By Marc J. Randazza It's an all-too-common scenario: A blogger criticizes someone online, and then gets sued for his statements. But two things make this case unique: First, the plaintiff sued because of the blogger's characterizations of him shooting two dogs at close range; second, the defendant blogger was in...
by Tatiana von Tauber Supermodel Naomi Campbell is insulted at being compared to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Bliss chocolate as in this ad. She’s considering legal action at its racist tone. If Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Bliss were white chocolate and compared to a white supermodel, I wonder if racism would come into the...
For those of you who are not lawyers, you can play too. A plaintiff files a defamation lawsuit. The plaintiff lives in California. The defendant lives in California too -- in fact, just a few miles from the plaintiff. Where do you file the suit? A) California B) ...
The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Snyder v. Phelps, otherwise known as the "God Hates Fags" case. To understand this case, you must unplug your emotional reaction to the speech that brought about the case in the first place. The fact is, nobody likes the Westboro...
By Marc J. Randazza Washington Redskins owner, Dan Snyder, seems to have awfully thin skin for a guy who owns a sports team named after a racial insult. Snyder filed a frivolous defamation suit against the Washington City Paper ("WCP") based upon an article "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to...
Systemgraph, an Apple-authorized service company in Greece, has sued one of its customers for complaining. Natch, there's a twitter tag devoted to mocking the company....
by Jason Fischer For anyone who has been following the story of Arthur Allan Wolk, Esquire, it will come as no surprise that Attorney Wolk's opposition to Amici, Eugene Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Edward Whelen, and Marc Randazza, reads like a paranoid diatribe. It seems that a massive blogger conspiracy, with ties...
Popehat has a bad-ass post on an "incident" at Syracuse University School of Law. The short version is this: Syracuse Law student Len Audaer published a blog satirizing his class, the administration, and public figures. From Popehat's story. Somebody complained. Syracuse decided to appoint a “prosecutor”...
Public Citizen reports: In a ruling this week, a Massachusetts trial judge upheld the free speech rights of a documentary filmmaking company against an effort by a Massachusetts software company to use trademark litigation to punish the filmmakers for the portrayal of one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen square...
By their very nature, suicide notes are controversial documents. Nobody likes to think or talk about them, despite accompanying many - probably most - of the suicides that occur in America. There were 34,598 reported suicide deaths in 2007 alone, making it the fourth leading cause of death for adults...
