Friday Links

Above, you’ll find the cover of Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre #4, published sometime in the mid-1990s before the series’ name was changed to Supernatural Law. Note the tagline: “Beware The Creatures of the Night – They Have Lawyers!”  We must confess a general unfamiliarity with this series and the characters who appear therein, though according to Wikipedia, they’ve been around since the 1970s. Who knew?

PHM at The Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog feels compelled to “put anything that includes the phrase ‘tort reform’ in quotation marks,” including The American Tort Reform Association. Sure, it’s an advocacy group, but we don’t put the Plaintiffs’ bar group, the “Association for Justice” in quotation marks because that’s what they’re actually called.  It’s like using the phrase “so called” when something is actually called that. Oh, well.

We don’t discuss constitutional law much here at Abnormal Use, but after learning of last week’s ruling in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, in which the Supreme Court struck down a California state law restricting the rental or sale of violent video games to children, we may have at least one comment on the subject. Like most, our first thought was, “How many sitting Supreme Court justices have actually played a video game?” And then we skimmed the opinion. But today, we direct you to this article by friend of the blog and Pennsylvania lawyer Jay Hornack (a/k/a Panic Street Lawyer), who analyzes the ruling in far more detail.

We here at Abnormal Use have been called many things, but it’s been a while since someone said we were silly. Alas, Ronald V. Miller, Jr. at the Drug Recall Lawyer Blog did so last week, chiefly because he didn’t like our recent post calling for Reed Morgan, the Plaintiff’s lawyer in the Stella Liebeck McDonald’s hot coffee case, to release the transcript. Ouch! Oh, well. All we want to do is read the transcript! Is that so wrong? McDonald’s isn’t talking (nor have they done so much on this case since ’94), and the courts sure aren’t likely to have a 17 year old trial transcript. So, that leaves us with the the Plaintiff’s lawyers who represented Liebeck. Considering that many, many Plaintiffs’ lawyers spent much of last week praising Susan Saladoff’s “Hot Coffee” documentary and clamoring for the real “truth” behind the Liebeck case, we thought Liebeck’s lawyer might naturally want to serve that interest and release the transcript for posterity. What better way to expose the truth? But I guess that’s just silly. (In other news, the ABA Journal referenced some of our work on the hot coffee case, as well. You can see that piece here.).