Blawg Review #203

ON DRUNKENNESS OH Drunk­en­ness thou poi­son of soci­ety what a hydra headed mon­ster art thou!

Like the pesti­lence thou walk­est among the chil­dren of men and ruin fol­lows with fatal pre­ci­sion in the tracks of thy footsteps.

Home sweet home what dost thou con­vert it to? The smile of dear and vir­tu­ous woman — the prat­tle of child­hood — the clasp­ing caress of art­less infancy: those touch­ing domes­tic delights that come over the untainted mind like the first rays of the morn­ing form thy dead­liest instru­ments of vengeance, they fall on the hearts of thy vic­tims like the burn­ing rain that fell on Sodom! Thou mak­est the fam­ily hearth gloomy and des­o­late: the abode of peace and cheer­ful­ness thou turnest into a house of mourn­ing, where the poor mother in secret “weeps for her­self, and for her children.”

Insa­tiable fiend! virtue, hap­pi­ness, fame and health are sac­ri­ficed upon thy bru­tal altar: the wel­fare of all the heart yearns over is given up for thee: the ten­der links that bind hus­band to wife, par­ent to child, friend to friend, thou burstest asun­der. The lin­ea­ments traced by a Divine hand after a divine pat­tern thou blottest out and pre­sen­test to our view instead the hideous like­ness of a beast!

Mother of crime! what are thy rewards? Alas! mis­ery and shame, beg­gary and dis­ease, blasted hopes and a ruined fam­ily, com­pose the ingre­di­ents of that mor­tal cup which thy besot­ted fol­low­ers drink to their destruction.

George Pear­son 1832

Wel­come,

one and all,

to the drunken orgy of Blawg Review #203.

Beg no leave to enter this con­vivi­al­ity of sex drugs and mad­ness. Leave your pan­taloons with your inhi­bi­tions by the door: pull up a chair, sit ye down and read on.

“Wel­come, Eng­lish­men! My name is Samoset. My lands are ver­dant broad and deep;

my daugh­ters are comely and fertile;

we are trust­ing, friendly and lightly armed.

Do you have any blan­kets to spare?”

Today is the first day of the fes­ti­val of Bac­cha­na­lia: con­ducted in hon­our of the Roman/Grecian god Bac­chus: known to the ancient Greeks as Diony­sus. He strode the lands of the ancient world doing rou­tine wickedly ironic god stuff: Diony­sus bestowed upon King Midas the power he had requested to turn all that he touched into gold; includ­ing the food he wanted to eat.

But Diony­sus is also the god of wine: that elixir of life. Truly then, the great­est god of all: when we are happy wine adds colour to our joy; when we are sad it mit­i­gates the mis­ery; we drink to cel­e­brate; we drink to com­mis­er­ate. It is no mere coin­ci­dence that lawyers are among the most avid users of wine whether as con­sumers or investors. But not, it seems, as blawgers.

Rather per­plex­ingly Geeklawyer was unable to find any alco­hol blawgs. Any. Any­where. Non-lawyer alco­hol blogs yes. Alco­hol blawgs, no. This is, to be frank, pro­foundly dis­ap­point­ing and you should all be jolly well ashamed of your­selves. In the teeth of this reces­sion­ary gale per­haps the hedo­nism of alco­hol is, like Geeklawyer’s gold plated dia­mond encrusted Bent­ley, some­thing to be frowned on. Per­haps it is the work cul­ture? if one is an inden­tured & servile asso­ciate, cowed under the hand of a worka­holic fun vam­pire like Dan Hull of WAC? infamy, then maybe that is jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Whatever.

Oh sure, lawyers talk about wine a lot. Vlawg tells us, admit­tedly in an old post­ing, that Boalt Law school has a Wine Law course. In between tire­some lec­tures on reg­u­la­tory law, intel­lec­tual prop­erty and inter­na­tional trade law the lucky stu­dents get to sup Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and Mus­cat Canelli. Appar­ently one gets extra cred­its for a solid tech­ni­colour chun­der after study­ing to hard.

