Worst Consumer in America

Over at the excellent Consumerist blog, after months of exciting bracket-tourney-style action, the blog's readership has finally awarded the "Lucky Golden Shit" award to the "Worst Company in America". In the final, my mortgage company, Countrywide, decisively defeated my cable and internet company, Comcast. Either certainly would have been a worthy "victor" in this match-up. Ultimately, it just confirms that when it comes to financial or consumer decisions, you should wait to see what I'm doing and then do the opposite.

I only made it through ten amendments before I ran out of fingers.

Some critics might suggest that blogging requires only an opinion and the ability to type (and perhaps that blawgging only takes those two plus some legal coursework), but Scott Greenfield consistently provides counterexamples at his Simple Justice blog. Greenfield's writing concerning criminal law generally and criminal defense particularly is compelling stuff; what's more, he backs his opinions with solid arguments and takes no prisoners (pun intended, of course!) when opposing arguments are raised. In short, he's a tremendous example of what a legal blogger should do to rise to the top of the blogosphere. I'm a fan.

For these reasons, I was particularly pleased to see that Greenfield would be hosting this week's Blawg Review #170, and he didn't disappoint. The theme this week is the Fourteenth Amendment, by which Bill of Rights protections are made binding upon the states and which was certified as part of the Constitution on July 28, 1868. Amongst the many highlights of this week's carnival are tricky prosecutors for hire, celebrating defense attorneys willing to go against the grain, and outing a judge who wanted her name kept out of a hit-and-run accident report.

Victoria Pynchon and her colleagues at the IP ADR Blog host next week's edition.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (177) . . . The Sequel!

This week's bonus joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Tuesday, July 22; link good at time of posting):

Three men suspected of stealing from a Goodwill store in Cookeville ran out of gas before making it out of the parking lot, police say.

Officers said they found a truck stalled in the parking lot after someone called police saying a recliner chair was being stolen and loaded on the back of a truck.

[Previous TGIS]

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (177)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Wednesday, July 23; link good at time of posting):

An Australian man's dare went horribly wrong when he tried to play chicken with cars on a freeway wearing only his underwear. The 18 year old was critically injured after being hit by a four-wheel drive on a freeway in the southern city of Melbourne in the early hours of Wednesday, police said in a statement.

"Police are dismayed at the utter stupidity of a man who decided to play chicken on the Tullamarine Freeway," the statement said.

[Previous TGIS]

Sometimes a whisper is a shout.

Whisper, a branding strategy blog, hosts Blawg Review #169 this week. If branding strategy seems to you like a counterintuitive theme for a collection of the best legal blogging of the past week, Whisper sets you straight straightaway:

Lawyers, and law firms, have always been brands.

As with any organization, product, or service, people think about a lawyer or law firm in terms of a handful of qualities or attributes, a promise, some kind of story.

That simple narrative can have a major impact on their decision to contact a particular firm, to buy its services, to do business there, and to affiliate with the lawyer.

In today’s globalized, networked world, every lawyer has to compete with every other lawyer for their share of the world’s clients, consumers, businesses, investment, capital, respect, and attention.

How a lawyer or law firm stakes out and communicates their distinctive place within the world largely determines which ones succeed, and which falter, in the race for economic prosperity.

Highlighting some of the top brands in the legal blogosphere is certainly not an easy task, but the Whisperers manage to do it in style. The bigger brands this week include Dan Hull's market-while-you-work path to building a "muscle boutique" firm, Eric Goldman's online guide to finding Eric Goldman, and a post where Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr's take on the exclusionary rule is augmented by a torrent of argument in the Conspiracy's non-exclusive comments.

Next week's Blawg Review will be hosted by another rapidly-rising brand, Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice blog. Greenfield's commentary is consistently amongst the most intelligent and engaging in the legal blogosphere. I know that I'm not alone in my eager anticipation for next week's edition of the carnival of legal blogging.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (176) . . . The Sequel!

This week's bonus joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Friday, July 18; link good at time of posting):

An Indian man who took an impersonator to court to get a divorce faces legal action after his real wife found out, lawyers said Friday.

Sanjib Saha presented a woman as his wife in a lower court in the eastern city of Kolkata this month. Both said they sought a mutual divorce, something the court granted immediately.

Saha's real wife was then asked to leave the marital home. She has since appealed the ruling at a higher court, charged her husband with cheating and the original divorce was suspended.

"The case exposed the legal loopholes in our system," Kaushik Chanda, lawyer of Saha's real wife, said.

[Previous TGIS]

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (176)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of The Register (from Wednesday, July 16; link good at time of posting):

A New Yorker was jailed for 30 months on Tuesday after being convicted for spamming 1.2 million AOL members with junk mail.

Adam Vitale, 27 and of Brooklyn, was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution for bombarding subscribers to the service with emails punting a "computer security" product. Vitale pleaded guilty to violating US anti-spam laws a year ago after he made the mistake of cutting a junk mail distribution with a government informant, Reuters reports.

