I love the internet.

Unlike many of you, I remember days when home internet access was limited to a few superbrains and no one else.  (A middle school friend's dad had it.  He designed the electrical systems on the ALVIN submersible, as well as a lot of stuff he refused to talk about even to his son.)

And only the internet could have made possible what I read this morning: supremely erudite Cato Institute scholar Walter Olson, commenting on Lindsay Lohan's Twitter feed.  Though the two seem to be ideological twins, Olson is critical of Lohan's research methodology on federal sentencing policy.

In the 1970s you had to read underground magazines, circulated only in certain Chicago book and record stores, to enjoy this sort of thing.  Today it's available to everyone.

By now news has broken that the Obama administration hired a New York personal injury lawyer by the name of Eric Turkewitz as the first "White House law blogger."  Yes, the White House will soon have another weblog.

Turkewitz is perhaps best known to the world as the lawyer who sued a Staten Island liquor store on behalf of an alleged robber, who slipped on an icy sidewalk trying to flee the scene of his crime.  He maintains a plaintiffs' personal injury and medical malpractice law firm in Manhattan.  He's quite well known on the web for the "New York Personal Injury Attorney Blog," where Turkewitz spouts off his opinions on everything from oral sex to cross examining doctors for profit.

I've encountered Turkewitz on the web in the past, and even linked to him.  He's a skillful lawyer.  He's an entertaining blogger.  He's probably a decent man, despite the damage he has wreaked upon America's already overburdened insurance industry.  But as the White House's new "public voice" on the law, I predict Turkewitz will be an unmitigated disaster.

First, he's a security risk.  Those who follow legal blogging have suspected for some time that Turkewitz was in talks to take such a position.  He's hinted as much on his blog (which went strangely silent a week ago), on Twitter, and in comments at others' blogs, where he suddenly ramped up the pro-administration rhetoric, even rabidly defending his future masters' attacks on the auto industry in the (now infamously debunked) California Toyota accelerator case.  Typically, a man who has been offered a sensitive government position doesn't let the world know it while he's being investigated by the FBI.  What will Turkewitz leak the next time the Obama administration vets nominees for the Supreme Court, as is widely expected to happen this summer if John Paul Stevens retires?

Second, he's not just a security risk because he's loose lipped.  A careful reading of Turkewitz's record as a blogger raises questions about his patriotism, especially as it pertains to the War on Terror.  Consider past reckless statements on Professor John Yoo, whom Turkewitz described as a "torture lawyer".  As I understand it (a friend who serves on staff for the Senate Judiciary Committee confirms the administration was moving to hire a legal commentator for the web), Turkewitz won't be serving the press office, but the office of White House counsel.

If a "ticking time bomb" scenario arises, if Bin Laden or some other high Al Qaeda figure is captured and interrogated, will Turkewitz, as a member of the White House legal team, be able to restrain himself?  Or will he denounce fellow government lawyers as torture artists?

Third, if Turkewitz's past is any indicator, you can forget about changing the tone in Washington, or any hint of civility.  The next time the administration (or perhaps Turkewitz himself) disagrees with a court, can we expect the mockery and hostility that led Turkewitz to denounce a past Supreme Court nominee as "error-riddled" and an "embarrassingly silly hypocrite"?

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, why has the White House chosen a medical malpractice lawyer to speak for it on legal issues?  Is this some sort of payback to Fred Baron and the rest of the plaintiffs' trial lawyer bar?  Is this evidence of some new "health care reform" initiative for the benefit of lawyers who prey on the medical profession?  To my knowledge Turkewitz has never practiced as a constitutional lawyer.  Why has the White House (Obama is also a lawyer, heavily indebted to the trial bar for his election) chosen this man, who is no more qualified to speak about the Constitution than the Geto Boyz, to be its voice on issues such as free speech, national security, and the constitutionality of the health insurance mandate?

This is just the tip of the iceberg where the White House's new law blogger is concerned.  Eric Turkewitz has maintained a public voice for years.  Expect Republicans, and others who care about the dignity of the law, to dig up far more as Turkewitz becomes the administration's new mouthpiece.

It's a shame.  A White House law blog could be a great idea, a tool to engage with citizens about the part of their government many understand least.  But to put it in the hands of a character assassin like Eric Turkewitz?  Rather than "Hope" and "Change", this looks like business as usual for Washington.