Like­wise Pro­fes­sor Bain­bridge, clearly an oenophile, offers com­mend­able wine sug­ges­tions for any Thanks­giv­ing cel­e­bra­tion. The sug­ges­tions, en passent, work equally well for a Christ­mas lunch (which, as all men of refine­ment know well is the only proper time of year for serv­ing turkey). But these are all sober, if you will for­give the unfor­giv­able pun, reflec­tions on the aes­thetic aspect of the grape. We serve mam­mon, not the girly Chris­t­ian God. Can we com­bine alco­hol and the bill­able hour? To put it another way: is there money to be made from weak­nesses and frail­ties of man?

Yes! There is money in C₂H₅OH

Cer­tainly IP lawyers like you hum­ble scribe have an ongo­ing inter­est in the IP aspects of booze: the eter­nal Anheuser-Busch/Budvar dis­putes have made the 100 Year War look like a momen­tary spat and spawned an entire lit­i­ga­tion sub-industry. The UK’s pre­mier IP blawg IPKit­ten (pro­fes­sor Phillips and Simon Myer­son QC will justly rip Geeklawyer a new one for using the ‘Blawg’ neoligism)  reports on the lat­est fire­fight: a geo­graphic indi­ca­tor squab­ble. Geeklawyer pre­dicts the most morally attrac­tive par­tic­i­pant will win — the lawyers. As with the great major­ity of our clients merit has no part in the result: Bud­weiser is what you even­tu­ally get if you make a don­key drink Coors.

Absolvi­tor tells of the tra­vails of the Buck­fast Tonic Wine com­pany fight­ing the biased under-age drink­ing pre­ven­tion regimes of Glas­gow City Coun­cil in Scot­land. Fast-Buck is the cheap strong wine of choice for teen and pre-teen trainee binge drinkers. Clearly, GCC sees the wine pro­ducer as pro­duc­ing train­ing wheels for alco­holics and is act­ing dis­grace­fully in try­ing to stop it. Here’s to you Fast­Buck: God speed you in your right­eous  fight.

DUI lawyers have much to thank booze for. If there is any con­so­la­tion for the rel­a­tives of a bus queue, mown down like ripe wheat, it is the knowl­edge that a DUI lawyer’s fam­ily gets to eat for another day, the sil­ver lin­ing if you will. Min­nesota DWI tells Geeklawyer that the State delib­er­ately refused to upgrade breath-test machines to cor­rect an error that prob­a­bly caused false con­vic­tions: busted!

DUI blog reveal the aston­ish­ing story of Col­orado leg­is­la­tors grant­ing them­selves exemp­tion from arrest for drunk dri­ving. Geeklawyer was shocked to dis­cover that US politi­cians also give them­selves pref­er­en­tial treatment.

Not every­one dri­ves while drunk: some walk. As Selchick makes clear, in Mass­a­chu­setts those WUI face the infa­mous drunk tank. On the plus side, drunk walk­ers have a much harder time wip­ing out bus queues: not even the mor­bidly obese ones jog­ging to the next McDon­alds restau­rant really really fast.

His­tory

Tea, the foul drink of old maids, is mis­tak­enly cred­ited by some with being the spark for the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion; that sad­dest self-inflicted injury in Amer­i­can his­tory. The truth is that Bac­chus was the true source. In Eng­land in the 18th Cen­tury opu­lently rich dis­en­chanted licen­tious youth would pass their gilded time in clubs devoted to Bac­cha­na­lian orgies of sex, wine, mock­ery of chris­tian­ity, and devil-may-care card games of no-limit Cribbage.

The very finest of these clubs, or the very worst if your moral plumbline is inverted, was the Hell­fire club. Its mem­bers com­prised the very cream of the finest Empire the world has ever known, includ­ing the inven­tor of the Sand­wich and one John Wilkes-Booth — arch expo­nent of the fine Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of con­cise polit­i­cal crit­i­cism: assassination.

