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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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I'm not sure what your criticism is or what word games I'm playing. My post was addressing what is admittedly a very low bar to clear, namely how to present allegations of a conspiracy competently. I'm not denying that lawyers lie or conduct sloppy investigations or do some expert-shopping, but all that is collateral to whether or not the allegations are described coherently and with sufficient detail. Even knowing that the Subway Tuna lawyers shopped around and misrepresented their DNA findings, that doesn't change the fact that their theory was coherent and had enough details. The falsification of my argument would be if the Subway Tuna lawsuit didn't bother with any testing at all and instead filed an affidavit from some rando who said "I have come to believe that Subway Tuna is not in fact tuna" without explaining foundation.

I don't think you're playing word games, so much as you're getting played by word games.

At the trivial level, I think the Krick complaint has a pretty sizable amount of what O'Rouke's final order on sanctions on calls out as :

Given the circumstances of this case, it was not enough to merely accept as true (or potentially true) what might be stated in the media, what had been pushed out over the Internet, or even what was included in other lawsuits filed around the country.

There's some sunlight between it and O'Rouke, but not much. Quite a lot of the 'specific' citations have nothing to do with the actual legal theory, and even some of the ones you highlight are just pulling statements by randos out of their original context, or taking routine actions as evidence of a dire conspiracy. And while you emphasize affidavits with a lot of padding, there's a number of specific and actual (though false!) claims with connections to violations of law (that the plaintiffs misunderstood or had no standing to challenge).

My deeper objection is that this distinction is pretty uncompelling to normal people, and in ways that undermine your point. The precise legal theory and the relevance of specific claims to it is interesting, and it does genuinely matter when someone submits unmoored claims or specious legal theories to the court, and hurt when people aim pants-on-head-crazy ones at you. There's reason that courts are more likely to assign sanctions for 11(b)2 than 11(b)3 for reason, and it's not just that judges can evaluate those questions more easily and review them more reliably, or even that lawyers can.

But it would be kinda nice to know that the lawyers in question had checked if a Pakistani Airlines pilot had actually seen a missile anywhere near an SM-2 (or even what his or her name was) or what if any conclusion the FBI had pronounced after investigation, or what the relevance of PCR for canned tuna would be, or if Wisconsin drop boxes were operated in violation of state law, in addition to whether this mattered for the underlying question of law and whether they are sufficiently specific. That's the more conventional read of "the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap". This is part of Rule 11 (b3, to be precise), and it's possible to get sanctioned for failing this test, but it's extraordinarily uncommon and the standard is extremely forgiving. (see discussion here under "Reasonable Inquiry").

There are reasons this stance is so forgiving, and I can be persuaded that fair and open access to the courts is worth the costs of spurious lawsuits. But if your selected example of one includes a full pepe silvia of questionable newspaper clippings and depends heavily on a couple bullet points that are little more than "Trust This Rando Pro Se Litigant, he totally has retired navy and FBI people dropping hot tips, bro," it runs into problems. Or where the complaint, across three amendments, launders claims because the PhD biologist must have missed the people citing him.

You're probably even right in the sense that the people with their names on the complaint are totally hands-clear. Krick doesn't have Stalcup on the complaint or submitting an affidavit; Amin merely hired rather than submitted as an honest expert witness Dr. Barber. But it's not like the behavior in O'Rouke was better where it followed that trick: the initial complaint launders several specific factual complaints originating from Johnson v. Benson in Detroit. But we recognize that the plaintiffs were on notice for O'Rouke when we seldom do the same for people with comparably bad factual allegations.