taxpayers and veniremen”).

With due respect to my colleagues in the majority, and to whatever compulsion they feel to expend substantial energies on this case, I fear that the majority opinion (44 pages of typescript) will only feed the plaintiffs’ fantasy of oppression: that plutocrats are trying to stifle an upsurge of Pol-Potism on Staten Island. Contrary to the impression created by the majority’s lengthy formal opinion, this case is not a cause célèbre; it is a slow-motion tantrum by children spending their graduate years trying to humiliate the school that conferred on them a costly education from which they evidently derived small benefit. A selection from the illiterate piffle in the disputed issue of the College Voice is set out in the margin for the reader’s fun.

Basically, Jacobs ordered a whole fleet of whambulances for the plaintiffs, which should probably be the disposition of more cases these days.

Under Pressure

We here on the Court are big fans of booze. Connoisseurs, one could even say. Part of what makes us such a fair and effective deliberative body is the fact that we are willing to explore and be adventurous with our libations. If you took out the recycling after a SCOTUS hoe-down, you would find a delightful and interesting variety of empty receptacales. We like to experiment, and that is OK. Or so I thought.

Now, this guy is telling me that I am going to be immediately judged, and perhaps discounted and rejected by others, based on my cocktail order. I personally find his science to be somewhat faulty, and the last thing I need is to have one more thing to worry about on a date.

(Not that ol' CT has had a date in recent memory, but when that day comes - and it will, right soon - I do not want to waste a single moment trying to analyze what conclusions about my character my date will reach based on my drink order)

Isn't it enough that I spend most of my life striving for truth and justice? Valiantly protecting the original intentions of our founding fathers against crazy progressives that somehow think Jefferson and Adams didn't know EXACTLY the kinds of issues that would face the nation 200 years down the road? Must I also be forced to defend my choice to order a lemon meringue-a-tini if that's what I'm in the mood for!?

On a side note, I take issue with his characterization of people who order Screwdrivers as "original thinkers". WTF? What the heck is original about a freakin' Screwdriver? That is something I would have ordered when I was about 17 and didn't want to seem indecisive in a bar, lest they discover my underage status, so I just went with the first thing I could think of. But I digress...

The point I am making is, anyone that makes sweeping generalizations about a person based merely on what particular variety of drink they may decide to order at any given time is a total douchebag.

Unless, of course, the person making those sweeping generalizations is a member of the Court. In which case, it is totally acceptable. Judging people is our job, after all.

Show me the gruesome

We're usually not big on the gory over at SCOTUS: In fact, if a Freddy Kruger movie were ever appealed to us, I feel comfortable that the final disposition would be cert denied.

But, this issue is close enough to home that we're posting it anyways. Wisconsin State Senator Dave Hansen (D-30th) ran over his one year-old granddaughter with his car this morning. Our attention was piqued when well-known doofus Frank Lasee offered his condolences to Senator Hansen.

Applying law in action just like Howie told me to, I have a feeling this one was an accident: There are much better, and less messy, ways to kill off your toddler granddaughter if you really want to. Plus, Sen. Hansen doesn't seem to be linked to Lasee in any way other then geography, which gives him credibility through disassociation.

Middleton best place to live?

You better believe it. According to Money magazine, Middleton, WI, is the best place to live of cities with between 7,500 and 50,000 people. Money focused its judging rubric on Middleton's small-town charm, booming economy, and extensive parks and bike trials.

The Capital Times managed to quite awkwardly try to minimize the impact of the several negatives in Middleton:

The only negatives mentioned for Middleton were a lack of ethnic diversity and its long, cold winters. But even that doesn't stop hardy Wisconsinites from having a good time.

No, the lack of diversity has not stopped those hardy (to the winters or to integration?) Wisconsinites from rocking out.