More rel­e­vantly to this Blawg Review theme: a key mem­ber of the Hell­fire club was a treach­er­ous and infa­mous rogue, inciter of ter­ror­ism, found­ing father of the United States and dis­cov­erer of the best ever rea­son not to fly kites in a storm: Ben­jamin Franklin. The meet­ings Franklin attended involved the stan­dard fare for any man insane enough to wish to throw off the silken shack­les of free­dom granted by the benign sov­er­eignty of Eng­land and King George III: drunk­en­ness, homo­sex­u­al­ity and Satan wor­ship. Franklin has been widely con­demned by most rep­utable US his­to­ri­ans as infect­ing the other Founders Fathers with his rebel­lious drug, per­ver­sion and alco­hol fueled Repub­li­can mad­ness. It is spec­u­lated that it was at these wild fre­netic orgies he osmot­i­cally absorbed his resent­ment of roy­alty from the other sybarites. The rest was tear stained his­tory. With­out the Hell­fire club and Bac­chus the US today would be much like Canada. Only much much ruder and still bent on rul­ing the world. But at least they’d be able to spell ‘colour’ cor­rectly.

For all his flaws Benny did sup­port the US Con­sti­tu­tion he influ­enced. So what would he say? is there a con­sti­tu­tional right to con­duct orgies in one’s own home? Lawyer Brain Cuban stepped into the issue when it recently arose in Dun­canville Texas. Odd really, one imag­ines Tex­ans spend­ing all their time hang­ing men­tally hand­i­capped kids, shoot­ing ter­ri­fied flee­ing intrud­ers in the back and then going to church to get guid­ance on for­give­ness and love. Do they really have time for orgies as well? Is any­one enti­tled to that much fun?

As a nation of binge drinkers and piss artists the one sub­ject, other than the weather, that can cause us Limeys to get shouty is the gov­ern­ment screw­ing with alco­hol tax. Recent sug­ges­tions by the UK gov­ern­ment that legalised price-fixing was needed to curb binge-drinking have been coolly received. The aim is to keep booze out of the hands of those who most need its anaes­thetic effects: Solicitor-Inadequates, the poor & the worth­less. Some lib­er­tar­ian legal com­men­ta­tors have a less rigid take.

Sex

Now, booze is well and good but the Bac­cha­na­lia is also as much about sex & orgies. Since this is a fam­ily Blawg Review edi­tor Mr Ed has very sternly said that Geeklawyer may not use the per­fectly inde­cent Anglo-Saxon word ‘Fuck’. Appar­ently if this hap­pens the FCC will fine him for incit­ing the trans­mis­sion of obscene elec­trons. He did, nonethe­less, feel that the UK idiom ‘shag­ging’ was a run­ner since the FCC would con­fuse it with a dance invented for a movie by the soon to be dead can­cer hero Patrick Swayzee.

Regret­tably there­fore Geeklawyer can do no more than hint at the more seemly and fam­ily friendly aspects of Bac­cha­na­lian orgies, and not dish the dirty stuff you were all hop­ing for.

Ani­mal Blawg asks the ques­tion that is, one sus­pects, on every orgyist’s lips, why can’t we legally shag ani­mals? In Florida it seems one can. A date you can screw and then eat it is a sad rar­ity these days. Well, except in Ger­many but they are all sick and depraved.

One of the endear­ing fea­tures of the Roman Bac­cha­na­lian orgy was the accep­tance of gay sex: on occa­sions, men refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in bot­tom action were allegedly hauled off and killed. The soci­o­log­i­cal and legal under­pin­nings for this proactive-contra-homophobia have been addressed in an essay on Queer Legal The­ory by Adam Romero over at, pre­dictably, the turgid almost unpar­o­dyable Fem­i­nist Law Pro­fes­sors blawg where Adam utters pearls such as:

“Some fem­i­nist meth­ods include ask­ing the gen­der ques­tion, consciousness-raising, and con­tex­tu­al­ized rea­son­ing. Queer method­ol­ogy reflects a con­trary posi­tion­al­ity vis-à-vis the nor­ma­tive or dom­i­nant. If fem­i­nist and queer are best under­stood as descrip­tions of method, then we can­not know defin­i­tively what fem­i­nist legal the­ory and queer legal the­ory, as such, sub­stan­tively are or do.”

