Rov_Scam
1d ago
Force majeure is pretty rare and reserved for exceptional circumstances, not that they don't want to pay on a policy. If that's the case, they'll usually find another reason not to pay.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
You're entitled to your opinions on the ACLU, but they have very little to do with this case, other than that they're paying the attorney who handled it. Their participation is incidental, and if it wasn't for their public profile, would be entirely unknown. News coverage of high-profile lawsuits rarely mentions the insurance companies that are actually paying for them.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Sophistry? No. If I wanted to engage in sophistry I'd argue a lot more motions than I actually do.
Isn’t it also the case as I’ve read that most parties sue in order to settle out of court?
I don't know if that's exactly the way I'd phrase it. Cases going to verdict are certainly rare, yes. However, a good number of cases are dismissed before it even gets close to trial, and a lot of cases will just sit on the docket because the plaintiff isn't motivated enough to get things moving. If a case is actually going to get in front of a jury then it means it has some merit and the defendant isn't going to take the chance that the jury decides it's worth more money than the plaintiff is willing to settle for. The plaintiff, on the other hand, isn't going to get greedy and pass up guaranteed money when they could be walking into a defense verdict. Add into this that the courts have a positive bias toward encouraging parties to resolve matters on their own, with some even requiring pretrial mediation, and it's so surprise most cases settle. The Newegg case happened because the calculus changed whereby it was cheaper in the long run for them to countersue in the hope that it would discourage future litigation.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
As a litigator, there are any number of things I might take into consideration when making an argument in front of a judge, including favorable facts, unfavorable facts, favorable law, unfavorable law, and the kinds of arguments the judge tends to pay attention to. On thing I have never taken into consideration is whether my argument is intellectually consistent with an argument I've made in the past, even if I'm arguing for the same client in front of the same judge in a case with substantially similar facts to a case I've argued previously. Indeed, if a judge tells me he doesn't buy my argument, I'm not going to waste my time in a future case making that argument. If I did, I may be consistent in my opinion, but I'd be doing a disservice to my client, putting my own sense of moral consistency ahead of their very real legal jeopardy.
And here you are, saying you're infuriated because a lawyer whose prior stances you aren't familiar with is arguing in an area of the law that hasn't been relevant until very recently in front of a court that has repeatedly signaled that they have a tendency to find some lines of reasoning more persuasive than others. What's she supposed to do, proceed with an argument that she thinks is a loser because she is, in some abstract way, acting as a representative of "the left" and other people who have nothing to do with her or her case besides a vague association with "the left" have made similar arguments in the past? What kind of advocacy is that?
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I think a better strategy is to just limit your consumption to trusted channels. I'm reluctant to watch anything that isn't by someone I've seen before. I may not be able to tell when it's 100% AI content, but a low effort video is a low effort video. It's pretty easy to tell when someone doesn't know what they're talking about and are simply summarizing a Wikipedia article, or LLM output for that matter.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
At the time of the revolution, the colonies had their own governments and their own courts, which courts subscribed to the common law. Since there was no existing tradition of comprehensive legal codes, upending the system entirely would have meant creating a new civil law system from scratch, which there was no reason to do, since the common law had worked fine for 99% of cases, and they always had the opportunity to enact legislation for the 1% of cases where the common law was inadequate. Even to this day, we still rely on common law for the vast majority of the things that courts actually deal with on a day to day basis, and it continues to evolve in the individual jurisdictions, such that law students are vexed by having to learn majority and minority rules.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
This is one of the areas where the current state of the market is objectively worse than in the pre-internet era. I remember when I was in college (the internet existed but hadn't subsumed everything) it seemed like every town had a video store that opened when the VCR came out in the 1980s, ordered every title that was available, and never threw anything out. The result was that you had independent shops whose archives included pretty much everything that was ever released on video. Sure, it might not be on DVD, and the tape might be in bad shape from having been watched 4 million times, but at least it was available. I remember they had a 5 catalog rentals for $5 deal, and the rentals were for a week, so it was kind of a weekly ritual to rent 5 movies every week whether I planned on watching them or not. They also had a byzantine setup that encouraged browsing because you never knew where you'd find anything, though they had a catalog you could consult. The new releases were obviously segregated, and they had the normal categories (comedy, drama, etc.), but the AFI 100 movies had their own section, as did "Black and White Classics", and there was something called the Video Vault that could have anything. I believe there was even a small LBGT section, definitely odd for a small town store in the mid 2000s.
They closed in 2007, well before streaming. I think it was a combination of OG Netflix and Redbox. I worked at a video store in high school, and 90% of our sales were newer releases, though the one I worked at didn't have much of an archive. It was part of a grocery store, and it became easier for the grocery stores to just put a Redbox machine in the lobby that would cover the dozen or so titles that actually made money. Netflix didn't make sense for new releases at the time, since you had to wait and could be on a list, but for movie buffs who would just put a hundred movies in the queue and watch whatever Netflix sent them, it was perfectly fine and didn't require as much effort. My roommate and I got the Blockbuster equivalent circa 2008 and I remember he spent an afternoon just inputting the entire 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in, and we'd watch whatever came in. That was probably the peak of movie availability since they really did have close to everything you could think of, unless it was really obscure.
As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.
If they set themselves up as legal gambling companies, they wouldn't have as much of a problem. But they don't want to deal with the regulation, which includes being banned in a lot of states, including some big ones, so it's worth it for them in the short term to insist that they're in some vague category that can't be regulated and do the minimum to appease the people who have the power to sic attorneys general on them. If they can stay out of the headlines it's better for business.
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