Ares writes "In a follow-up to Blogger Subpoenaed for Criticizing Trial Lawyers, Katherine Seidel's blog indicates that not only has she successfully quashed her subpoena, but the lawyer issuing said subpoena is now under orders to appear and explain why the courts shouldn't sanction him for it. This should be interesting, because in addition to Ms. Seidel's subpoena in New Hampshire, the lawyer issued a similar subpoena to a doctor and a Harvard professor under similar circumstances."
I can't imagine what else I'd feed my pet alligators if the supply of lawyers ran out!
I hope you never get arrested for a crime you didn't commit or your kid isn't poisoned by some product made by a careless corporation.
I hope you never get prosecuted or sued by the RIAA because your neighbor's son hacked your wireless router and used it to play with torrentz.
I hope your civil rights are never violated or that you never need the protection of bankruptcy court.
I hope you never have a problem with your income taxes, or a dispute with your business partner or get rear-ended by a drunk driver.
I hope you never have to set up a trust fund to care for a relative who is too ill to care for herself or have a dispute with your bank or have your identity stolen.
I hope you never get married unwisely and have to divorce from a spouse who wants to hurt you as much as possible.
I hope you never get overlooked for promotion because you are too old, or too black or too female.
It can be argued that lawyers do as much to protect our freedoms as the men and women in our military. Maybe more.
People who think our lives and our country would be better without lawyers are as stupid as stupid gets.
yes, good lawyers are very useful people to have (good accountants also fall in the undervalued category), but there are way too many bad (where bad="complete lack of ethics") ones around, hence the big-brushing of the profession.
yes, good lawyers are very useful people to have (good accountants also fall in the undervalued category), but there are way too many bad (where bad="complete lack of ethics") ones around, hence the big-brushing of the profession.
As a nitpick, the problem with "bad lawyers" is usually their morals, not their ethics.
Indeed, such people (along with, say, the average large corporation's upper management) are usually an excellent example for demonstrating the difference between "ethical" and "moral".
Thank you for standing up for all the good lawyers in this country. It really troubles me that the bad ones give the other 2% a bad name.
I can't imagine what else I'd feed my pet alligators if the supply of lawyers ran out!
I hope you never get arrested for a crime you didn't commit or your kid isn't poisoned by some product made by a careless corporation.
Corporations are careless because their lawyers make them so expensive to sue, and ensure that the corporate officers are never held personally liable for unconscionable acts.
I hope you never get prosecuted or sued by the RIAA because your neighbor's son hacked your wireless router and used it to play with torrentz.
The RIAA is pretty much just a bunch of lawyers (oh - and lobbyists). Oops - most lobbyists *are* lawyers.
I hope your civil rights are never violated or that you never need the protection of bankruptcy court.
Why would I need protection of a bankruptcy court? Oh, yea, because there is someon
I'm just wondering why, genetically speaking, it should feel so good to hear about justice being served? Justice, fairness, reciprocity, selflessness: these things naturally feel good to most people, while their opposites usually feel bad, even when they have absolutely nothing to do with us.
If we were truly selfish creatures, wouldn't the opposite be true? We would have evidence that we could get away with our selfishness, and that would feel good. It seems our genetics code for cooperative behaviors over selfish ones. Is this simply the selfish best choice for individuals, to cooperate with each other, or can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
Yes, but your benefit from injustice is likely to be much greater.
A company distributing a significant amount of its profits to all its employees might double all their salaries and be fair, but the top few management people could no longer draw $10m salaries for screwing the company up....