Jesus h Christ Adam, do you ever get laid, you bell-end?

Geeklawyer hes­i­tates to pro­vide a link to this crap in case you fol­low it, but if you must then here it is. If by a mir­a­cle you do man­age to endure this essay please drop a com­ment off below telling Geeklawyer if Joey did get a date with Cindy. Tenure for wim­min’ has a lot to answer for.

Mind you, some gay friendly lawyers have proper equal­ity issues to deal with instead of just wank­ing on: Stephen Page at Aus­tralian Gay and Les­bian Law blog dis­cussed the tricky issue of who is the par­ent in a les­bian insem­i­na­tion case.

Loony Chris­tians are not bend­ing over back­wards to accom­mo­date Obama’s anti-bigotry leg­is­la­tion: they like their homo­pho­bia just the way it is, thank you muchly.

Over at Pink Tape deli­cious hot girly Bar­ris­ter Lucy Reed (@lucindee) doc­u­ments the taboo topic of domes­tic vio­lence against men.

Rock and Roll

All satanic orgies need a great beat. Satanic Hip-Hop is just the thing:

UK read­ers should enjoy this link while they can: the Mafia organ­i­sa­tion, that func­tions as a music debt col­lect­ing soci­ety, has decided to end pre­mium music on Youtube by demand­ing much higher per­for­mance licens­ing fees. Google says that these new raised fees will cause it to lose too much money, while the PRS scum­bags says they are fair charges; even with­out being privy to the nego­ti­a­tions Geeklawyer knows whose ver­sion he prefers. The heart twitch­ing arrhyth­mi­cally at the core of this vex­ing prob­lem of music on the Inter­net is the bro­ken content-creators busi­ness model: run over by the dig­i­tal age and its easy fast Inter­net connections.

Geeklawyer is an IT/IP bar­ris­ter with an inter­est in civil lib­er­ties, in both their dig­i­tal and cor­po­real forms.

In the offline world there is out­rage at UK police tar­get­ing jour­nal­ists for sur­veil­lance. Jour­nal­ist Jason Parkin­son wor­ries about the effect of the Exec­u­tive harass­ing the Fourth Estate. As usual the UK Gov­ern­ment passes repres­sive leg­is­la­tion claim­ing the police wanted it in order to cope with crime: it’s a lie (leav­ing aside the argu­ment about just giv­ing the filth what they want all the time). Here’s a ten­ta­tive expla­na­tion Jason: in the UK we have no writ­ten con­sti­tu­tion and a judi­ciary intim­i­dated by the Exec­u­tive who have sub­verted par­lia­men­tary over­sight and con­trol. Think Zim­babwe, but with rain. Other than that, every­thing is sod­ding peachy in the Mother of Democracies.

And while we are talk­ing of pub­lish­ing, @macsithigh points out, via Twit­ter, that the UK sta­tus as forum-of-choice for defama­tion lit­i­ga­tion is finally start­ing to attract some neg­a­tive polit­i­cal atten­tion. How pre­dictable that  despite us com­plain­ing for years, it isn’t until US politi­cians moan that UK politi­cians start to take an inter­est. The one area where the tra­di­tional obse­quious grov­el­ling by UK politi­cians to US ones may give us Brits a ben­e­fit, for a change, rather than dam­ag­ing our civil lib­er­ties. Not all the best defama­tion lit­i­ga­tion takes place in the UK: in the US the web­site Skanks in NYC and Google are being sued by age­ing skanky model Liskula Cohen for call­ing her an aging skank. Geeklawyer is think­ing of a defense along the lines of, ooooh, say, Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.

