Apparently a successful cause of action, according to today’s Wall Street Journal Law Blog:

Law Firm Hamburger War Heats Up

Powerhouse D.C. law firm Steptoe & Johnson has won an order to force a neighboring burger restaurant to stop omitting hamburger fumes into the firm’s air intake system.

See and Post Comments:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/08/26/law-firm-hamburger-war-heats-up?mod=djemlawblog_t

Today’s Wall Street Journal Law Blog has an article about the “UnemployedJD” blog of an unemployed law graduate. The website begins “My name is Ethan Haines.” The website features a picture of a trim white male who, according to the website, is on a hunger strike to protest his own unemployment and the unemployment of other law school graduates.

However, according to the WSJ, the website is operated by Ms. Zenovia Evans, who does not in any way resemble the profile of “Ethan Haines.” As reported by USA Today, Ms. Evans chose not to take the July bar exam, chose instead to study abroad in London, and is currently purusing a MBA. USA Today reports that she is not unemployed, but is instead an “independent contractor (which means no benefits) for a personal injury law firm, earning about $600 a week to hone her legal skills.”

UnemployedJD does not disclose where Evans/Haines attended law school. But a web search found a Zenovia Evans who attended the Auburn Hills campus of Thomas M. Cooley Law School.

The particular demands of the Evans/Haines hunger strike are that ten particular law schools provide certain information about the employment of graduates to an organization called Law School Transparency, and that the schools audit their career counseling programs “for effectiveness, resourcefulness, and accuracy.” [LST has no relation to Evans/Haines or the hunger strike.]

According to Evans/Haines, the ten schools to which s/he sent the hunger strike demands were “randomly selected law schools ranked in the Top 100 of the 2010 U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings. These schools were selected because they stand to gain the most from keeping the current rankings structure in place.”

The Cooley Law School has been a long-time critic of the US News ranking sytem, which Cooley analogizes to ranking college football teams based on the quality of their freshman recruits, rather than by the results achieved by the teams. Cooley favors an alternative rankings system, under which Cooley scores in the top-20.

According to USA Today, “She says she owes more than $150,000 in loans.” (On the blog, she says that she authorized USA Today to reveal her real name.) Cooley’s current annual tuition is $30,644, with discounts of 25–100% available for students with high LSATs (starting at 149, with an additional 10% discount for Michigan residents).

It does not seem prudent for a person with $150,000 in debt to postpone the bar exam, study in London, and then enroll in a different professional school program.

Haines/Evans does not allege that Cooley Law School misled her in any way, or that Cooley’s Career and Professional Development Office failed to function in a professional and appropriate manner.

Surprisingly, Evans is also the proprietor of the J.D. Lifeline website, which sells a book for pre-law students, and another book for 1Ls. According to J.D. Lifeline, “now is the perfect time to go to law school.”

Regarding the progress of the hunger strike, Evans/Haines writes: “As of today, August 24th, I am officially at the end of the second stage of starvation. I have rejected all food thereby limiting myself to water and fruit juice for the past 12 days. Stage three – where death is highly probable – is in the very near future, but I have yet to receive any communication from law school officials regarding my Notice of hunger strike.  As of today, I have lost 15 pounds! I am at a loss for words…”

Given the near-death situation, one wonders if Ms. Evans is still able to perform her duties effectively at the law firm where she works.

Constant improvement of post-graduation data, and constant improvement of law school career counseling offices are both worthy goals. Certainly there is room for debate about the merits of the US News ranking system versus alternative ranking systems. To me, however, Mr. Haines and Ms. Evans do not appear to be particularly persuasive spokespersons for those causes.

Would someone like to do a Latin to English translation of Leonado Bruni’s “De Militia”? It’s a 20 page essay from mid-15th century Florence, extolling the militia as the best defense of a free city-state. I can send you the original Latin text, which has been cleaned up so it’s in easily-read printed format, rather than the specialized medieval Latin script. This would be a useful addition to modern knowledge of the Renaissance’s militia philosophy. Currently, the only extended English translations of Italian Renaissance writings on the militia are texts by Machiavelli.

The translation will be published on my website, and an excerpt will appear in a forthcoming book. (I post an announcement about that book in a few weeks.) Of course you’ll receive formal credit for the translation, thus garnering fame and honor, if not fortune.

If you’re possibly interested, but don’t want do to all 20 pages, then it might be possible to pick the shorter passage for the book, and just translate that. However, you would still have to read the whole essay, so we could work together to pick the best excerpt.

Please contact me via the e-mail address supplied on the lower right-hand column of my website.

The 1959 “time machine” episode of Colorado Inside-Out won the 2010 award (for 2009 programs) for best Interview/Discussion Program/Special from the Heartland Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Some excerpts from President Calvin Coolidge’s magnificent speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

...Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection...

The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them....

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world. It was not only the principles declared, but the fact that therewith a new nation was born which was to be founded upon those principles and which from that time forth in its development has actually maintained those principles, that makes this pronouncement an incomparable event in the history of government. It was an assertion that a people had arisen determined to make every necessary sacrifice for the support of these truths and by their practical application bring the War of Independence to a successful conclusion and adopt the Constitution of the United States with all that it has meant to civilization.

The idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers was not new in political history. It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king. This right was set out with a good deal of detail by the Dutch when as early as July 26, 1581, they declared their independence of Philip of Spain. In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne. In each of these cases sovereignty through divine right was displaced by sovereignty through the consent of the people. Running through the same documents, though expressed in different terms, is the clear inference of inalienable rights. But we should search these charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions.

....A very positive echo of what the Dutch had done in 1581, and what the English were preparing to do, appears in the assertion of the Rev. Thomas Hooker of Connecticut as early as 1638, when he said in a sermon before the General Court that–

“The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people”

“The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.”

