Comes now an object lesson in the importance of taking every lawsuit seriously. And that includes hand-scrawled, rambling, what-the-heck-is-he-talking-about-now lawsuits filed by non-attorneys.

The attorneys for Gelman Management Co. in Washington, D.C. evidently thought little of a housing and discrimination lawsuit filed last October by a Mr. Abdul Wakil Amiri. And, in truth, Mr. Amiri's nine-page suit comes across as a classic pro se filing, the kind of impassioned but undisciplined work that U.S. District Court judges in D.C. toss out all the time. Writes Mr. Amiri in one representative section:

"My rent was increased once a year, then twice a year, three times and four times a year, totally unlawful in the presence of housing code violations...when I ask why don't you increase the rents of other tenants, the answer is that we do not increase rent of friends."

This guy doesn't have a chance, right? Gelman's attorneys moved to have the "stream-of-consciousness, handwritten complaint" dismissed for failure to state a claim.

Not so fast. On Friday, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates rejected Gelman's request to dismiss the suit, essentially admonishing them to confront seriously the points raised. Writes Bates:

"The (Gelman) motion simply recites each of plaintiff’s claims and then states the conclusion that there is a failure to state a claim. Wholly absent from defendants’ motion is any substantive argument for dismissal or citation to authority other than the federal rule on which they rely."

Suits & Sentences likes this. Judge Bates has been on the bench for about eight years. That's enough time to have seen innumerable wacky lawsuits; crazy stuff. Impatience and quick dismissal would be a natural response. You know: Oh, jeez, not another suit by this guy! But instead, the judge is taking seriously -- and requiring attorneys to take seriously -- each and every argument that comes his way.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan seemed in feisty form Thursday as he heard arguments in a case involving former Vice President Dick Cheney's FBI interview.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has sued the Justice Department in an effort to obtain the Cheney interview notes. The Bush administration, of course, resisted releasing the documents. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Obama administration has stuck to the same argument. The mid-afternoon hearing in Courtroom 24 drew a pretty good crowd, including Newsweek's most dogged investigator, Michael Isikoff.

Sullivan started off by saying he didn't want to make an incorrect assumption, so he asked explicitly: Does the Obama administration, in fact, follow the Bush administration's lead in trying to keep the Cheney interview notes secret

"The Department of Justice is an ongoing entity," administration attorney Jeffrey Smith replied, "and it's not normal for us to update cases simply because we have a new attorney general."

Smith is a career attorney with the Civil Division's Federal Programs Branch. In other words, he stays while the political appointees come and go.

The judge seemed a little exercised over the fact that he, or his trusted law clerks, had found two cases that seemed to support CREW's arguments challenging the withholding of the documents but which had not been cited in briefs from either side. He all but chastised CREW's attorney David Sobel for not bringing in these other cases, and he pointedly reminded Smith that the government's attorneys, too, had an obligation to provide relevant case citations even if not helpful to their cause.

Judge Sullivan, before Suits & Sentences abandoned ship, seemed primed to request an in camera review of the Cheney documents in order to make a determination. 

Some circumstances are too sad to ignore. But that doesn' t mean they add up to a federal case.

Felecia Taylor (cq) lives in Washington, D.C. Since around March 2003, she has cared for two children known, for courtroom purposes, as D.B. and T.B. They were born under a bad sign. As U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy noted in an opinion Wednesday:

"In May 2000, the District removed D.B. and T.B. from the custody of their birth mother out of concern for their health and welfare."

The children were shipped off to a foster home overseen by a Ms. Annie Milloy. It wasn't paradise. As Judge Kennedy stated:

"While the children were living with Milloy, the District regularly tested their blood lead levels, which showed 'sustained blood lead levels for 2-4 times the upper normal limits.' In September 2002, the District conducted a lead inspection test that confirmed that there were lead-based paints in Milloy’s residence."

Taylor alleges the children were damaged by their exposure to lead. Moreover, Judge Kennedy reported:

"Around March 2003, in response to allegations that D.B. and T.B. had been inappropriately exposed to sexual activity by Milloy and sexually assaulted while in her care, the District removed D.B. and T.B. from Milloy’s care and placed them with Taylor, with whom they presently reside."

Taylor sued multiple parties, including the District of Columbia and property owner Lucille Hicks, in D.C. Superior Court. The District got it bumped to federal court, on claims that there was federal jurisdiction. On Wednesday, Judge Kennedy agreed with Hicks that, with regard to her at least, there was no federal role involved.

The tension between empathy and judgment is most apparent in cases like this. Justice cries out, no? Who will speak for little D.B. and T.B., right? But sometimes, maybe many times, the courthouse doors remain legitimately closed.

There was something odd about the electric razor in the bathroom.

Thus begins a new, noir-ish opinion crafted by Judge Scott W. Stucky of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. Judge Stucky, sticking with the hardboiled style, goes on describing a Marine Corps enlisted woman: 

"(She) typically changed clothes in the bathroom and for the past year had felt that she was being watched, a feeling that she attributed to paranoia. But this time the circumstances were simply too odd and her suspicions too strong.

