-
OBABL Links & Resources
2010 February
Feb
12
It was a good day in snowy Mississippi for Carlos Moore and his client, Michael Archie. From the Greenwood Commonwealth:
A Leflore County jury decided Tuesday for Michael Archie.
It set the price of his ability to use the lower half of his body at $12 million.
The a-mount is to be paid by the owner and security guard at the Itta Bena club where Archie, an innocent bystander, was shot on Jan. 26, 2003.
The former basketball player at Greenwood High School and Mississippi Valley State University has been a paraplegic since.
Archie’s attorney, Carlos Moore of Grenada, said the family is pleased with the verdict but would give anything to have Archie back up and walking.
“That is simply priceless,” Moore said in a prepared statement released after the jury returned its verdict just before noon Tuesday.
Feb
10
Website Posts Naked NBA Player Pics; Lawyers Have Pissing Contest
Filed Under Defame • Leave a Comment
Earlier this month, TheDirty.com posted nude pictures of San Antonio Spurs Point Guard George Hill. The photos show Hill in a Spurs cap (and little else). Hill had apparently texted the pictures along with some revealing text messages to his jump off (he apologized to his girlfriend in an open letter to his fans) about a year ago.
In one text Hill confesses, “Im a fast c—.” Click here to fill in the blank and view Hill in all his glory. Well, almost–LARGE hearts and bubbles cover the money shots.
Thanks to Hill’s nifty product placement, the Spurs were soon drawn into the drama, instructing their lawyer to fire off a missive to TheDirty. Read the full letter via HuffPo:
This letter is formal notice of the Spurs’ objection to the display of photographs of Spurs’ player George Hill on thedirty.com’s website. More specifically, thedirety.com has caused or permitted photographs of Mr. Hill in an unclothed state to be posed on its website. Moreover, the website expressly references Mr. Hill’s status as a BA player for San Antonio and contains a hyperlink to a photograph of Mr. Hill in a Spurs’ uniform. The website also links to phtographs of Mr. Hill in various states of undress and phtographs that contain messages meant for a particular private recipient.
The content of this site is clearly aimed at prurient and sexually explicit interest that should not be associated with the Spurs…
That was all fine and good until TheDirty’s lawyer penned what amounts to a written bitch slap. It begins thusly:
TRADEMARK LAW DOES NOT APPLY TO CRITICISM OF CELEBRITIES MAKING FOOLS OF THEMSELVES
Then continues:
…you contend that trademark law and related torts prevent the publication of Mr. Hill’s name and/or image simply because www.TheDirty.com is a hudgely successful commercial site…
Since you have not cited any authority for this premise, I assume you could not find any. That’s not surprising since as Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, or Britney Spears could explain to you, this argument is totally without merit. Strangely, many people seem to share this mistaken belief that the Lanham Act prevents all uses of a trademark without the holder’s permission. Thankfully for The Dirty, TMZ, etc., this is not the law; it is an urban myth:
Finally, there is this:
I realize that NBA fans in the San Antonio are may not be so sophisticated, particular if any of them have opted to support Mr. Hill and the Spurs rather than the undeniably superior Dallas Mavericks (excluding Shawn Marion who hasn’t been the same since he left Phoenix).
Feb
9
Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. –From ‘The New Jim Crow’.
This from the cover of former Stanford Law School Associate Professor, Michelle Alexander’s new book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. To it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination–employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service–are suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America. we have merely redesigned it.
RestoreFairness has a more in depth review of the book. The organization is working to restore due process and fairness to our immigration system.
Feb
9
The American Bar Association met in Orlando, FL for its 2010 Midyear Meeting and it was all about diversity.
The ABA formally issued its “Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps” Report. According to the ABA Diversity Commission:
Diversity approaches, according to the study, need to be inclusive, not pigeon-holing lawyers into affinity groups by discrete racial and ethnic categories, gender, sexual orientation or disability. At the same time, barriers may differ by practice setting, meaning the strategies to increase diversity cannot be one-size-fits-all, the study suggests.
It also asserted four rationales for diversity:
- Lawyers and judges have a unique responsibility for sustaining democracy
- The profession must be diverse to thrive in a global and domestically inclusive business environment
- Diversity is critical if the profession wishes to maintain a societal leadership role
- Changing demographics in society compel the profession to change its own demographics
The Midyear Meeting also held an interesting panel, Diversity on the Bench: Is the “Wise Latina” a Myth? Two studies suggest it may not be.
In Myth of The Color-Blind Judge: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Harassment Cases, Pat Chew and Robert Kelley:
African American judges rule differently than White judges, even when one takes into account their political affiliation or certain characteristics of the case. Our findings further suggest that judges of all races are attentive to the relevant facts of the cases but may reach different conclusions depending on their races. When race, political affiliation, and certain case characteristics are all considered simultaneously, the role that race plays loses some statistical significance (as one might expect given the increasing number of variables).
While we cannot predict how an individual judge might act, our empirical analysis suggests that African American judges as a group and White judges as a group perceive racial harassment differently. These findings counter the traditional myth that the race of a judge would not make a difference—a myth premised on a presumption of a formalistic and objective decision-making process.
In “Female Judges Matter: Gender and Collegial Decisionmaking in the Federal Appellate Courts” Jennifer Peresie writes:
The data also indicate that an indirect effect existed: Male judges were more likely to find for plaintiffs when at least one female judge was on the panel.81 Because the regressions controlled for ideology, the results indicate that regardless of the ideology of the male judge, sitting on a panel with a female judge increased the likelihood that he found for the plaintiff. As Figure 2 illustrates, adding a female judge to the panel more than doubled the probability that a male judge ruled for the plaintiff in sexual harassment cases (increasing the probability from 16% to 35%) and nearly tripled this probability in sex discrimination cases (increasing it from 11% to 30%). Further, conservative male judges were affected as much as liberal male judges were by the presence of a female judge.
The meeting also highlighted its Judicial Clerkship Program with this neat video:
For more information, see the ABA’s Center For Racial & Ethnic Diversity webpage.
Feb
1
From The ABAJournal:
A former staff attorney of Covington & Burling can proceed with her federal discrimination claim over the law firm’s policy of assigning work, based on a disparate impact theory.
However, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton found that Yolanda Young had waited too long to bring a similar claim that the firm’s refusal to promote her to an associate position also was discriminatory, reports the Blog of Legal Times.
Walton OK’d the work-assignment claim because it involves a recurring issue that is revisited at annual reviews each year, the law blog explains. Young argues that the firm’s policies have a disparate impact because, she alleges, the staff attorney group is disproportionately black.
Says Yolanda Young’s attorney:
“My client is pleased to be able to pursue the disparate impact claim because it is not every day that a court allows that kind of claim to move forward,” attorney Latif Doman, who is representing Young, tells the BLT. “As we move forward with discovery, it will be clear that African-American staff attorneys are put through a similar system as white associates but are not being judged in the same manner.”
