Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
The whole purpose of fee-shifting statutes is to generate attorneys' fees that are disproportionate to the plaintiff's recovery.
Millea v. Metro-North Railroad Co., No. 10-409-cv (2d Cir. Aug. 8, 2011) (Jacobs, C.J.) (reversing award of $204 in fees on $612.50 in damages under Family Medical Leave Act).
Do you wonder what you could do if someone targets your company with a torrent of calls and emails? Wonder no more. You can sue under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, which creates both criminal penalties and a civil cause of action.
So held the Sixth Circuit in Pulte Homes, …
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917).
Today Blawgletter can't resist giving credit for more than one quote to Douglas E. Abrams, who teaches law at the University of Missouri, the show-me state.
Professor Abrams's piece in the July issue of the Texas Bar Journal — What Great Writers Can Teach Lawyers and Judges — highlights such a Great Many pithy comments…
Snappy: You know, Bitey, ever since the nice doctor cut out my spare kidney by not-on-purpose, I've thought a lot about tort reform.
Bitey: But Snappy, you hate reform — tort or not. Why thinketh thou aboutst itteth after your Bad Surgery Thing?
Snappy: Oh, you know, one thing leads to another. For instance, as I gazed at…
It is not enough for counsel to claim that s/he is too busy to meet the deadline, has plans to be on vacation, wants more time to study the record, or was only recently added to the client's team of lawyers. Such assertions, inasmuch as they turn on factors within the control of counsel or…
Each time you buy something with a debit card, you and the issuer of your card pay an "interchange" fee for using the network that handles the purchase. Visa and MasterCard run the biggest networks and reap the most fees — directly from your card issuer and indirectly from you.
A new law, the…
Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions. It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.
Hugo Mercier, "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth", The New York…
You know things probably won't turn out well when the first sentence in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court opinion quotes from a 158 year-old novel.
Dickensian
So begins Chief Justice John Roberts's opus for the majority in Stern v. Marshall, No. 10-179 (U.S. June 23, 2011). It says:
This "suit has, in course of time, become so…
Blawgletter has a thing about the passive voice. We don't like it, no sir. Not at all. You might say it is hated by us.
[See, e.g., "They Will Be Killed by Us", "The Voice That Dares Not Call Its Name", "Passive Voice Kills Another Lawsuit", "Contingent Fee…