Blog of law articles

I'm having some trouble organizing my thoughts this morning, so let me just lay out what's jogging around in my brain right now.....you guys tell me if any of this is somehow related:

You know there's something wrong with Iqbal when Judge Posner questions its application in run of the mill federal cases:

In our initial thinking about the case, however, we were reluctant to endorse the district court's citation of the Supreme Court's decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), fast becoming the citation du jour in Rule 12(b)(6) cases, as authority for the dismissal of this suit. The Court held that in complex litigation (the case itself was an antitrust suit) the defendant is not to be put to the cost of pretrial discovery - a cost that in complex litigation can be so steep as to coerce a settlement on terms favorable to the plaintiff even when his claim is very weak - unless the complaint says enough about the case to permit an inference that it may well have real merit. The present case, however, is not complex.

But Bell Atlantic was extended, a week after we heard oral argument in the present case, in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009) - over the dissent of Justice Souter, the author of the majority opinion in Bell Atlantic - to all cases, even a case (Iqbal itself) in which the court of appeals had ‘promise[d] petitioners minimally intrusive discovery.' Yet Iqbal is special in its own way, because the defendants had pleaded a defense of official immunity and the Court said the promise of minimally intrusive discovery ‘provides especially cold comfort in this pleading context, where we are impelled to give real content to the concept of qualified immunity for high-level officials who must be neither deterred nor detracted from vigorous performance of their duties.

So maybe neither Bell Atlantic nor Iqbal governs here. It doesn't matter. It is apparent from the complaint and the plaintiff's arguments, without reference to anything else, that his case has no merit.

I've often wondered what would happen if some of my favorite cases were anthropomorphized into wrestlers and had to fight each other.

I'm pretty sure Venetian Salami would beat the snot of out Hickman v. Taylor.

However, while being interviewed ringside by Gordon Solie, Venetian Salami was viciously attacked from behind with a folding chair by Professor Toru Tanaka's tag-team partner Chudasama, which inevitably sets up the feud match involving all three of them and that great patriotic superstar, American Pipe.

I can't believe a guy seriously made an entire career out of impersonating Jerry Lewis. RIP Sammy Petrillo.

Problem -- my deep reservoirs of knowledge concerning World War II, films, and the Marvel Universe are beginning to merge -- did Captain America really punch out Hitler or did that just happen in a Tarantino movie?

Triple-oy alert -- Robert Zemeckis is remaking Yellow Submarine.

God do I love Drew Barrymore. Related -- I really hate Justin Long.

Ok folks, it's finally happened -- I have become Larry King.