Around the Blawgosphere: Seeking Fictional Lawyers; UK Blawgs Soar; Strauss-Kahn and Hotel Security
Fictional Lawyer Smackdown
Above the Law is looking for nominees as it attempts to create a March Madness-style bracket of 32 fictional lawyers, and determine, by process of elimination, who is the greatest fictional lawyer of all time. If you have suggestions, send them to [email protected].
For inspiration, you can check out the ABA Journal’s 2010 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch) feature as well its sidebar listing Other Notable Characters That Did Not Fit Into Our Top 25. Top vote-takers in our contest were Vincent “Vinny” Gambini from My Cousin Vinny, Jack McCoy from Law & Order and Alan Shore from Boston Legal.
Just last week, Constitutional Daily posted a list of six overlooked fictional lawyers, including Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gerald Broflovski of South Park and linked back to a similar Bitter Lawyer post from last year that suggested Bob Loblaw of Arrested Development and Romo Lampkin of Battlestar Galactica, among others, should have made the Journal’s 2010 list.
Brit Blawggers Going Strong
Siobhain Butterworth of the Guardian’s blog Butterworth and Bowcott on Law noted a recent Guardian article about the “death of political blogging” in the United Kingdom and contrasted it with a surge in legal blogging there.
Butterworth was a panelist at last week’s #lawblogs event in London along with David Allen Green, who is of counsel and head of the media practice at Preiskel & Co. in London and authors the blog Jack of Kent. Green said he became a legal blogger by accident when he started writing about a high-profile libel case. “I realised I could publish the statements of case and could explain it in a way that hadn’t been done before,” he wrote.
Panelist Joshua Rozenberg, who also blogs for the Guardian, said that he thinks that the mainstream media has largely abandoned providing detailed coverage of legal affairs, and that legal blogs are now filling that gap.
Crime in Hotels
The allegations that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, sexually assaulted a maid while in his hotel room prompted Litigation and Trial blogger Maxwell Kennerly to raise the issue of crime and security in hotels. He dug up a 3rd Circuit case from 2008 over the rape of a guest at a Virgin Islands resort. In the case, the security guard assigned to the area where the guest was raped never patrolled it. He was also nearly an hour late for work, not equipped with a flashlight or radio, and he and told by his supervisor that the area where the rape happened was “too dark for [his] own safety.”
“In other words, the ‘security guard’ was a total scam designed to create the appearance of security, but not actually create a reality of security,” Kennerly wrote. “We can only hope that, as the Strauss-Kahn prosecution winds its way through the courts, it will shed some light on this dark secret of the tourism industry. It’s about time we have some real numbers; if you don’t admit there’s a problem, how can you fix it?”
