Unfortunately, I’m not talking about Texas winning the BCS National Football Championship.
Rather, the American Tort Reform Association has named the Texas Rio Grande Valley and Gulf Coast region as the number one “judicial hell-hole” for 2005. The ATRA describes a judicial hell-hole in the following manner:

Judicial Hellholes are places that have a disproportionately harmful impact on civil litigation. Litigation tourists, guided by their personal injury lawyers, seek out these places because they know they will produce a positive outcome – an excessive verdict or settlement, a favorable precedent, or both.

Hat tip to Walter Olson for the link.

In this interesting post, the Wired GC discusses the potential negative impact of Web 2.0 on high-cost legal research services such as Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis, and then passes along this anecdote that should give pause to the legal research vendors:

Then as I am about to leave my office last night and head home to complete this post, I opened a November 30, 2005 letter from an SVP of West. It was one of those customer-friendly letters you get these days. You know, the sort that starts out ìDear Westlaw Subscriberî and goes on to state:

ìTo help us continue upgrading the Westlaw content and functionality that helps you carry out top-quality research, we will be increasing rates for Westlaw usage by an average of six percent (6%) as of January 1, 2006.î

The price increase helps me? I set my 2006 budget months ago. For most technology-driven companies, upgrades typically lower costs for customers. No mention of any enhancements, either.
Memo to West: a form letter that slaps a long-term customer with a 30 day notice of a unilateral price increase is very much Law 1.0. Risking driving a customer away is rather ignoring Law 2.0.

Read the whole post.

The ever-alert Tom Mighell passes along this handy AskSam database of over 350 of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito‘s published opinions, which can be viewed either online or after a download. Between this database and this previously-noted University of Michigan Law Library site, there is not much that you cannot find out about Judge Alito, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled to take place in January, 2006.

I oppose the death penalty, but not on philosophical grounds. Rather, I do not believe that the state can implement the death penalty without making mistakes such as the one described in this haunting Sunday Houston Chronicle/Lise Olsen article. Until a system is developed that reduces as much as humanly possible the risk of mistakes such as this one from happening, I remain opposed to the death penalty.
By the way, we are not close to having such a system in place in Texas.

As it did with Harriett Miers, the University of Michigan Law Library has put together this top notch site that includes biographical information, downloadable opinions, and almost everything else you need to know about Supreme Court Justice nominee, Samuel A. Alito, Jr.. Check it out.

Third Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. is President Bush’s new nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Larry Ribstein provides an overview of Judge Alito’s decisions in business cases, Orin Kerr believes that Judge Alito will ultimately be viewed as being quite similar to Justice Roberts and, thus, easily confirmed, and Doug Berman provides the early analysis of the nomination from a criminal justice standpoint.

In this previous post, former Solicitor General and unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork provided a handy shorthand description of the judicial philosophy of originalism. In a letter to Wall Street Journal’s ($) editor yesterday, Richard A. Epstein — the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (previous post here) — provides an equally tidy explanation of the primary criticism of the originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution:

[Mr. Bork] is wrong to assume that his brand of originalism is the preferred form of constitutional interpretation, much less the only means to combat inherent tendency of left-wing judges to improperly expand the scope of judicial power.

Continue reading →

Last month, this post commented on the interesting story of former University of Alabama football coach and current University of Texas at El Paso football coach Mike Price‘s $20 million libel lawsuit against Time Inc. That post ended with the following comment:

“Does anyone else get the sense that Time needs to settle this case quietly?”

Well, Time Inc. has taken that advice and settled with Coach Price.
Time Inc. made a very good decision. Vanderbilt’s football team would have a better chance of beating the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa than Time Inc. would have had of prevailing against Coach Price in a Birmingham courtroom.