It’s a big bad world

The big IT rights rage in much of Europe is the MPAA & RIAA attempt, via proxy organ­i­sa­tions, to coerce ISPs into fil­ter­ing con­tent at their behest. On their ter­rific blog UK IP/IT solic­i­tors Azright’s dis­cuss the appar­ent climb down by the UK gov­ern­ment on a pro­posed “three strikes & your off the Inter­net” scheme under which copy­right infringers would be denied the use of the Inter­net after warn­ings. In Ire­land TJ McIn­tyre makes the case against this pol­icy, in the face of the craven and dis­grace­ful capit­u­la­tion of national ISP Eir­comm to Hol­ly­wood: he makes the point that Geeklawyer has also often made that in the dig­i­tal era Inter­net access is a fun­da­men­tal civic util­ity; one does not cut off a family’s water sup­ply because the kids threw a few water-bombs at next door’s cat.

The French have also been up in arms about a sim­i­lar pro­posal ema­nat­ing from their empty headed Pres­i­dent Sar­dozy at the behest of his equally empty headed hooker clothes horse wife Carla Bruni.

On the major crim­i­nal front some alumni of the Hell­fire club may not be at the AGM’s for a while. Accord­ing to the ADR Prf Blog exem­plar demo­c­rat Omar Has­san al-Bashir of Sudan, benign pro­tec­tor of Dar­fur, has been indicted by the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court.

Hell­fire club favourite, the love­able mis­un­der­stood rogue, Bernie Mad­off gave an aston­ish­ingly hand­some endow­ment to the Hell­fire club a cou­ple of months ago and has paid his subs to the year 3010: we are think­ing of buy­ing Har­vard and Prince­ton uni­ver­si­ties as week­end retreats for the mem­bers. Of course we now know how he afforded it. The poor chap has had to plead guilty, but at least he can afford decent lawyers. A total genius; sem­per fidelis old buddy.

Regret­tably, and to our eter­nal col­lec­tive shame, not every­one in the pro­fes­sion knows how to do the right thing: Robert Ambrogi at the Legal Blog Watch tells us how Keith Langston donated a kid­ney to save the life of arch-rival lit­i­ga­tor Scott Skel­ton. What would the pub­lic think of us if we all behaved in this dis­grace­ful fashion?

Because I’m a geek 1: Social Media & related law

Social media con­tin­ues its drunken ram­page through con­ven­tional media. Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism School says “Fuck New Media” (hat tip to @ColinSamuels via Twit­ter); social media says “Hey Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism School! get­ting out of the damned road, there’s a fast mov­ing truck behind you, ya fuck­ing bozo.”

Reporter cum crime blog­ger Mur­ray Waas reports on crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions into Dick Cheney’s out­ing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. This all con­firms Geeklawyer’s opin­ion that pol­i­tics draws bad men to its bosom and makes them unspeak­able. Waas was cel­e­brated as get­ting press cre­den­tials along­side con­ven­tional media.

But there is a new boy in town: Twit­ter. @geeklawyer is, let us not mince words here, com­pletely damned obsessed. Please do fol­low @geeklawyer, but don’t expect high­brow legal tweets — at all:  it is drunken fool­ish­ness mostly. Twit­ter is the micro-blogging/messaging sys­tem with a mes­sage size lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. Mes­sages (“Tweets”) are broad­cast to a Twit­ter­ers ‘fol­low­ers’ i.e. sub­scribers. Twit­ter is read by sub­scribers over smart­phones or a com­puter client pro­gram or at the Twit­ter web page. UK Legal librar­ian Lo-fi (aka the hilar­i­ous & bizarre @geeklawyer side­kick @infobunny) col­lates a list of use­ful Twit­ter apps.

Tweets are often triv­ial and irrel­e­vant giv­ing no more than out­lines of someone’s day or cur­rent dis­po­si­tion. Those who, like David Giacalone, don’t get it ask the eter­nal skep­tics ques­tion: “Why do I give a fly­ing fuck that you are eat­ing your break­fast?” The answer is that unless you are a pal you prob­a­bly don’t; you might, how­ever, be inter­ested in the win Geeklawyer got five min­utes ago in the House of Lords that hasn’t been reported by con­ven­tional media yet; you might be inter­ested in the peo­ple Twit­ter­ing “Any­one know a good IP lawyer in Lon­don?”. You might be inter­ested in the ongo­ing case Kansas dis­trict Court judge Thomas Marten allowed to be Twit­tered. Of course Twit­ter, with Face­book Linkedin Myspace Friend­Feud et al, adds to infor­ma­tion over­load, as Turke­witz, who doesn’t not get it, points out.