Hehe, that is SO true. Who DIDN'T root for the coyote to catch the roadrunner? Life isn't fair, yet most of us are born with an innate desire for it to be so. This desire for fairness has been shown to be more powerful than the profit motive. Yet our economic system is based on the premise that individual profit is most rewarding to individuals. It is set up to reward selfishness, and in essence makes life less fair. When it seems there is no possibility that life can be fair, most people resort to selfish
. Is this simply the selfish best choice for individuals, to cooperate with each other, or can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
They can, but it's hard to make it work. Basically, a mechanism is required such that the benefits of the behavior accrue more to those who have the gene than to those who don't. So if it is detrimental to you, but beneficial to a other of people who are more likely than the average person to share that gene, then it can be favored by natural selection. So one tends to look for direct benefits before looking for indirect ones
Reciprocal altruism is one example--for example, if altruists are more likely to c
Look at chimpanzees vs. humans to see what the difference between naturally selfish and naturally sharing behavior is.
Chimps will take whatever they think they can get away with, and never actively teach and often try to hide things from each other. Humans may have a lot of the same tendencies, but not nearly to the same degree.
Chimps do teach each other things, and will not generally steal from friends. Younger males will often cooperate to distract a dominant male while a few slip in for a little hanky panky with his harem. They are quite secretive, though. But pygmy chimps (also known as bonobos) are very, very different animals behaviorally. Researchers speculate that the abundance of resources in the South American habitat of the bonobos, as compared to the African chimps, leads to more cooperative behavior. Bonobos are highly
If sex was used to diffuse social tension, I think you'd see people start arguments over nothing just to end up in bed after their night at the bar.
Man: Hey lady! You are sitting in my seat! Woman: But I've been here all night. Man: Doesn't matter. That seat is my territory and you'd better move or I will get real angry. Woman: You know what? Fuck you, too. And you can can have your stupid chair because their is too much tension here. Man: By any chance, could I help you relieve your tension? Woman: I don't
Who says it has genetic roots? I always just figured it was a learned behavior after being screwed more times than we care to remember. The reason I like to see these bastards get nailed to the wall is that they're usually attacking people who were minding their own damn business and not looking for a fight to begin with. The victim usually is completely unprepared for the fight and has significantly fewer resources than the attacker.
If there's such a thing as a cooperative gene, then I'd say that it feels g
We are built to be selfish, as long as it benefits the group. Natural selection decides what you express in the group, so you can't be un-groupishly selfish. You can't be ungroupishly selfless either. But what you do, if it doesn't benefit the group, isn't likely to outlast you, unless you become immortal, somehow. Selfish or selfless... are abstract, survival is very concrete. The genes don't code one behaviour over the other, it's just "not too much of an asshole" are less likely to be selected against
can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
Genes generally code for behavior that is good for genes. A gene for you to treat family well doesn't give a shit about you personally; your family members are likely to have the same gene, so it's just being good to other copies of itself.
I'm just wondering why, genetically speaking, it should feel so good to hear about justice being served? Justice, fairness, reciprocity, selflessness: these things naturally feel good to most people, while their opposites usually feel bad, even when they have absolutely nothing to do with us.
I think you have to go to another level of abstraction. Humans need a rational universe, or else we have no control. We've evolved to believe in cause and effect, and many universal laws of physics are practically
similarly, the fact that we like to root for the underdog...
Or more likely, we've either been f*cked over by a lawyer in the past, or know someone who has been. There's a BIG difference between the law and justice, and the law as currently practiced is often unjust.
It also explains all the lawyer jokes:
Like, "Deep down, lawyers are okay - preferrably at least 6 feet down."
... and...
Q. what do you call 1000 lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?
A. Not enough sand.
Scumbag doesn't begin to classify this guy:
He's made a career out of extorting the VICP (Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund), which allows one to file a claim for vaccine injury, with no out of pocket legal expenses, because the court pays attorneys fees, regardless of the merit of the case.
Well, how about that... If only this sort of story were not the exception rather than the rule.
I have a friend who recently started a small business (he makes board games). On release of his first game, he was immediately sent a letter from a competitor's lawyer demanding either cease-and-desist, or a licensing agreement for the use of the term "Superheroes*". Are you kidding me?! My understanding is that this company routinely threatens any small business (they're fairly small too) that creates a game with "Superheroes" in the name, and threatens legal action or a licensing payment.