Update: 4/2/2010 I suppose I should have guessed that this was an April Fools Day joke on the part of Mr. Turkewitz.  Sneaky New York lawyers, can't trust a one of them.

As documented by Turkewitz, it also appears that you can't trust certain New York newspapers.  I was sure we'd get the right-wing blogosphere with this post, and the media would ignore it.  It turns out (I have a few emails from bloggers I'd tried to deceive, commending Turkewitz's joke and saying "Thanks, but no thanks," to me) that bloggers are a litle more in touch with the calendar than certain big time journalists.

If you've played World of Warcraft for any appreciable length of time (I know that a number of our readers have), would you please consider responding to this anonymous survey?

The survey is promulgated by one of my wife's graduate assistants.  It is not intrusive, nor will it consume a great portion of your day.  It is part of a larger research project on the ways in which self-selecting groups (hence Warcraft) use the internet to obtain desired information from dumps of voluminous yet widely dispersed data.

A randomly selected participant will receive a small cash prize.  I declined my eligibility for the prize, so your odds of winning are that much higher.  As a bonus, by increasing the size of the sample, you will enhance the survey's validity, thereby assisting a promising researcher in her career.

In other news, highly placed sources inform Radar Online that Chief Justice John Roberts' resignation from the Supreme Court is imminent.  And some highly trafficked blogs are treating the anonymous rumor, from the web equivalent of Maxim magazine, as credible.

Incredible.

Generic incendiary blog post. Very funny.

Many of the comments are as good as the post.  I do not say that merely because I wrote one of them.

(Via Walter Olson).

That the email letting me know that [someone on the Popehat blogroll] is following our Twitter account has this as its third sentence:

If you believe [someone on the Popehat blogroll] is engaging in abusive behavior on Twitter, you may report [someone on the Popehat blogroll] for spam.

I enjoy using Twitter, and someday, perhaps as a Friday timewaster, I'll post a big list of links to everyone we follow on the service.  They'll give readers an instant reading list of interesting things to read, in 140 characters or less.

But I'd guess that over 90% of the accounts that have followed our own were spammers.  In other words, it's about as useful as Usenet.  Twitter would be well served by some stringent bot protection, but that would run counter to its "Billions and billions served" claims.

At least with McDonalds. shareholders can determine exactly how many hamburgers are served, and can be assured that real humans are paying for them*, if not eating them.

*My dogs get Chicken McNuggets on the drive home from visits to the veterinarian.

At least according to Google:

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama."

I'm about to reprint the image, below the jump.  Be warned, gentle readers, that it is very offensive.

Continue Reading »

Is this a story about police overreaching?  Or is it a story about the horny idiocy of young men, one in particular, who are so stupid that they can be taken in by an internet photo of a pretty girl? Could it be a story about the internet becoming a virtual Oceania, where Google and Facebook replace the Telescreen?  Or more prosaically, is it a story about the incompetence of criminal defense lawyers?  If I'd been Adam Bauer's lawyer, I'd have forced the state to try this case, though I'm not a criminal attorney.  (My trial experience comes from insurance defense, but that would be enough to get the charges against Bauer dismissed.)  Or is it a cautionary tale about the foolishness of laypeople who represent themselves in court?

Am I missing something?  Could it be all of these, and more?

We'd have covered the lawsuit filed by University of Miami law professor Donald Jones against the legal gossip site Above the Law yesterday, except that we were busy.  And everyone else got to it first.

Suffice it to say that the lawsuit was ridiculous.  It betrayed fundamental misunderstandings of law, and the nature of the internet on the part of its author. The best blogposts on the matter were written by Ben Sheffner, analyzing the demerits of the suit, and Eric Turkewitz, who played against type and provided wise, conciliatory counsel to the plaintiff, the sort of advice one might expect from, oh I dunno, a law professor.

(And by, "against type" I don't mean Turkewitz isn't wise.  I mean that his conciliatory advice doesn't play into the stereotype of a plaintiff's personal injury attorney, but I digress…)

The suit was dismissed, voluntarily and without prejudice, one day after news of it broke on the web.  We're pleased to note that Above the Law was represented by longtime Popehat friend Marc Randazza, who blogs on the First Amendment among other things at the Legal Satyricon.  Randazza got the case dismissed with one letter.

