First Amendment vs. Disabilities Act

(From Charles Platt) Is this a real threat, or just posturing? The ADA has already been extended far beyond the areas in which is was first designed to apply. I can certainly imagine regulations compelling web sites to be “equally accessible” to the disabled. Discussion here.

Jonas Williams: If you are a process server, you damn well better not lie on your service affidavit

This is, in the grand scheme of things, not a very important case. However, to a lot of people, it might be.

There was a process server operating in San Diego by the name of Jonas Williams. Instead of actually serving the people he was asked to, he just signed the affidavits of service as if he did. I was not his first victim, but by golly I’m pretty sure that I’m his last.

My wife and I filed an abuse of process claim against the guy, and prevailed. It was a default, but he’s known about the case and just chose not to defend it. And, we had cell phone records showing that I was 20 miles from where he allegedly served me. I have heard from a number of people who had similar problems with this guy. (Including this poor soul, who the court did not believe) If you’ve been the victim of this kind of behavior, please feel free to rip off the complaint in this case and administer corrective disincentives to any process server that does this to you, but especially if it’s this Williams character.

If you’re thinking of hiring him as your process server (or for any other position requiring trust) – consider the potential ramifications of doing so.

Randazza v. Jonas Williams Complaint

Randazza v. Jonas Williams Judgment Papers

The best part of the news, it is not as if it is an uncollectable judgment. Process servers must carry surety bonds. I just cashed in Mr. Williams’ bond for a portion of the judgment.

If this has happened to you, don’t think that you’ll get nothing more than a worthless piece of paper.

Rakofsky v. The Internet – LINK FIXED

The long saga of Rakofsky v. The Internet is over (at least for now). The Order is here.

Stay tuned, I’d imagine that there will be an appeal.

The order is a bit soft, but the findings of fact are devastating.

Rakofsky v. The Internet ORDER

The long saga of Rakofsky v. The Internet is over (at least for now). The Order is here.

Stay tuned, I’d imagine that there will be an appeal.

ORDER UPDATED

9th Circuit rules – Righthaven is dead, finally. Righthaven v. Hoehn

The order speaks for itself – and here it is.

The New Victorians Strike Campus Yet Again (VIDEO)

By Greg Lukianoff

While they are rightfully accused of being hyper-politically correct, college campuses these days sometimes seem downright Victorian. Take, for example, the case of Isaac Rosenbloom, a student whose quest to complete college so he could become a paramedic was nearly ended after he complained to another student about an assignment after class. Rosenbloom told his classmate that the grade he got on the assignment was “going to fuck up my entire GPA.” When his professor overheard him, she threatened the 29-year-old father of two with (I kid you not) “detention.” Rosenbloom was brought up under the charge of “flagrant disrespect of any person”—an actual offense at Hinds Community College in Mississippi.

Check out Isaac’s story in this new video.

One might think that such a ridiculous incident would quickly resolve itself as soon as the charges got in front of the university counsel. But one would be wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. Ignoring cases like Cohen v. California (1971) and, even more on point, Papish v. Board of Curators (1973), the administration went ahead with a surreal hearing. Rosenbloom was found guilty of “flagrant disrespect,” given 12 “demerits,” and was no longer eligible for his Pell Grant, (which effectively meant expulsion for Rosenbloom). The university only backed down after my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), found a lawyer for Rosenbloom and secured a favorable settlement in July 2010.

Cases like this are not rare on campus. Indeed, just as the Isaac Rosenbloom case was ending, the perhaps even sillier swearing case of Jacob Lovell at the University of Georgia was just beginning (you can watch a video about his case here, complete with Lex Luthor allusions). As I pointed out last fall when I unveiled a video about a professor who vandalized a “free speech wall” in Texas because someone had written “fuck Obama” on it, if there is one thing that seems to unite the Right and Left on campus, it is that some subset of both groups really, really hate swearing. Because of this fact, unfortunately, campus administrators are too often able to get away with punishing students for cases that involve swearing.

I tried to call out this practice in my book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. While swearing is sometimes the purported justification for punishment, it is clear that in case after case students are not really being punished for swearing, they are being punished because they swore in the process of complaining about the university.

Lately it seems as though the “campus censors as Victorians” theme is popping up all over the country. Just last month one college in upstate New York banned a campus event involving a gay porn star, another college in New Mexico shut down the student newspaper after they produced an issue about sex, and in an ongoing saga, a professor at Appalachian State University was suspended after showing a graphic video that was critical of the adult film industry.

Today’s campus censors appear to be haunted by the spirit of Anthony Comstock, and they’re likely to have the same level of success in the long run that Comstock did. But in the meantime, these efforts to appease the uptight are doing real damage by harming discourse on campus, impoverishing the marketplace of ideas, and higher education just a little bit dumber.

Greg  Lukianoff is the president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).  He is also the author of “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.”

Mutually Assured (Asset) Destruction

By J. DeVoy

The maxim of “if I can’t have [something], then no one will” is childish, but very effective in estate planning disputes.  To demonstrate this point, we’ll use a hypothetical where you’re a child of parent with inheritable assets, and have an all-around inferior sibling – albeit one whom your parents insist they love equally – who is also in line for those assets.  For various reasons, your parents insist on at least an equal division of assets, but also threaten to write you out of the will and leave you nothing because of your antipathy for lesser family members.

Do you just lie there, take it, and watch five to six, even seven, figures of future value evaporate because of their mercurial whims?  No! You litigate!

Hiring a lawyer to vigorously defend your entitlement to an inheritance – morally, if for no other basis – can be an incredible financial boon.  Merely the knowledge that you’ve lawyered up can lead the future decedents to change their plans, especially upon seeing how much it can cost to repel even a steady stream of letters – depleting the pool of assets they intended to leave behind in the first place.  Once they realize the financial toll of such an engagement, the future decedents may back off their plans to posthumously screw you.  Even if such soft-touch prompts to reconsider fail, a lawyer can evaluate ways to attack the sufficiency of the decedents’ will or wills, and fight to ensure you receive a fair share if the decedents die without a will.

The not-yet-dead can try to get around this by pouring assets into a trust, but that will leave them with fewer assets available to withstand a legal action (formal or not) against them.  Generally speaking, you cannot eat a trust res (and the trustee would likely be in breach of fiduciary duty for allowing anyone to do so), making a policy of being cash-poor untenable.  Thus, trying to hide assets beyond your reach in a trust may have the ultimate effect of significantly weakening the party or parties trying to protect their assets.  Even after the trust is created, it may be altered or terminated to reflect the subsequent good sense of asset-holders who were too clever by half.