Legal Briefs
The February 1 Ottawa Citizen highlights another case of brave trial lawyers bringing a dangerous industry to heel: In this case, the National Hockey League and the NHL Players Association.
It seems that the outlaw hockey industry was involved when equally notorious trading card companies placed more valuable trading cards randomly into trading card packages.
Lawyers filing the suit claim the varied value of cards in card packages promotes gambling among children.
The lawsuit was filed in California by the U.S.'s largest class-action firm, which previously had filed a class action suit against RJ Reynolds, claiming that the Joe Camel character was aimed at children. Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA and the Walt Disney Company were also named as defendants in the suit.
In other suits, filed last year, the card companies themselves were targeted.
Says the Ottawa Citizen: "If the legal action sounds farfetched, it does not really matter. In the lucrative business of class action lawsuits, often it is enough to mount a plausible case in the hopes of winning out-of-court settlements from defendants who don't want to risk a judgement or who'd rather avoid a long and expensive legal battle."
Ironically, Columbia University Law Professor John Coffee told the paper,
it is the law firms themselves who are actually engaging in gambling. They
do so, he says, by financing lawsuits themselves in the narrow hope of scoring
a large settlement or award.
If Americans don't like lawyers, and they say they don't, they aren't getting these ideas from television.
According to a January 1999 report from the Media Research Center, TV
portrays lawyers as very upstanding citizens. Lawyer characters committed
only 1% of TV crimes, compared with businessmen (29.2%), career criminals
(9.7%), doctors (4.1%), government officials (3.9%), police officers (3.5%),
soldiers (2.1%), blue collar workers (1.8%), and teachers (1.2%). Even scientists
are portrayed as less ethical than lawyers (1.4%).
Citizens Against Government Waste, the anti-pork government watchdog group, released a report February 9 estimating that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has spent up to $60 million in taxpayer dollars in its antitrust case against Microsoft. That's half as much again as Ken Starr's critics say he's spent.
On January the President announced that DOJ will sue tobacco companies,
despite DOJ's announcements last year that it has no grounds for doing so.
It's anyone's guess how much that suit will cost.
From the February 3 Albuquerque Journal comes the ridiculous case of a man who had sex with his girlfriend and then sued her, claiming that the girlfriend "stole his semen and converted it to her own use without his permission" because she became pregnant.
The lawsuit by Peter Wallis against Kellie Smith alleged fraud, breach of contract and "conversion of property" -- Wallis' semen.
Plaintiff Wallis' lawyer claimed that Wallis' semen was merely "loaned"
to the defendant, prompting the defendant's lawyer to ask: "What were
the terms of the loan? What were the interest rates?"
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