Randazza, an "adjunct" professor himself (meaning he actually practices law) has long maintained that the legal academy does a poor job of educating its students.  Non-adjunct, "academic" professors, tenured or not, are often so removed from the practice of law (at least as it relates to litigation) that they have little of practical benefit to offer the eager young minds who pay their exorbitant salaries.

I think this case proves Randazza's point.

Poor Mr. X.  I feel for your family and friends.  I don't know much about you or them, but I'm sure I'll meet a number of them when your estate files suit against my client.  In the meantime, this is what I do know about you.

You were a fan of Megan Fox.  I'm sure your wife was pleased by that.

You liked to insert a device known as a "bierstick" into your mouth.

You had degrading tastes in soft-core pornography.

You had a prostate condition.

And that's about it.  Your obituary is already behind a firewall, so as far as the internet is concerned your tombstone is shaped like a beer-injecting plastic penis.  Long may it stand.

As for the rest of you, I know your mother told you always to wear clean underwear, in case you were in an accident.  But are you wearing a clean Facebook page?

How would the sort of man who doesn't get responses on OK Cupid reinterpret the classics of romantic poetry and novels?

"if a hotti3 lieks a man & dont ende@vr 2 conceel it OMG he must hit it"

"shl i cmp@r U to a sumrz d@ lol?"

"no i no i shud think wel of myself :-< but that isnt enuff if othrz dont luv me i wud rathr dye then live kthxbye"

"1 day i wr0te hr name up0n tha strand but came tha wavez & washed that sh1t away – wtf"

"yo my l1ps iz 2 b1ush1n p11gr1mz r3@dy st@nd 2 sm00v d@t ruff tuch wit @ t3ndr k1zz"

Of course they're all charming in person, it's not fair to judge a man by his spelling and grammar, and why are you so stuck up anyway, and they'd just love to exchange photos with you.

Hat tip: Flowing Data, through David and Ken.

Ask Officer Cody Anderson, of the Bozeman, Montana Police Department.  He was, after all, dumb enough to write on Facebook that he and fellow police officers should be allowed to send "stupid" people to jail.

Anderson’s Facebook postings about jailing “stupid” people and how he enjoys “messing” with the public are cited in a lawsuit filed against him and other officers last week. The suit accuses the officers of illegally entering a man’s home and unjustly arresting him in February.

Although Anderson is being disciplined for his actions, he is not being fired.

Is it stupid for a police officer, in a profession that always faces the possibility of civil rights lawsuits because it empowers its members to use deadly force and otherwise ruin the lives of citizens, to write this sort of thing on the wide open web?  About the public he enjoys "messing with," the same public that might read what he posts?

I'd say so.  But fortunately for Officer Anderson, stupidity isn't a crime.  Perhaps he'll appreciate that, now that he's just another stupid civilian.

Quoted text of an email I just received from the Clerk of the United States District Court for Eastern North Carolina:

The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certain security concerns relating to a software application or plug-in called RECAP, which was designed by a group from Princeton University to enable the sharing of court documents on the Internet. Once a user loads RECAP, documents that he or she subsequently accesses via PACER are automatically sent to a public Internet repository. Other RECAP/PACER users are then able to see whether documents are available from the Internet repository. RECAP captures District Court and Bankruptcy Court documents, but has not yet incorporated Appellate Court functionality. At this time, RECAP does not appear to provide users with access to restricted or sealed documents. Please be aware that RECAP is "open-source" software, which can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes, such as facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sealed documents. Accordingly, CM/ECF filers are reminded to be diligent about their computer security practices to ensure that documents are not inadvertently shared or compromised. The court and Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will continue to analyze the implications of RECAP or related software and advise you of any ongoing or further concerns.

On one level, I appreciate the warning.  For those not in the know, access to documents filed in United States District Courts (which account by far for the majority of federal court suits and decisions) is public, but not free.  To review such documents for "free," one has to drive to the Clerk's office where the file is located physically, and endure the equivalent of an alien rectal probe.

Or, one may view them online, through PACER ("public access to court electronic records") at the staggering, and antediluvian, cost of eight cents a page.  Websites like Justia have made a selection of such documents available for really free, but only a tiny selection.  For the rest, one has to pay the freight, for which the government makes a hefty (they're not saying how hefty) profit.  Eight cents a page adds up.  I couldn't tell you how much of my clients', and my own, money I've blown through the years looking up information on PACER at an utterly inflated price.  But as most people who own or publish web pages can tell you, the actual cost of a page view is generally … well, far less than eight cents.  Far less than one cent.

