Articles Posted in Miscellaneous

Read this, please:

“John Fund [of the WSJ], after discussing how disgruntled the GOP base may be, has it exactly right: ‘Republicans have appeared to the world to be as unprincipled and rudderless as the politicians they campaigned against back in 1994. Unless they change course dramatically in the seven months between now and Election Day, they may well find themselves facing the same fate as the Democratic political dinosaurs of that year that they replaced.’ I’m disgruntled, too, and I’m going to get it all of my chest this morning: I’ve never voted for a Democrat in a general election in my life, and I don’t expect to anytime soon, but it’s been impossible for me over the past couple of years to get enthused about the Republican party. I voted for President Bush twice, and contributed to his campaign twice, but held my nose when I did it the second time. I don’t consider myself a Republican any longer. Thanks to this Administration and the Republicans in Congress, the Republican Party today is the party of pork-barrel spending, Congressional corruption – and, I know folks on this web site don’t want to hear it, but deep down they know it’s true – foreign and military policy incompetence. Frankly, speaking of incompetence, I think this Administration is the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century. The good news about it, as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s almost over.”

From the National Review ….

I am a little late in posting today because I have been busy preparing for a speech and panel discussion in Knoxville. The Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy is honoring Justices Drowota, Anderson and Birch today; I have been invited to speak about the impact that these gentlemen have had on Tennessee tort law. I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in this program.

To get ready I read tort opinions for an hour or so last night and started again at 4:30 this morning. Tort law has come a long way in Tennessee since 1990, and these gentlemen played a major role in advancing the cause of justice in Tennessee.

Justice Drowota retired last year and Justices Anderson and Birch retire at the end of August. They will be sorely missed.

Cameron Diaz has won her lawsuit over unauthorized sale of photos of her topless.

I am out of town today giving a speech for the Kentucky Academy of Trial Attorneys. I won’t likely get a chance for a substantive post, unfortunately.

Tom Delay is resigning from Congress. For the latest on this issue, see this article from the Washington Post.

This article tells us how the circle is closing around Delay.

Or should I say noose.

The Appellate Cour Nominating Commission will be meeting on April 20 and 21, 2006 to select three people to recommend to the Governor to serve on one of the two open spots on the Tennessee Supreme Court.

As of the application deadline of March 31, 2006, at 4:30 p.m. CST, the following persons have submitted their application for this judicial position:

Judge Gary R. Wade
Judge D. Kelly Thomas, Jr.
D. Bruce Shine
Judge J.C. McLin
George T. “Buck” Lewis
J. Houston Gordon
Chancellor Richard H. Dinkins
Philip A. Condra
Stephen A. Cobb
Judge Frank G. Clement, Jr.
Judge D’Army Bailey

Kim McMillan has announced that she will not run for re-election to the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Kim is a Democrat from Clarksville and has served for six terms (twelve years). She is the first female Majority Leader of the House in the history of the state.

Kim is one of the brightest and most articulate people in the House. She is also one of the few remaining lawyers in the Legislature.

This article from Lawyers Weekly U.S.A. explains that insurance defense lawyers are seeing an increased in the number of professional negligence claims filed against them.

An excerpt: “According to an ABA study released last summer, malpractice claims against personal injury defense lawyers increased 6 percent from 1999 to 2003 – the largest increase in any practice area. Nearly 10 percent of all malpractice claims in 2003 were filed against personal injury defense lawyers. Personal injury-defense now ranks third in malpractice claims, behind top-ranked personal injury-plaintiff and real estate. Family law and trusts and estates rank fourth and fifth, respectively.”

Read the article here. NOTE: Link is broken and article now lost in cyberspace.

Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m. my grandmother died at home at the age of 97. My wife Joy and I leave for Wisconsin this morning; the funeral is Saturday in Platteville, a college town of 10,000 people. Platteville is in the Southwest corner of the state and about nine miles from Rewey, the 200+ person village where my grandma lived most of her life.

Grandma graduated from college at the age of 16 (a teaching certificate took one year in 1924) and began teaching one-room school in a schoolhouse on County Trunk A in Iowa County, Wisconsin about 3 miles outside of Rewey. She taught school for thirty years, interrupting her service to raise two daughters. The last years of her career she taught a combined first and second grade class in the brick school across the street from her little yellow home on Main Street. My grandfather built that home from wood he recovered from an old house he tore down.

Every summer she had each of her grandchildren spent one week with her. This was a big deal for my family – Grandma lived 180 miles of two-lane roads away. How she managed to deal with a room full of little kids throughout the school year and then accept the responsibility of having a kid in her home virtually every week of the summer amazes me to this day.

The death of Natalee Holloway is a tragedy in every sense of the word. It is a tragedy compounded by screaming skulls (as opposed to talking heads) like Nancy Grace, a pseudo-journalist who has successfully managed to purge any gray matter she might have of anything she was supposed to learn in law school about the Bill of Rights. Nancy Grace is a poster child for what is wrong with cable “news” shows.

Back to Natalee. Her parents have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Joran Van Der Sloot and Paulus Van Der Sloot. Under the law in every state, they certainly have a right to do so, i.e. they have a right to prove in the civil justice system what the criminal justice system has not been able to prove.

The Van Der Sloots have been sued in New York. Natalee’s parents are asking Alabama law to apply to that case.