Vitale and his accomplice Todd Moeller falsified header information and used anonymous proxies - compromised PCs - to bypass AOL's spam filters. The duo completed their spam run in less than a week in August 2005 in the hope of raking in half the income from the resulting sales.

Vitale received an unusually harsh sentence for his junk mail activities partially because of his 22 prior convictions. His sentence works out to 65 seconds in jail for every junk mail he sent.

[Previous TGIS]

In the meantime, will someone please buy Mr. Heller a revolver?

Dick Heller, a resident of the District of Columbia, was denied a permit to possess a handgun for self-defense. He sued the District, seeking to invalidate, or at least to limit, the District's categorical ban on personal ownership of handguns. He was ultimately successful; the United States Supreme Court recently found in his favor. In his majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Scalia wrote:

In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.

With a Supreme Court victory under his belt and a run-of-the-mill seven-shot semiautomatic pistol in his possession, Heller's permit should be forthcoming, one might think. Well, in the District of Columbia, home of the Supreme Court, one would think wrong. Via HotAir.com, DC-Area channel WUSA describes this morning's scene:

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District's 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit.

But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

While we wait for someone to explain to the District's officials a bit about pesky matters like the rule of law, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and the authority of this nation's highest court, perhaps we might be able to find Mr. Heller some sort of interim solution. A nice revolver might be sufficiently unlike a machine gun that the District will graciously permit him to possess it. If nothing else, it might force them to concoct a more plausible excuse for not issuing Heller a permit.

Personally, I think he should get a nice pistol like this one:


This pistol's muzzle-loaded, so there are no pesky "bottom-loading" issues to concern the DC Police's gun nannies. It has only a single shot capacity, so it's below the District's ridiculous magazine capacity threshold. Heller's own pistol was as well, of course, but only by four rounds; this weapon's fully ten rounds under. Now the DC policeman who's processing applications when Heller returns can use all of his fingers to do the math.

Moreover, it's not like anyone in the District has ever been killed with such a limited weapon.

Gonna make a jailbreak...

AC/DC had their '74 Jailbreak, released after singer Bon Scott's death, and it's still a great record. Steve McQueen made a Great Escape a decade or so before then and it inspires whenever it comes on. Only an Eighteenth Century French prison break gets its own national holiday, however.

On Bastille Day, Jeffrey Mehalic hosts Blawg Review #168 at his West Virginia Business Litigation blog. Highlights include picking-through the writing errors in the recent Heller decision, the legal ins and outs of leaked sex tapes, and giving 150% to the practice of law.

From this point forward, Le Quatorze Juillet will no longer cause my thoughts to turn to the French Revolution but instead to business litigation in the Mountain State. Vive La Virginie Occidentale!

The Whisper branding blog will host Blawg Review #169 next Monday. If you'll promise to read it, I'll promise not to trot out my feeble high school French.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (175)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of The Huntsville Times (via QuizLaw) (from Wednesday, July 9; links good at time of posting):

According to police, Garry Michael Wilson drove a stolen BMW Z3 just two blocks Saturday night before the car's manual transmission apparently couldn't take any more grinding punishment.

"He just couldn't drive the car," said police Lt. Justin Barley.

A resident on High Street alerted police when he heard someone in front of his house revving the stolen car's engine. Wilson got out of the car and fled on foot, the witness told police. The suspect was later arrested at a nearby house.

[Previous TGIS]

Random Thought (11)

It would be irresponsible for me to suggest that the weather today is as hot as Hades. I've not been to Hades since that legal ethics seminar a few years back, so I have no current information concerning its climate.

[Previous Thought]

Surreality Programming

I'm a regular listener and great fan of Mike Semple Piggot's various podcasting productions, including the daily news program at the Insitelaw Magazine site, his ongoing Charon podcast series, and his "West London Man" satiric commentaries. I highly recommend them all.

Although I've exchanged an occasional e-mail with each, I've never had the pleasure to meet or speak with either Mike or his guest on today's podcast, Dan Hull (of the always-excellent What About Clients? blog). I was, to say the least, flabbergasted when the following exchange took place around seventeen minutes into the interview:

MIKE: I've always enjoyed reading Colin Samuels and I know his Blawg Reviews have won Blawg Review consistently for several years. But they are literary and they are always interesting.

DAN: Colin's one of the few bloggers out there who can really write. There's a number of lawyers that blog and they have great ideas, but there's only a small handful of those that are both . . . original and eloquent at the same time, so you're right about that.

I'm certainly honored to be mentioned so glowingly by Mike and Dan, whose own legal blogging efforts are far superior to my own. As a "blogger who can really write", I suppose I should make a more concerted effort to write a bit more frequently! Thanks to you both, most sincerely.

