Thread of legal hubbub

[faftorial]

Booo.

We could have attended in the gallery and thrown old bananas at him.

[Shyster]

I assume the argument would have been in the Supreme Court courtroom here in Pittsburgh (the PA Supremes hear cases in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philly depending on where in PA the appeal comes from). It's quite a lovely room and is one of the few parts of the City-County Building that isn't grimy, dilapidated, and run down.

[Shyster]

It's always interesting when a major case for a certain jurisdiction has an interesting case name. Like I have a case in Florida right now where there's a question of jurisdiction, and the leading Florida Supreme Court case on that is Venetian Salami Co. v. Parthenais, 554 So.2d 499 (Fla. 1989), so all of the argument is about Venetian Salami this and Venetian Salami that.

[Shyster]

[tifosi77]

Similarly, I never totally got how chair lifts at ski resorts are things that exist.

[Pavel Bure]

That was a fun 5 mins. Only 30x more dangerous than the traditional elevator. It has pressure plates that “should” stop it from cutting someone in half… I’d be taking the stairs.

[Shyster]

One of my firm's clients is a company that does elevator-inspection services, so when someone gets injured on an elevator or escalator or whatnot my client is usually included in the lawsuit because they argue that client should have caught the defect or whatever they claim caused the injury. I would advise that client to have nothing to do with a rotating guillotine machine, and, to the contrary, to literally run in the other direction if anyone ever asked them to inspect it.

I mean, those things are totally neat old-school tech. But just... no.

[dodint]

A bit cheeky of them to speed up the footage though.

[tifosi77]

That was a fun 5 mins. Only 30x more dangerous than the traditional elevator. It has pressure plates that “should” stop it from cutting someone in half… I’d be taking the stairs.

The auto-close frunk on a Cybertruck "should" sense when your fingers are in the way. Alas.

[Shyster]

This could be a gear grinder, but I'll put it here. Got a case in Washington state where we'll be pro-hac'ing in. Washington state not only still maintains its own case reporters, but it demands parallel citations.

[dodint]

Hah.

[Shyster]

An interesting suit. Hermès apparently only sells Birkin Bags (I assume some sort of ridiculously expensive purse?) to customers who buy a lot of other Hermès stuff first. That's certainly not a unique thing in the luxury-goods world; for example, Ferrari basically reserves certain models for customers who have already bought a bunch of other Ferraris first, and I know that some luxury watch makers do the same. (Oh, you want to buy that special edition? You need to buy a couple of our regular watches first.) This suit is arguing that such "tying" of luxury products is illegal under antitrust law.

[tifosi77]

I'm not sure how they do it now, but at least at one time you couldn't 'purchase' the new limited-edition Ferraris at all. They were conditionally leased. The goal was to inhibit the ability of speculators who were buying up their super/hypercar models and then immediately selling them to the highest-bidding yobbo that came along with a Brinks trunk. Ferrari decided they wanted more control of that market themselves, and so rolled out the lease program. I don't know if they extended the program to cover their base models (if $250,000 is 'base' anything), but violation of their lease terms is why there's no longer a Ferrari dealer at the Wynn Hotel in Vegas.

[Shyster]

The PA Supreme Court just granted an appeal to answer the question of whether nudity requires visible nipple :

Whether, in addressing an issue of first impression, the Superior Court panel erred as a matter of law in affirming Petitioner’s adjudication of delinquency for transmission of sexually explicit images by construing the statute’s definition of “nudity” under 18 Pa.C.S. § 6321(g), which includes “[t]he showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any portion thereof below the top of the nipple[,]” as not requiring a showing of the nipple.

The facts are that a teenage boy convinced a mentally-challenged 12-year-old girl to pull up her shirt on Instagram. Her bra rode up so that you could see a little bit of the bottom of her breasts, but not her nipples. PA has a statute that makes it illegal for one minor to transmit or disseminate "a visual depiction of any minor in a state of nudity without the knowledge and consent of the depicted minor."
The boy was adjudicated delinquent because the court said that the "anything below the top of the nipple" definition in 18 Pa.C.S. § 6321(g) does not say that the nipple itself must be visible. So the Court will decide whether nudity requires nipples.

As an aside, I would find it extremely difficult to write any brief on this case without using the word "underboob."

The PA Supremes decided this case last week and unanimously held that nudity does not require visible nipple, and underboob is "nudity."

[Joegap]

So, my wife sometimes parks at PPG Paints for work. They switched to the app parking or whatever. She never got a ticket or anything from the city, but today we received a few notices each totaling $87 dollars from a company called Parking Revenue Recovery Services. The company is legit, but very scummy. Should we send them a letter asking them to prove she never paid?

[tifosi77]

If you really want to dig in, ask them to prove the charges are legit in the first instance. Then ask how how they apply to you. Then prove that the debt is valid.