Geoffrey Chaucer — he of the prurient Miller’s Tale and indeed all of The Canterbury Tales in fourteenth century England — invented many of the legends to which we owe what we now celebrate on February 14 as Valentine’s Day. Blawgletter wishes you a most happy and, er, productive one.
On this joyous occasion
The majority of a Fifth Circuit panel held today that a Texas ban on sale of "sexual devices" violates the fourteenth amendment. All three circuit judges agreed as to the unconstitutionality of the Texas statute to the extent it prohibited advertisements for sexual devices. The third panel member dissented as to the ban on sale
Supervising lawyers, whether in-house or outside, can profit from giving clear instructions to their charges. The same goes for general counsel types who oversee the work of law firm types regardless of seniority.
Blawgletter learned that from clerking for a Fifth Circuit judge — The Honorable Jerre S. Williams — going on a quarter century
The German Federal Cartel Office searched the premises of seven chocolate-makers on February 7, according to Bloomberg and Reuters today. The searchees included Mars, Nestle, Kraft, and Ritter.
Possible price-fixing among dominant chocolate-makers surfaced last November with disclosure of search warrants in Canada and then the firing up of a U.S. probe by the Antitrust
A popular gaming device.
A study that Blawgletter mentioned earlier this week concluded that clients prefer contingent fee arrangements even if the deals require them to pay their lawyers more than double their hourly rates. What prompts such seemingly irrational behavior? The researchers give a simple answer: "mixed gambling".
For those who don’t regularly play
Frank Easterbrook, Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit, revels in writing stream-of-consciousness opinions. This chronic self-indulgence comes across nicely in his rejection today of a tax shelter scheme that led to the demise of the Jenkens & Gilchrist law firm (whose name he misspells as "Jenkins & Gilchrist"). The opinion makes its readers wait until
Class actions get a bad rap from people who compare big fees that lawyers earn with small payments that class members receive. Blawgletter hasn’t much patience with the argument. It makes the wrong comparison. The fees should bear a reasonable proportion to the benefits the lawyers secured for the class, not with what a single
Force of nature.
Apparently you can. For that very sobriquet appears in the February 2008 issue of ABA Journal. The article — about Blawgletter’s senior partner, Steve Susman — has Steve saying it to a new associate.
Imagine our shock.
The youthful lawyer, by the way, is now a partner in the New York
Point of Law kindly pointed last Friday to a new academic paper on Blawgletter’s favorite subject — contingent fees. We haven’t digested the study yet. But in the next day or two we expect to give our take on the researchers’ findings, including their rejection of traditional "rational choice theory" in favor of "prospect theory"
Contingent business law includes class actions involving commercial disputes. Such as the one over Shell gasoline that, because it left the refinery with too much sulfur, damaged consumers’ automobile fuel guages.
Today the Fifth Circuit considered the contingent aspect of the lawyers’ handling of the ensuing class litigation — the fee part. The district court