Most of these companies run on a shoestring budget and caved, but my friend hired a lawyer to write an aggressive response, threatening countersuits, etc. My understanding is that he never heard from them again. In an ideal world, this sort of through-the-legal-system extortion and bullying would be severely reprimanded, but in the real world, a small business is generally considered lucky if they only have to shell out a few hundred (or thousand) in lawyer fees.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
the lawyer issued a similar subpoena to a doctor and a Harvard professor under similar circumstances.
I thought everybody knew you don't mess with Harvard when it comes to legal matters. Even the RIAA has stayed far clear of Harvard Square with their John Doe suits and subpoenas for student information.
...is how much in the way of legal bills did Seidel run up getting the supoena quashed. If it was a lot, we should be outraged. And if we're outraged, we should express our outrage in a constructive manner: go to her web site, click on "donate" and drop a few bucks in her kitty.
And don't say "She can get damages from that shyster for his misuse of the legal system". That's a lot harder to do than people seem to realize.
I am not sure that there were any legal fees. According to her blog post [neurodiversity.com], Ms. Seidel was represented by the First Amendment team [citizen.org] at Public Citizen [citizen.org]. Perhaps Public Citizen should be the ones recovering some of the expenses? In any case they should be congratulated for the win!
She filed pro se. I understand Kathleen got some help from knowledgeable friends, but that's about it. The online free speech project at Public Citizen had offered to provide their legal help, but it would seem that Kathleen did such an excellent job with her pro se filing that Public Citizen didn't have to file anything.
Or, like I've done several times when I wanted to comment on *why* I modded something up or down, he logged out and then made an anonymous comment. (yes, I checked afterwards, the moderation stays)
Eliot Spitzer was just the beginning. With all the massive economic damage lawyers have caused businesses and consumers, it will be interesting to see if similar numbers of lawyers can start receiving similar levels of fines and sentences, not to mention regulatory legislation. As it is, perhaps more lawyers graduate these days than MBAs, engineers, and MDs, and the amount of wealth being parasitically siphoned from productive society is approaching Roman Civilization Bureaucratic Collapse proportions. I don
I don't think there has ever been such an arrogant caste profession since the days of the Egyptian priesthood.
Sure we have. They're called "doctors", "politicians" and "Chief Executive Officers", respectively. Granted, many politicians are also lawyers, so there's some crossover but they all they tend to think just as highly of themselves. I will agree that, unlike the other three groups, doctors do provide useful if overpriced services. If all physicians suddenly disappeared tomorrow many of us would be in trouble, but if attorneys, politicians and "Chief Executive Officers" vanished from the face of the Earth most of us wouldn't even notice.
For sure there'd be a lot of nice homes and used luxury cars on the market.
From looking at what looks like the email notice of order, it appears that the blogger may have represented herself. That is simply great.
Reference to the order also implies that the lawyer seriously overstepped the rules by issuing a subpoena to a nonparty without court approval. I would expect sanctions in such a context. If the blogger gets serious, she can maximize sanctions if she can demonstrate a pattern or practice of similar such abuse.
I wish her good luck.
More important things (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More important things (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying lawyers aren't important?
Way to get sued!
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Re:More important things (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:More important things (Score:5, Funny)
I'm calling PETA and the *SPCA on you! If you hate your 'gators so much, why not just put them to sleep instead of torturing them?
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Re:More important things (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you never get prosecuted or sued by the RIAA because your neighbor's son hacked your wireless router and used it to play with torrentz.
I hope your civil rights are never violated or that you never need the protection of bankruptcy court.
I hope you never have a problem with your income taxes, or a dispute with your business partner or get rear-ended by a drunk driver.
I hope you never have to set up a trust fund to care for a relative who is too ill to care for herself or have a dispute with your bank or have your identity stolen.