For all the triv­i­al­ity Twit­ter has pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion poten­tial. LawyerKM exam­ines the rel­a­tive util­ity of Twit­ter ver­sus Face­book for net­work­ing. Look at Kevin O’Keefe’s fab­u­lous Lex­tweet Tweet ser­vice for lawyers & see the net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties being exploited; note his response to Turkewitz’s points supra. Remem­ber how web­sites and blogs were ini­tially treated by law firms? Recall the dis­dain of the man­ag­ing part­ners who looked at you like you were an IQ chal­lenged rock when you sug­gested cor­po­rate email and a firm web­site? Fancy your firm not hav­ing a web­site nowa­days? So, still com­fort­able not doing social media?

For each up side to social media there is a down. Con­cur­ring Opin­ions demon­strates con­vinc­ing evi­dence  that it is pri­mar­ily women who are the vic­tims of unpro­voked attacks in social media envi­ron­ments. Frankly, if rather than frit­ter­ing their time on the Intar­web they stayed in the kitchen cook­ing for their hus­bands this wouldn’t be an issue: self-inflicted, no sym­pa­thy. And Micheal Scut­ter tells Geeklawyer that he has dis­cov­ered a word new to us both. “Dooce: To be fired from one’s employ­ment for con­duct while blog­ging. Verb.” The com­pany in ques­tion, Ivell Mar­ket­ing and Logis­tics Ltd of Clac­ton UK, even boasts of their com­mit­ment to employee rights — but only in client com­pa­nies of course. Wel­come to the neg­a­tive Google hit Ivell, you Dooce-bags, have some Google Sluice.

In the Peo­ples Repub­lic of Great Britain it seems that laugh­ing while dri­ving is grounds for get­ting a pull from the Filth. DUI lawyers and com­edy expert wit­nesses are gear­ing up for new rev­enue oppor­tu­ni­ties: “Your hon­our: the Defen­dant admits there were open Monty Python tapes in the car but at the time of arrest he was only lis­ten­ing to Benny Hill: barely amus­ing; clearly the charge of DWL is unsus­tain­able. We move to dis­miss.”

Geeklawyer is a well known abuser of online anonymity and so has a vested and par­tial inter­est in remain­ing unknown. The Mass­a­chu­setts Court of Appeals’ recent deci­sion in the Inde­pen­dent News­pa­pers, Inc. v. Brodie case on anonymity out­lines a mod­er­ate stan­dard of proof needed to act against anony­mous forum com­men­ta­tors. The issue has also been recently addressed in the UK under the Nor­wich Phar­ma­cal doc­trine in Sheffield Wednes­day v Neil Har­g­reaves where pri­vacy expec­ta­tions rather than free speech was the pol­icy point con­sid­ered most promi­nently, and the bur­den on the claimant^* was the rather vague one of a “need”. (^*claimant: laugh­able UK legal Newspeak for the once per­fectly ser­vice­able word ‘Plain­tiff’ — thank you Tony fuck­wit Blair).

Jay Shep­herd, com­ment­ing on the rise of Twit­ter gen­er­ally, and in work­places par­tic­u­larly, notes that “As often hap­pens when employ­ees start doing some­thing new, com­pa­nies soon want their lawyers or HR peo­ple to cre­ate poli­cies to restrict it.” He obliges, with a com­mon­sense Twit­ter pol­icy that is just 140 char­ac­ters long and suit­able for tweeting.

