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The question in the title of this post is inspired by this new article in the Los Angeles Times, which is headlined "Judge tours California's rebuilt death chamber; U.S. judge is reviewing the state's revised lethal injection procedures and facilities,...

San Francisco Chronicle, Highest-paid UC Execs Demand Millions in Benefits: Three dozen of the University of California's highest-paid executives are threatening to sue unless UC agrees to spend tens of millions of dollars to dramatically increase retirement benefits for employees earning more than $245,000. "We believe it is the University's...

by Paul Alan Levy For more than three decades, the courts have recognized a general policy under both the common law and the First Amendment under which judicial records — both briefs that argue how judges should resolve vases, and...

John Eleuthère du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, is the latest plutocrat to hit the estate tax lottery by dying yesterday at the age of 72 (in prison where he was serving his sentence imposed for his conviction of third degree murder in the 1996 shooting...

George Lardner has this effective op-ed in today's New York Times, which is headlined "No Country for Second Chances." Here are excerpts: If by tomorrow he pardons no one but turkeys, President Obama will have the most sluggish record in...

The big news in the music world this week is that Apple finally is able to sell digital downloads of the Beatles catalog in its iTunes music store. For years, the copyright holders who control the Beatles master recordings have withheld permission to use feature the Beatles recordings on iTunes and other digital download and on-demand streaming services, seemingly afraid of diluting the value of their copyrights. There are other bands who have had a similar reluctance to make their recordings available on-line. While this impasse has now been broken by the biggest name among these digital holdouts, at least as to iTunes, some have asked why it is that the Beatles were never missing from Internet radio, while they were absent from these other services. The answer is the statutory license under which Internet Radio operates. While there have been many disputes over the royalties that have been imposed under the statutory license created by Congress which allow non-interactive digital...

Working with smart, funny, and creative people brings lots of rewards. This month, one of the smartest, funniest, and most creative people Blawgletter knows (and once had the pleasure of working with) wrote a thought piece on legal blogging --...

If you go down the list of Halliburton’s misdeeds at the website Halliburton Watch, there’s more than enough to be concerned about. Fraud, bribery, waste, abuse, faulty work and war profiteering at the company once led by Dick Cheney. (For...

Both Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. and Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch have made funny work of a lawsuit involving the man pictured on the cover of Dido's 2008 album Safe Trip Home.

Bloomberg, Wealthy Lock In Low Gift Levy as Time Runs Out on 0% Estate Tax, by Ryan J. Donmoyer: Estates are exempt from all taxes for 2010, and the rate shoots up to 55% next year unless lawmakers act in a post-election session. That means the best tax-reduction strategy, short...

Via Above the Law, I learned of this article in the Los Angeles Times. Frank McCourt, owner of the L.A. Dodgers baseball team, is engaged in a scorched-earth divorce battle, and this article details how Larry Silverstein, a lawyer for McCourt, apparently took it upon himself to change one word in a signed contract between [...]

California campaign finance disclosures reportedly show that the campaign to deaft marijuana legalization is being funded in part by the alcohol industry which does not relish the idea of joints replacing shots as intoxicants of choice. The California Beer and Beverage Distributors contributed $10,000 to the No on Prop. 19 campaign, also known as “Public [...]

A juror was punished this week for posting updates about a court case to Facebook before the case was over. Pro tip: don't do that. Read More: Associated Press Read the comments on this post

Sometimes I’m surprised at how tightly some otherwise clear-thinking people cling to what they learned in high-school typing class. When I took typing in high school, 37 years ago, I was taught to hit the space bar twice after each...

If you happen to be a fan of both ThePopTort and country music, today we begin with apologies because by now, you probably can’t get that Randy Travis/Carrie Underwood song “I Told You So” out of your head (especially after...

The anger which ignited the 1992 Los Angeles riots is frightfully similar to what many New York City residents felt after the acquittal of police officers who shot and killed Sean Bell in a hail of NYPD gunfire outside a...

The Roberts Court just completed its 5th year. According to this article by Adam Liptak in today's New York Times, "[i]n those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in...