I hope you never get married unwisely and have to divorce from a spouse who wants to hurt you as much as possible.
I hope you never get overlooked for promotion because you are too old, or too black or too female.
It can be argued that lawyers do as much to protect our freedoms as the men and women in our military. Maybe more.
People who think our lives and our country would be better without lawyers are as stupid as stupid gets.
Parent
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yes, good lawyers are very useful people to have (good accountants also fall in the undervalued category), but there are way too many bad (where bad="complete lack of ethics") ones around, hence the big-brushing of the profession.
As a nitpick, the problem with "bad lawyers" is usually their morals, not their ethics.
Indeed, such people (along with, say, the average large corporation's upper management) are usually an excellent example for demonstrating the difference between "ethical" and "moral".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope you never get arrested for a crime you didn't commit or your kid isn't poisoned by some product made by a careless corporation.
Corporations are careless because their lawyers make them so expensive to sue, and ensure that the corporate officers are never held personally liable for unconscionable acts.
I hope you never get prosecuted or sued by the RIAA because your neighbor's son hacked your wireless router and used it to play with torrentz.
The RIAA is pretty much just a bunch of lawyers (oh - and lobbyists). Oops - most lobbyists *are* lawyers.
I hope your civil rights are never violated or that you never need the protection of bankruptcy court.
Why would I need protection of a bankruptcy court? Oh, yea, because there is someon
Re:More important things (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Justice sure feels good (Score:5, Interesting)
If we were truly selfish creatures, wouldn't the opposite be true? We would have evidence that we could get away with our selfishness, and that would feel good. It seems our genetics code for cooperative behaviors over selfish ones. Is this simply the selfish best choice for individuals, to cooperate with each other, or can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
Re:Justice sure feels good (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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A company distributing a significant amount of its profits to all its employees might double all their salaries and be fair, but the top few management people could no longer draw $10m salaries for screwing the company up....
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A similar phenomenon (yet the opposite direction) is us always hoping that Skeletor will kick He-man's ass if JUST ONCE
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. Is this simply the selfish best choice for individuals, to cooperate with each other, or can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
They can, but it's hard to make it work. Basically, a mechanism is required such that the benefits of the behavior accrue more to those who have the gene than to those who don't. So if it is detrimental to you, but beneficial to a other of people who are more likely than the average person to share that gene, then it can be favored by natural selection. So one tends to look for direct benefits before looking for indirect ones
Reciprocal altruism is one example--for example, if altruists are more likely to c
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Chimps will take whatever they think they can get away with, and never actively teach and often try to hide things from each other. Humans may have a lot of the same tendencies, but not nearly to the same degree.
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But pygmy chimps (also known as bonobos) are very, very different animals behaviorally. Researchers speculate that the abundance of resources in the South American habitat of the bonobos, as compared to the African chimps, leads to more cooperative behavior. Bonobos are highly
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If sex was used to diffuse social tension, I think you'd see people start arguments over nothing just to end up in bed after their night at the bar.
Man: Hey lady! You are sitting in my seat!
Woman: But I've been here all night.
Man: Doesn't matter. That seat is my territory and you'd better move or I will get real angry.
Woman: You know what? Fuck you, too. And you can can have your stupid chair because their is too much tension here.
Man: By any chance, could I help you relieve your tension?
Woman: I don't
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Like the RIAA, you mean?
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The reason I like to see these bastards get nailed to the wall is that they're usually attacking people who were minding their own damn business and not looking for a fight to begin with. The victim usually is completely unprepared for the fight and has significantly fewer resources than the attacker.
If there's such a thing as a cooperative gene, then I'd say that it feels g
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But what you do, if it doesn't benefit the group, isn't likely to outlast you, unless you become immortal, somehow. Selfish or selfless... are abstract, survival is very concrete. The genes don't code one behaviour over the other, it's just "not too much of an asshole" are less likely to be selected against
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can genes code for behaviors that are detrimental to the individual but good for the gene pool overall?