The rest goes to the federal court purse.  PACER is a tax on the curious and busybodies, those who seek to access public records already paid for by their income taxes and court filing fees.

And PACER sucks.  The system navigates about as badly as a Tripod or Geocities page designed in 1998, and at 1998 speeds to boot.

Enter RECAP.  If I install RECAP, any time I access a document in one of my cases, or someone else's, you can access it too, without paying eight cents a page.  (God only knows why you'd want to.)  Without paying anything, apart from what you're already paying to subsidize my litigation habit through your taxes.

As mentioned above, I do appreciate the warning that, if I'm using RECAP, I should take care not to let it see documents filed "under seal,"  generally those involving matters of national security, or in my case minors and alleged sex offenses.  As if.  And the project does raise identity theft concerns, but then, if I want to steal your identity through federal court records, nothing will stop me from getting the information.  Why should lawyers have all the fun?

But I'm not the first to speculate that the reason for this "warning," with its security overtones reminiscent of a "YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE INFECTED! DOWNLOAD SECURITYROJAN!" popup ad, is really aimed at scaring lawyers, hardly the most tech-literate class of professionals, into believing that the extension may compromise their internet security.  OMG!  TEH CLERK SAYS RECAP IS A VIRUS!!!  Or something.

And in the process preserve a valuable, but dubious, stream of revenue to the federal courts, charging people inflated prices through a badly designed system for information they already, allegedly, own.

In fact, if the courts are so concerned that lawyers may inadvertently download malware, compromising federal security through maliciously modified versions of RECAP, you'd think they'd direct lawyers to the official, malware-free site?

Kimberly Block's ADA lawsuit against Squeeze Inn might have ended differently.

The Sacramento woman who sued the tiny Squeeze Inn hamburger restaurant over its lack of wheelchair access has dropped her lawsuit.

Kimberly Block, 41, filed a civil rights complaint July 6 against the Squeeze Inn under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the lawsuit, Block claimed she suffered "embarrassment and humiliation" when she tried to eat there last November.

For reasons set forth in our previous post and comments on the topic, Block's suit seemed a classic shakedown, the sort of abuse of a well-meant law which gives a bad odor to anyone who attempts to use it for legitimate purposes.  While I support the idea behind the Americans With Disabilities Act, abusive or ill-founded suits like those filed by Block (her fourth this year) and individuals like Thomas Mundy give me, and many others, pause about the law.

Still, the internet does get the word out.  When the ADA was enacted, the internet was limited to people who could afford dollars a minute for access, or university systems.   A suit like that filed by Block and her attorney, Jason Singleton of Eureka California, would have proceeded in silence with barely a voice raised in protest.  And months later, people in and out of Sacramento would wonder whatever happened to the cramped cheeseburger joint on Fruitridge Road?

Not everyone gets to live in paradise. Some people have to live in Chicago. Living in Chicago isn't cheap, so if your apartment sucks you probably need to vent about it. And sometimes you need to vent 140 characters at a time.

Amanda Bonnen needed to vent her frustration that her landlord, Horizon Group Management, didn't seem to care about the mold in her apartment. The 20 followers on her twitter account saw Ms. Bonnen tweet "… Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment is bad for you? Horizon realty thinks its okay."

Then Horizon Group sued her for libel.

There are signs that Hardt Stern & Kayne are not experienced libel practitioners, chiefly that they allege that Bonnen's statement was "liable [sic] per se," but also that their website notes that they typically represent "automobile dealers and real estate developers". I wonder, when Horizon Realty Group turned to Hardt Stern for "cost effective, logical, creative and commonsense litigation services," if they expected to be counseled to brew up a massive shitstorm that resulted in the whole country – instead of Bonner's 20 followers – knowing that they had a moldy apartment and an indifferent management company. The long list of fields in which Bret Rappaport claims expertise does not include libel law, nor does it apparently include damage control. Perhaps he should stick to wildflowers.

Since being sued, Bonner has closed her twitter account, a chirpy chronicle of a happy-go-lucky girl for whom things keep going wrong (See the suit here: Twitter lawsuit Horizon Group Realty v Amanda Bonner). On May 4, she tweeted "abonner Isn't into this whole legal process thing". She had no idea.

Via The Awl