Perpetual class act Juan Cole is advertising for a libel attorney – on contingency, of course.
Res ipsa loqitor, as the lawyers say.
We’ve been down this road before.
Perpetual class act Juan Cole is advertising for a libel attorney – on contingency, of course.
Res ipsa loqitor, as the lawyers say.
We’ve been down this road before.
I just call him “petty” for short.
So Juan finally noticed someone has been hacking his website and posting thoughts indistinguishable from his for several years? Not a winnable case, if you ask me.
Might fly in England, but in the US truth is always a legitimate defense.
My father, z”l, was a lawyer and a wise man. He once told me that you should never commence a libel suit.
The basic theme of a libel suit is that the defendant’s false and defamatory statements damaged the plaintiff’s good reputation. One defense is that the plaintiff’s reputation is bad. This means that the defense can put everybody who hates the plaintiff on the witness stand to prove that the plaintiff is an evil slime-ball.
He told the story of a local television personality who sued the newspaper for defamation. The newspaper found all of his girlfriends to testify about their affairs and his poor treatment of them. The result of the suit was that the TV guy won nothing, was embroiled in a nasty divorce, and had to leave town.
Mr. Cole, are you feeling lucky?
What a tool. It’s not hard to find a libel lawyer, there’s this thing called the phone directory. I understand they even have them online nowadays. Also in most states if you call the state bar association they have a referral service. Mr. Cole’s post just looks whiney to me–“somebody’s calling me names, you guys!” If he were serious about the libel suit he’d be talking to a lawyer, not posting on his blog.
Res ipsa loquitur.
_My father, z”l, was a lawyer and a wise man. He once told me that you should never commence a libel suit._
Ha! Abraham Lincoln, another wise man and a lawyer’s lawyer, brought three libel cases for plaintiffs accused of having sex with animals. He won one, lost another and the third was a draw before a hung jury. The hung jury was apparantly unable to decide whether the plaintiff “did have sexual intercourse or carnal knowledge with a cow.”
At least in the nineteenth century, a fellow could always pick up and go West.
PD Shaw: The hung jury was apparantly unable to decide whether the plaintiff “did have sexual intercourse or carnal knowledge with a cow.”
We can be reasonably confident that no such accusation unlies the present controversy.
There are no cows on the Ann Arbor campus. Go and see for yourself. Professor Thorstein Veblen explains why, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):
In short, in spite of Veblen’s aesthetic-erotic appreciation of the beauty of the cow (surely shared by all educated men of good taste), the University of Michigan resorts to lawnmowers instead – sacrificing art for bourgeois prejudice. This is because they’re ignorant philistines and over-stuffed middle-class snobs. The presence of cows on their greens would suggest rustification and thrift, which are offensive to their leisure class ambitions.