The sub­mit­ter said of his sub­mis­sion “Geeklawyer, If this judge ever turns his sights on you, we’ll never see or hear from you again”. It wasn’t made clear whether he thought that was good or bad. He may have had a point: John Meis­erow reports that in one Louisiana court­room seven “fuck you’s” directed to the judge means six months (after a reduc­tion on appeal from the orig­i­nal three-and-a-half years). In Geeklawyer’s advo­cacy style such mild lan­guage would be rank flir­ta­tion with the judge.

Mis­cel­lanea

Roger Thon at Michi­gan Auto Lawyers blog sends Geeklawyer a post about the stu­pid­ity of pun­ters. Thank bug­gery Geeklawyer isn’t a Bumps and Knocks lawyer: if his punter set­tled because the insurer gave him some­thing shiny four hours after the crash, but then wanted to know if he could still col­lect his Big Ass Set­tle­ment Cheque, he’d prob­a­bly run him over himself.

And Micheal Scut­ter, again, gets jus­ti­fi­ably upset about the out­ra­geous, and unlaw­ful, recently dis­cov­ered data­base run by the con­struc­tion indus­try to black­list union mem­bers. He makes the argu­ment that this is worse than the plethora of CCTV cam­eras in the UK. Geeklawyer dis­agrees with that but thinks the dis­grace­ful data­base oper­a­tors and sub­scribers deserve to have their bol­locks cut off. That’s ADR the Geeklawyer way (busi­ness method patent pend­ing), not the Vic­to­ria Pyn­chon ‘Tell the Story’ style.

The down­right frickin’ weird or pernickity

Con­tract drafted in blood not enforce­able.

As a physi­cist Geeklawyer was hooked on the pro­found ques­tion lying under Ken Adam’s post on the seman­tics of time in con­trac­tual draft­ing: what is Time? His con­tentions are, Geeklawyer sub­mits, wrong but the topic is sci­en­tif­i­cally and legally interesting.

Because I’m a geek 2: Boys toys & Boys Toys law

Super savvy IP and tech lawyer Denise M. How­ell rubs Geeklawyer’s nose in her spiffy new Kin­dle 2. The abil­ity to carry about 1.5 Gigs of Pdfs in a usable anno­tat­able eBook reader has him sali­vat­ing and putting down his order. Or rather, intend­ing to as soon as Ama­zon decide they’ll be gra­cious enough to sell it out­side the Evil Empire (is it still Evil now GW’s sorry ass is gone?).

Denise is not alone: Law21 views the Kin­dle in a sim­i­lar vein and dis­cusses its role in the appar­ent demise of printed law jour­nals. Infor­ma­tion Over­load, a UK Legal Librar­ian at Magic Cir­cle firm Clif­ford Chance, also pre­dicts the end of paper texts thanks to Kindle-like devices.

Nicholas Weston at the, untrade­mark­able, Aus­tralian Trade Marks Law Blog com­ments on a puz­zling case where tech­nol­ogy con­ver­gence defeated an appli­ca­tion for revo­ca­tion of a mark on the grounds of non-use by the Pio­neer audio com­pany. As he rightly says, every­thing nowa­days has a com­puter in it or is inter­faced with it, so this shouldn’t admit a defense.

The end of the orgy.

The past legal boom years have been a wild party for us all. But, like this Blawg Review, all par­ties end and the wilder they are the larger the hangover.

Much of the blaw­go­v­erse seems to be dis­cussing how to cope with the effects of the reces­sion. Geot­ru­pes offers some well made points:

“This is not the first, and won’t be the last, reces­sion … I am con­fi­dent “boom and bust” will be around for quite some while to come.”
“It is evi­dent … that bud­gets are being cut dras­ti­cally. I won­der though just how many law firms are accom­pa­ny­ing those bud­get reviews with look­ing at just how they can:

* … pro­vide “bet­ter value, bet­ter ser­vice”;
* … meet their client’s expec­ta­tions that their key ser­vice providers main­tain a “very com­pet­i­tive struc­ture”; and
* at the same time use this cur­rent oppor­tu­nity to make the busi­ness more powerful.”