This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church....

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause....

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Transocean’s ban on employee knife possession nearly killed several BP drilling rig survivors, by preventing them from cutting the rope that attached the life boat to the drilling rig. Details here, from Towmasters. Some additional details here from the 1:30 p.m. report by the New Orleans Times-Picayune: the life boat was supposed to have a knife in it, but it couldn’t be found in the dark during the chaos. Fortunately, a rescue boat drove up the raft and supplied a knife. For men at sea, and for lots of other laborers, a knife is a basic safety tool. The knife ban is one more piece of evidence that Transocean and BP chose not to follow best practices for safety.

I prefer reading books on paper (“pagebooks” in 23d century parlance). So I initially thought that Kindle (and similar products from other companies) was an interesting novelty, but not greatly important. However, some ancillary aspects of Kindle are making me reconsider. To wit:

1. Text to speech. Only a very small percentage of books are so popular that it makes economic sense to create a special audio edition. Kindle’s text-to-speech feature makes every book into an audio book, unless the publisher refuses to grant the rights. As a result, the number of available audio books is vastly increased. The Kindle reader is not excellent, but it’s pretty good. The “reader” has little sense of English, and often puts the accent on the wrong syllable. But the listening experience is no worse than listening to a very clear speaker whose native language is not English, and who therefore incorrectly accents “Wisconsin.” Kindle is incompetent at numerals of three digits of greater. “1990s” will be read as “eye-gee-gee-oss” or “nineteen-goes” or some other bizarre variant. But overall, Kindle creates a reasonably functional audiobook out of every pagebook, with no marginal production cost. Pretty nifty for those of us who might want to listen to a policy book that sold 3,000 copies in 1996.

2. Text resizing. Not a big deal for me now, but gigantically significant for older people like my dad, whose eyesight is not as sharp as it used to be. With Kindle, every book is instantly a large-type edition. As with audio, a special feature that once was available only for big sellers is now available for everything.

3. Newspapers! Daily subscriptions to the Irish Times, the Daily Telegraph, Spain’s ABC, and other great newspapers for a small fraction of what a print subscription would cost. And, for my dad, a large-print (via text resizing) version of the Denver Post and NY Times. I realize that all this is available for free on the web, but it’s nice to be able to read a newspaper while sitting in the garden, instead of sitting in the home office at the computer monitor.

4. Instant delivery. Back in the days when I wrote a bi-weekly column for the Rocky Mountain News, there were plenty of times when I was writing a column Tuesday night which was due Wednesday afternoon, and I discovered that the column would be improved by examining a book to verify a particular fact. Sometimes I was able to get what I needed via Amazon’s preview feature. But even better would have been instant delivery of the book itself. Only a tiny percentage of readers have an important need to have a book now, as opposed to 12 or 72 hours from now. For those readers who do need instant delivery, Kindle is fantastic.

As Wonder Woman might have said, the Amazonians are building the bridge to the future.

Alabama Agriculture Commissioner candidate Dale Peterson, who finished third in the primary, is back with a new ad endorsing one of the two candidates in the run-off. Were I an Alabama Republican, the ad would not make me more inclined to vote for John McMillan, whom Peterson endorses.

Compared to the first ad, the second ad has an important improvement: Peterson keeps his finger off the trigger until he is ready to shoot.

However, this modeling of responsible gun handling is far outweighed by Peterson actually shooting. High in the air, over the head of someone who is stealing a McMillan yard sign. A very poor decision and a terrible example, in my view, even if it were legal, which I doubt it is. Among the many reasons for my conclusion: the yard sign is presumably located at the edge of Peterson’s property, near a public road, so that other people can see it. Ergo, Peterson’s high shot in the air traveled across a public road, and there was a very significant chance that it entered someone else’s property. I realize that for the production of ad, Peterson might have staged the shot so that it only went on his own property, but the story of the ad is still built around modeling recklessly irresponsible gun use.

In addition, the second ad repeats the claim that Peterson served in the Marines “during Vietnam,” which is true only in a Clintonian sense. He did serve in the Marines, but never left the United States. The second ad also repeats the claim (which was presented more elaborately in the first ad) that another candidate has been taking illegal campaign contributions, a claim which is, at best, based on a hyper-aggressive reading of the Alabama campaign finance law. Details here, from Politifact.

Tag line for the ad: “Don’t you wish you had Dale Peterson watching your back?” My answer: No. Among the people I do not want behind me with a rifle is someone of questionable character (a propensity for half-truths) and a record of “showing off” with reckless gun handling.

Every Friday, I participate in a weekly public affairs roundtable program, Colorado Inside-Out, on Denver’s KBDI television, channel 12. Every summer we do a “time machine” episode. Last summer’s 1959 episode has been nominated for a regional Heartland Emmy award. I play Charleton Drizzelwhit-Koplowitz, book review editor of the Rocky Mountain News. In real life, my father Jerry Kopel worked at the Rocky Mountain News earlier in the decade (when his last name was Koplowitz), and among his jobs was book reviewing.

In Massachusetts, it is illegal to sell a “zoobow.” Mass. Gen. Laws Ann ch. 269, § 12. It is also illegal to sell a manrikigusari, nunchaku, shuriken, or klackers (the children’s toy popular in the early 1970s). The Massachusetts law does appear to have prevented the klackers violent crime epidemic which now plagues the other 49 states.

The minimum sentence for selling any of the above weapons in Massachusetts is two and half years in prison. So I want to be careful that when I am in Massachusetts, I do not violate this law by selling a zoobow. However, “zoobow” does not appear in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and I have been unable to find a definition on the web.

Accordingly, I would be grateful if a commenter could explain what a zoobow is.