Genes generally code for behavior that is good for genes. A gene for you to treat family well doesn't give a shit about you personally; your family members are likely to have the same gene, so it's just being good to other copies of itself.
Those seriously wondering about this topic should read The Selfish Gene [amazon.com] (Richard Dawkins's first book, wherein he coined the term "meme"). Then follow that up with Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals [amazon.com]. They're two very readable books
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Be careful, you might end up proving the existence of God...
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I think you have to go to another level of abstraction. Humans need a rational universe, or else we have no control. We've evolved to believe in cause and effect, and many universal laws of physics are practically
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similarly, the fact that we like to root for the underdog...
Or more likely, we've either been f*cked over by a lawyer in the past, or know someone who has been. There's a BIG difference between the law and justice, and the law as currently practiced is often unjust.
It also explains all the lawyer jokes:
Like, "Deep down, lawyers are okay - preferrably at least 6 feet down."
Q. what do you call 1000 lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?
A. Not enough sand.
Sweet justice (Score:2)
Can't wait for sanctions against this scumbag. Hopefully other overzealus lawyers will take notice too.
Re:Sweet justice (Score:5, Informative)
Paraphrased from Kathy's extremely... "in-depth" blog http://www.neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/149 [neurodiversity.com]:
Since June of 2006, Mr. Shoemaker (scumbag) has been paid fees in 22 VICP cases, 15 of which were dismissed.
Total fees paid to this DB for the DISMISSED CASES are up to $254,291.25.
Total fees paid for cases which resulted in awards were $330.158.04.
Oh, and it was 4 hours after this info was published on Kathy's Blog that she was served with the Subpoena.
Parent
s/Katherine/Kathleen/ (Score:5, Informative)
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Ah, forgot that this is Slashdot for a moment. Nevermind, move along.
Re:s/Katherine/Kathleen/ (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Hooray for a bit of legal sanity (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a friend who recently started a small business (he makes board games). On release of his first game, he was immediately sent a letter from a competitor's lawyer demanding either cease-and-desist, or a licensing agreement for the use of the term "Superheroes*". Are you kidding me?! My understanding is that this company routinely threatens any small business (they're fairly small too) that creates a game with "Superheroes" in the name, and threatens legal action or a licensing payment.
Most of these companies run on a shoestring budget and caved, but my friend hired a lawyer to write an aggressive response, threatening countersuits, etc. My understanding is that he never heard from them again. In an ideal world, this sort of through-the-legal-system extortion and bullying would be severely reprimanded, but in the real world, a small business is generally considered lucky if they only have to shell out a few hundred (or thousand) in lawyer fees.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
I Thought Everybody Knew... (Score:2)
I thought everybody knew you don't mess with Harvard when it comes to legal matters. Even the RIAA has stayed far clear of Harvard Square with their John Doe suits and subpoenas for student information.
What I want to know... (Score:4, Insightful)
And don't say "She can get damages from that shyster for his misuse of the legal system". That's a lot harder to do than people seem to realize.
pro bono? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What I want to know... (Score:4, Funny)
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Joke or not, the link seems to serve its primary purpose, which is to discourage people from modding me down just because they disagree with me.
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Society Strikes Back (Score:2)
I don
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Re:Society Strikes Back (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure we have. They're called "doctors", "politicians" and "Chief Executive Officers", respectively. Granted, many politicians are also lawyers, so there's some crossover but they all they tend to think just as highly of themselves. I will agree that, unlike the other three groups, doctors do provide useful if overpriced services. If all physicians suddenly disappeared tomorrow many of us would be in trouble, but if attorneys, politicians and "Chief Executive Officers" vanished from the face of the Earth most of us wouldn't even notice.
For sure there'd be a lot of nice homes and used luxury cars on the market.
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Bravo (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:In Communist China (Score:5, Interesting)
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In part (Score:3, Informative)