If you are an heir to a fabulous fortune, particularly the heir to a $1-4 billion group of family businesses like that of the New York Yankees and its associated entities, it is preferable for the property to pass this year. An AP Article summed it up: "If Congress doesn't go retroactive, then [Yankees-owner George Steinbrenner] picked a great year to die," said Robert Steele, who heads of the trusts and estates department at the law firm of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz in New York. "There will be possibly tremendous capital gains tax, but the capital gains rate...

In 2008, the RIAA paid over $16 million in legal fees. The industry group was able to recover just $391,000 in claim settlements. Read More: Recording Industry Vs The People Read the comments on this post

In a landmark ruling, Judge Louis Stanton, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, granted YouTube and Google summary judgment against Viacom, holding that YouTube qualified for “safe harbor” protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. Section 512(c)). The Judge held that mere generalized knowledge that infringing material [...]

Now that the medical malpractice lawsuit issue has relinquished the title of national “political football” in the national health insurance reform debate, the issue moves back to the states, where it has been thrashed around for over 30 years. Yes,...

While my focus remains elsewhere for the moment, I can't help but anticipate next Friday's June 18 hearing at the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which will hear oral arguments in Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller's removal proceedings. I've consistently kept the date clear and plan to show up early for the queue to get a good seat. Mary Alice Robbins at Texas Lawyer has an excellent preview of the case, and Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle has an early writeup. Judge David Berchelmann in his findings of fact thought that appellate attorney David Dow's culpability subsumed Judge Keller's, while the Special Master says Berchelmann used the wrong standard of review, weighing comparative blame as though this were a civil dispute between Keller and Dow instead of evaluating Judge Keller's actions on their own merits. (Notably, the forensic psychologist in Richard's case was later found to have inflated IQ scores in death penalty cases on behalf of...

Pequignot v. Solo Cup (Fed. Cir. 2010) Over the past year, hundreds of companies have been sued for false patent marking. The qui-tam style statute creates a cause of action against manufacturer who, with intent to deceive the public, mark...

The Supreme Court's conservative wing usually sides with corporate interests, according to a new report by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). The report, "The Roberts Court and Corporations: The Numbers Tell the Story," states: The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision this past January in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, holding that corporations have the same constitutional rights aa individuals to spend money to influence elections, has focused a national spotlight on the rulings of the Roberts Court in cases involving the interests of big business and led to charges that the conservative majority on the Roberts Court is being ‘activist' in favoring corporate interests. To test empirically the idea that the five conservatives on the Roberts Court tend to side with corporate interests, at least more than their colleagues do, we have examined, for those cases in which the United Chamber of Commerce participated as a party or as an amicus curiae, every opinion...

Federal judge Rosemary Collyer sits on the DC District Court, where several of the recent US Copyright Group lawsuits against alleged P2P users have been filed. A few of those lawsuits ended up on Judge Collyer's calendar, one of them filed against over 4,000 anonymous "John Does" at once. This week, Judge Collyer issued a terse demand to the lawyers behind these cases: convince me within two weeks that jamming 4,577 people into a single lawsuit is a proper use of the court system. Judge Rosemary Collyer A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. "MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20," wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry. The judge's order came only days after the ACLU and EFF joined...

New York Times, Student Debt and a Push for Fairness: If you run up big credit card bills buying a new home theater system and can’t pay it off after a few years, bankruptcy judges can get rid of the debt. They may even erase loans from a casino. But...

First, an important note: the federal government is not, in fact, proposing to save newspapers by reining in fair use, creating a national "hot news" right over facts, or charging Internet subscribers $5 a month. But plenty of people are, and they have now resorted to seeking government support for some of the worst "save the media" ideas ever put to paper. Read the comments on this post

The European Parliament's website urging its members to sign Declaration 29 seems well-meaning enough, with a frightened-looking child and a plea to end sexual harassment, child porn, and pedophilia. However, privacy advocates are concerned over a semi-hidden rider on the declaration that allows EU member states to retain data from search engines, essentially eliminating any privacy EU citizens previously had when surfing the Web. The stated purpose of Declaration 29 is to set up an early warning system (EWS) to target pedophiles and sex offenders. The statement itself is somewhat vague about how this would be done, but claims that pedophiles currently enjoy "freedom of action, putting them on the same footing as honest citizens and making it difficult for the authorities to trace them." Read the comments on this post

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is facing a potential suit by the Center for Biological Diversity for allowing the use of dispersants in an attempt to limit damage in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil spill. Dispersants are...