Security is Everyone's Business

When I was young, I remember going to my father's office at one of the military bases where we were stationed and seeing a poster which said "Security is Everyone's Business". It was the 70s, so there was probably a "Hang in there, baby" cat poster alongside it, but I don't recall.

I was reminded of that security poster today by this New York Post story (via Instapundit):

He's a criminal, but he "did the right thing" when it mattered - alerting cops to what he feared was a terror plot the day before the Fourth of July.

At about 5 p.m. yesterday, an unidentified thief with a police record broke into a red van that had been parked at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in Brooklyn's Sunset Park for about a month, a source told The Post.

He was stunned when he looked inside - it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.

The street is lined with brownstones, and there's a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.

Then he got out and called a cop he knows from his run-ins with the law.

"He did the right thing," a high-ranking officer said. "And he possibly saved a lot of people's lives."

It's certainly a heartwarming, faith-affirming story. It's just too bad that when this patriotic car thief needed a store where he could park his explosives-filled van, the nearest Wal-Mart was ten miles away, all the way over in New Jersey.

Superstar Treatment

Jonathan Frieden throws a nation's worth of legal blogging into Blawg Review #167 this week at his E-Commerce Law blog. Frieden surveys every state in the union (including Canada, the 51st) and highlights a legal blogging "star" from each. All are worthy selections. Particular highlights include a Virginian with expertise in the estate planning concerns relating to cryogenic preservation, a Rhode Islander who's suspended blogging in favor of a run for public office, and a Californian whose single-name recognition ranks him amongst the glitterati.

Jeffrey Mehalic will host Blawg Review #168 next week at his West Virginia Business Litigation blog. Hopefully, he'll carry on this week's theme for a bit and give us some hint as to where he's writing from.

TGIS: Thanks God It's Schadenfreude! (174)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of KWTX (via Grits for Breakfast) (from Wednesday, July 2; link good at time of posting):

A warrant has been issued for former Troy police chief David Seward who failed to show up for a court appearance on June 11 related to a misdemeanor theft charge stemming from the alleged misuse of money seized during an arrest.

The Bell County Court Coordinator’s Office said Seward was due in court to tell a judge whether he had hired an attorney or needed court-appointed counsel.

Posters with the heading “Wanted by the Troy Police Department” and bearing a photo of Seward have been posted around Troy.

Seward, who was fired in 2006 as a result of an investigation that involved the Texas Rangers, was arrested in April in Arlington on a misdemeanor warrant charging theft over $500, but under $1,500.

According to the affidavit issued for the arrest warrant, Seward told investigators he used money from a Troy account to pay for items for himself and his wife including an embroidery machine, a vacation, meals, gas and a rental car.

Seward was fired in August 2006 after spending six weeks on unpaid leave.

The Troy City Council suspended him on July 11, 2006 because of the ongoing investigation, which focused on the handling of money seized after drugs were found in a vehicle during a traffic stop.

[Previous TGIS]

Perhaps a nail salon instead?

My earlier speculation has thus far yielded no Starbucks. It seems somewhat less likely now.

It's not discrimination if you treat everyone appallingly.

As a group, the English are not generally more pleasant than others, but at least when they're unpleasant they tend to be more sporting about it. Thus, presented with GeekLawyer's Blawg Review #166, we can't say we weren't warned.

Those of us who've enjoyed GeekLawyer's writing over the years have had ample opportunity to steel ourselves for this edition of the carnival of legal blogging. We've come to understand that he's the Squidward in our Bikini Bottom, the Grinch in our Whoville, the Blawg Review family's black sheep who the judge swore wouldn't be eligible for work release before little Suzy's birthday party.

I digress.

Those of you who are just discovering him now will . . . not be bored. Scandalized perhaps, but not bored. Dan Hull described #166 best this morning:

Barrister-pundit GeekLawyer never disappoints . . . . Women, children, liberals, conservatives, Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, your Mom, Mormons, the religious right, Midwesterners, most lawyers and their spouses will not like it. Witty, very British--and vile.

To his list, Hull might have added Canadians. The anonymous ("mysterious and suspiciously evasive" according to GeekLawyer) Blawg Review Editor notes that although this week's host has recognized America's upcoming Independence Day, he's slighted today's Canada Day. Ed. offers a supplemental post in honor of neglected Canadian legal bloggers:

[T]his addendum is by way of apology to the many Canadian barristers and solicitors who follow Blawg Review hoping, nay praying, for some passing references this Canada Day . . . and some well-deserved link love from a popular law blog host.

In all fairness to GeekLawyer, however, he's not the first person to completely forget that Canada exists. Frankly, we Americans should all try harder. After all, they are our 51st state and they deserve our consideration, respect, and superior health care, eh.



Next week, Jonathan D. Frieden will host Blawg Review #167 at the E-Commerce Law blog, assuming there's anything left of Blawg Review then, that is.