Archive for the 'News You Can Use' Category

Is Your Scratch-off Ticket Stale?

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 06/19/08
in News You Can Use
. 2 Comments

“It’s for the kids.” Ah, yes. The great justification for just about any government program. Of course, it’s the central justification in most states for the Lottery. Revenues are directed into the education department’s coffers for use in schools. That’s all fine and good, but the agreement the ticket purchaser enters into with the state is: I give you a dollar and you promise to give me a chance to win a prize.

Then there’s this:

After a business finance professor tried a Virginia Lottery scratch game for the first time, he became suspicious about how the game was being run. It seemed to him that the rate at which Beginner’s Luck paid out its $75,000 prizes defied the laws of statistics.

His concerns ultimately led him to conclude that the Virginia Lottery continues to sell tickets to its scratch games statewide even after all the top prizes for the game have been claimed.

Monday, a Roanoke law firm announced its intention to sue the lottery on behalf of Scott Hoover, an associate professor at Washington and Lee University who teaches applied business statistics. The letter that lawyer John Fishwick sent to the state claims the lottery has violated its contract with scratch ticket buyers by purposefully selling tickets that have no chance at all of winning a top prize.

“We estimate that since 2003, the state has sold over 26.5 million losing tickets in this way, pocketing an estimated $84.7 million in purchase prices from the shell game,” Fishwick said. “The state cannot continue to boost revenues by knowingly selling its citizens defective tickets based on hollow promises of an opportunity that does not exist.”

Basically, the state gave away all the prizes, but kept selling tickets. Talking with WAMU today, Mr. Hoover said this gives rise to multiple claims against the state, the most serious of which is fraudulent inducement to purchase the tickets.

He’s filed a claim with the state (basically a notice stage required before filing a lawsuit) alleging that the state has misled citizens and that it must rectify the situation. His lawyer told WAMU that they aren’t necessarily looking for damages, but are primarily looking for the state to acknowledge it’s doing something wrong and change the process.

And For Dessert, I’d Like the Death Penalty, Please

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 06/09/08
in News You Can Use
. 5 Comments

Here’s a question for you: should someone who requests the death penalty be prohibited from receiving it?

From Friday’s New York Times:

[Khalid Shaikh Mohammed], the former senior operations chief for Al Qaeda, said he would represent himself and dared the Guantánamo tribunal to put him to death.

“This is what I want,” he told a military judge here, in his first appearance to answer war crimes charges for the terrorism attacks that killed 2,973 people and set America on a path to war.

“I’m looking to be martyr for long time,” he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret C.I.A. prisons.

Reaction to FLDS decision

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 05/30/08
in Law and News You Can Use
. 20 Comments

I’m curious to hear your reaction to the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to return the children seized by the Texas Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS) from the FLDS’ Yearning for Zion Ranch. I’ve read the court’s decision and a few news reports. Admittedly, my reading has not gone much beyond this surface level. So if you have insight that I lack, have at it…

Notwithstanding my serious misgivings about the sect and the lives children are apparently forced to lead there (expressed in this thread), I think the court’s approach strikes an appropriate balance between keeping kids with their families by applying the statutory standard to which state agencies must adhere when dealing with cases like this.

Continue reading ‘Reaction to FLDS decision’

Every Law School Needs An Official Blog

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 04/03/08
in News You Can Use
. 0 Comments

searchme-results.jpgSo, I’ve been toying around with SearchMe today. It’s a cool visual search engine (click on the screenshot to the right to see it). Still in beta form, but it’s open registration to try it out. I think it’s pretty cool. The whole premise is that you see the pages that come back in a search. They’re categorized and easy to scroll through. You can choose to see text results as well.

My search for “law school blog” yielded some interesting results. It also brought me back to a question I’ve had for a while but haven’t yet asked here: Can someone please point me to a good law school blog written by a member of the school’s administration or that is otherwise quasi-official? Our school has two that I know of (Admissions and Financial Aid).

(Incidentally, kudos to Catholic Law on the site redesign. I’m sure you’ve been working on it for a while. Well done!)

The trouble is there aren’t many. Those that exist seem to be, like Catholic’s or this one, updated sparingly and with information that is not totally useful or just downright uninteresting. Continue reading ‘Every Law School Needs An Official Blog’

Posner on Bell Atlantic v. Twombly

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 04/02/08
in News You Can Use
. 1 Comment

In a RICO case, Judge Posner opined on the post-Twombly standard on motions to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).

(H/T How Appealing)

The case involved an allegation that a municipal government had pre-empted their efforts at building a marina on their land by conspiring in a “continuing violation” of the RICO statute. The trial judge dismissed for failure to state a claim and Posner agreed (the claim was “threadbare”). But, on Twombly, added:

Bell Atlantic must not be overread. The Court denied requir[ing] heightened fact pleading of specifics,” 127 S. Ct. at 1974; “a complaint . . . does not need detailed actual allegations.” Id. at 1964. Within weeks after deciding Bell Atlantic, the Court reversed a Tenth Circuit decision for requiring fact pleading. Erickson v. Pardus, 127 S. Ct. 2197 (2007) (per curiam). A prisoner, proceeding pro se, had complained that he had Hepatitis C, that he was on a one-year treatment program for it, that shortly after the program began the prison officials withheld treatment, and that his life was in danger as a result. That was the ontext in which the Court said that “specific facts” need not be pleaded. Id. at 2200. A complaint must always, however, allege “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face,” Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, supra, 127 S. Ct. at 1974, and how many facts are enough will depend on the type of case. In a complex antitrust or RICO case a fuller set of factual allegations than found in the sample complaints in the civil rules’ Appendix of Forms may be necessary to show that the plaintiff’s claim is not “largely groundless.” Phillips v. County of Allegheny, 515 F.3d 224, 231-32 (3d Cir. 2008). If discovery is likely to be more than usually costly, the complaint must include as much factual detail and argument as may be required to show that the plaintiff has a plausible claim. See also Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 157-58 (2d Cir. 2007).

A Music Tax? The Extortionary Ways of the Music Industry

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 03/29/08
in Law and News You Can Use
. 0 Comments

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has several good stories on a proposed “music tax” which the recording industry is seeking to impose on listeners. As per usual the industry is talking out of both sides of its mouth by suggesting that the tax would not be mandatory but would instead be a voluntary scheme that ISPs can choose to participate. In reality, Arrington writes:

…the plan essentially comes down to telling ISPs that they can avoid any copyright infringement liability if they pay the fee on behalf of customers. And while the government wouldn’t be directly involved, the willingness of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system to enforce civil and criminal copyright infringement laws is the stick by which Griffin will convince ISPs to jump on board. It’s government endorsed extortion, nothing more and nothing less.

Or, in other words, “pay us not to sue you.” Interestingly, Arrington notes that the tax could bring in as much as $20 billion (twice the current revenue of the entire industry).

Continue reading ‘A Music Tax? The Extortionary Ways of the Music Industry’

US News Rankings Preview

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 03/27/08
in Law School Rankings and News You Can Use
. 0 Comments

Even though we’re building a case against the US News Rankings here at Fight The Hypo (stay tuned), we were pretty excited to see this leaked Top 100 of the rankings listing Catholic U at #86 (up 11 spots from last year)!! No matter how much we read about how bogus these rankings are or how much lower than American U we are ranked, we readily admit to being excited when they show our school moving up the ranks.

(h/t PrawfsBlog)

Also, Concurring Opinions is soliciting thoughts on how to change the US News methodology. Interesting discussion.