Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog

Shaq, Zippo & Shirley Jones

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn of the Eastern District of Michigan granted a Rule 12(b)(2) motion to dismiss in Binion v. O’Neal. The opinion is here.

The movant was defendant Shaquille O’Neal. The plaintiff Jahmel Binion—a Michigan resident—alleged claims for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and general negligence based on posts Shaq had made on Instagram and Twitter that included pictures of Binion. Although the court stated that Shaq’s posts were “highly offensive,” it found after a discussion of Zippo and the “effects test” from Calder v. Jones that jurisdiction in Michigan would not comport with due process.

Here’s the New York Daily News with some background on the incident that gave rise to the lawsuit.

 

 

 

Appeal from District Court's Denial of Exemption from PACER Fees Dismissed

The Ninth Circuit dismissed an appeal from the district court's denial of an ex parte application for an exemption from PACER fees (the fees associated with electronic access to federal court records) for lack of jurisdiction, holding that the denial was not a final decision under 28 U.S.C. Section 1291.  In Re: Application for Exemption from Electronic Public Access Fees,  No. 12-16373 (9th Cir. Aug. 29, 2013). 

Judge O'Scannlain, who wrote the opinion, also filed a concurrence acknowledging "the elephant in the room" -- if the denial was unappealable, to whom might one go for review? -- and suggesting that it "will be up to Congress to decide whether to fashion an appellate-review mechanism."   I'm not holding my breath.

PM 

Davies on Baseball and Law

Professor Ross Davies (George Mason University School of Law) has posted "It's No Game: The Practice and Process of the Law in Baseball, and Vice Versa" on SSRN.  The article will be published in the Seton Hall Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.

The abstract states:

It is a commonplace that the relationship between baseball and the law is a long and close one. But, first, is it true? And, second, if it is, just how long and how close? Strangely, given the large amount of good work produced by able scholars of baseball and the law, concrete answers to these basic questions are not readily available. This article is a first step toward filling that gap. It is a sketch of the length, breadth, and depth of the relationship between baseball and the law. (In order to tell a less-than-interminable tale, this article mostly tilts back and forth between recent years – evidence of the vibrancy of the baseball-law relationship today – and the late 19th and early 20th centuries – evidence that it has been vibrant for a long time – and deals only sketchily even with those periods. This should not be taken to mean that the baseball-law relationship was any less interesting at other times, or that there isn’t much more to be said about all times.) As should be clear by the end of this article, the answer to the first question is an emphatic and certain “Yes”: baseball and the law are close and have been for a long time. The answer to the second question, however, is an equally emphatic but far less certain “Very”: while there surely are both unrecognized extents and unmarked limits to the law-baseball relationship, we cannot define them without a fuller inventory and chronology – an old-fashioned digest – of the thousands upon thousands of events that make up the history of baseball and the law. Perhaps this article can serve as the kernel of such a project.

~clf