Over in NYC Scott Green­field notes the blood­let­ting at Biglaw and offers croc­o­dile tears for the young lawyers; he views them as pre­cious young things long over­due a long cool glass of Real­ity with Angos­tura Bit­ter­ness. How­ever he coun­sels cur­rent solos against schaden­freude as these new, reluc­tant, solos will soon be eat­ing their lunch. Susan Cartier Liebels Solo Prac­tice Uni­ver­sity has opened for busi­ness to help them get knives and forks.

Cathy Gel­lis bemoans atti­tudes to con­tract lawyers and won­ders if in these bad times Biglaw might not ben­e­fit from exam­in­ing the con­tin­gency employee model used by the IT indus­try so successfully.

One David Souter Esq would, it seems, wish to be among the unemployed.

For the losers who really can’t hack it maybe now is the time to con­sider that career in origami fold­ing or san­i­ta­tion ser­vices that they always dreamt about. Ide­alawg points, with­out adding any value by way of com­men­tary, to a guide to com­plet­ing one’s loser status.

Given the sorry state of the Fam­ily Law Bar in the UK Lucy Reed engages in some soul search­ing about her qual­i­ties in look­ing at career options. She felt a judge or a taxi dri­ver was her best option. Hav­ing seen pic­tures of Lucy Geeklawyer would also have sug­gested porn star.

But not every­one is so polite as New York­ers like Scott Green­field: Brian Tan­nebaum, the lawyer with a rainy dis­po­si­tion from the Sun­shine State, just says “Under­stand that you have spent years doing noth­ing of any impor­tance”; Ouch, Brian, these are human beings with feel­ings; sure, kick­ing them when they’re down and already in pain is fun, but does it really make you feel better?

And who else than Holden Oliver of Wac? to pour saline into the wounds of the Biglaw slack­oisee? (why, WAC?‘s own Dan Hell of course).

In the UK there is a ven­er­a­ble (now vul­ner­a­ble) and well regarded tra­di­tion of pub­lic finance of some classes of lit­i­ga­tion: crim­i­nal defen­dants get Legal Aid, which is con­cep­tu­ally sim­i­lar to the US pub­lic defender sys­tem. The main dif­fer­ence is that it has bet­ter financed lawyers who don’t have a bazil­lion clients each with only 5 min­utes to pre­pare a defence in a cap­i­tal case. Fam­ily law is another area financed by the state, albeit inad­e­quately. Of course this is neo-socialism and so Neo-Labour are try­ing hard to kill it by slices as Lucy Reed (sigh) dis­cusses.

For those of you look­ing to bilk your clients out of as much as pos­si­ble in these straight­ened times Matthew Homann has hit on a counter-intuitive billing scam scheme. Geeklawyer is not sure that the tech­nique bears wide appli­ca­tion but the idea of pre­tend­ing to be altru­is­tic hon­est and open, while know­ing that pun­ters will feel morally obliged to over­pay is deeply cyn­i­cal and manip­u­la­tive. Top marks Mat, Geeklawyer salutes you.

And, with that, Geeklawyer’s blawging ardour is fully spent. He has emit­ted into the blaw­gos­phere and now relapses into post-literary con­tent­ment.

Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it — it’s the
only way. So as not to feel the hor­ri­ble bur­den of time that breaks
your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be con­tin­u­ally
drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.

And if some­times, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of
a ditch, in the mourn­ful soli­tude of your room, you wake again,
drunk­en­ness already dimin­ish­ing or gone, ask the wind, the wave,
the star, the bird, the clock, every­thing that is fly­ing, every­thing
that is groan­ing, every­thing that is rolling, every­thing that is
singing, every­thing that is speaking…ask what time it is and
wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:“It is time to be
drunk!”

So as not to be the mar­tyred slaves of time, be drunk, be
con­tin­u­ally drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.
Charles Baude­laire

Today is March the 16th. Today, Geeklawyer prefers Baude­laire to Pear­son. Today Geeklawyer will Quaff a bot­tle of Moniak Mead to hon­our Bacchus.

Blawg Review has infor­ma­tion about next week’s host, and instruc­tions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcom­ing issues.