And then:

"Her attempt to open the razor’s casing ended at Sears with a 'Torque' T7 screwdriver. Inside the razor she found a camera."

Nice detail, that: the Sears Torgue T7 screwdriver. All in all, this 25-page opinion dated June 11 gets started with a rare kick. It's the kind of hard-boiled literary styling that Chief Justice John Roberts attempted in a dissent last year, opposing a denial of writ of certiorari in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap, Roberts wrote:

"North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak."

In the new case United States v. Weston, Judge Stucky and the appellate panel considered the reasonableness of a search. Darrell Weston, at the time a Marine Corps staff sergeant, had denied investigators' request to search his home, but his wife assented. Weston ended up being convicted at court martial on charges including invasion of privacy.

Suits & Sentences is of two minds concerning these kinds of literary stylings. On the one hand, it's commendable when judges seek to write with verve. A little bit of zing can draw the reader in, which is  legitimate given a judicial opinion's education function. And, besides, hard-boiled is fun.

On the other hand, these are awfully serious issues -- just ask the court-martialed Marine, or the two Armed Forces appellate judges who filed separate opinions. It can seem a little iffy to have fun with a decision whose consequences are so life-changing

On the other, other hand...lighten up! And imagine what could be done with other, historic opinions...

William Marbury was mad. Boiling mad. He wanted his commission, and he wanted it now. But he had a problem...

Joseph Lochner squeezed the bread dough like it was the throat of one of those meddling do-gooders. They said he was working his bakery employees too hard. Hard! He slapped the dough down like he was affixing his signature to a contract, a binding contract.  He would show them hard...

The chad was hanging like a thief at dawn...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's 28-year-old death penalty memo, the one that's been trumpeted so loudly among conservative critics and just-plain skeptics, has now been made fully public by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The memo is part of the ongoing mass of documents being made available; most recently, involving the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

But the relevant question now should be: notwithstanding her views on the penalty, can she uphold its application?

The memo in question was presented March 24, 1981 to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sotomayor, then married and going by the name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan, was part of a three-member task force to examine the death penalty. The money quote:

"Capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society. The number of minorities and the poor executed or awaiting execution is out of proportion to their numbers in the population."

Jump ahead to 1998, when Sotomayor was a U.S. District Judge. In what the New York Times account of the time called "the first federal death penalty case in Manhattan in more than 40 years," Sotomayor permitted a capital case to proceed against a Bronx man, Clarence "Preacher" Heatley, accused of multiple murders as part of a big drug operation. Part of the black defendant's claim was that his race affected how prosecutors treated him.

Heatley is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.

OK, this is not really on point. Let us find, shall we, a case or two where Judge Sotomayor either facilitated or impeded the application of capital punishment...

Perhaps the most definitive capital punishment case out of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, unfortunately for the sake of this debate, did not include Sotomayor. In 2002, a three-member panel of the 2nd Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the federal death penalty in the case United States v. Quinones.

And that's it. Face facts: Sotomayor has not directly addressed the constitutionality of the death penalty, nor has she addressed directly its application. Explaining away the memo she wrote when she was 26 years old -- and a prosecutor, not a card-carrying member of the ACLU -- should be a snap.

Forget Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Suits & Sentences is now proposing the courthouse alternative, Six Degrees of Gary Condit.

Because by this stretch -- and, admittedly, it is quite a stretch -- the struggling former congressman can be connected up to an interesting student loan bankruptcy case accepted for hearing Monday by the Supreme Court.

The case is United Student Aid Funds v. Espinosa, and the briefs are available here via Scotusblog. The case itself was one of two bankruptcy related cases accepted Monday; a sign, one is tempted to think, of the current economic conditions. In Espinosa, the court must decide whether student loans can be dismissed through bankruptcy simply by providing a notice to the collector rather than by going through a formal hearing. Former student Francisco Espinosa owed $17,832 when he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Stated Charles W. Wirken, the Phoenix-based attorney for United Student Aid Funds, in his petition for a writ of certiorari:

"(Espinosa) merely included a declaration of discharge in his Chapter 13 plan and mailed it to
creditor’s post office box. Does such procedure meet the rigorous demands of due process?"

Wirken is with the firm Gust Rosenfeld. Among his clients: Baskin-Robbins. On whose behalf, for the past several years, Wirken has been engaged in legal battle with former congressman Condit. Wirken and Baskin-Robbins prevailed in their breach-of-contract lawsuit against Condit, whose family could now be on the hook for more than $100,000. Most recently, has filed to have the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismiss Condit's handwritten appeal of the trial judge's verdict.

A supposed Friday deadline for resolving a land acquisition dispute in the plans for construction of a Flight 93 memorial in rural Pennsylvania quietly came and went. Suits & Sentences totally called it.

Late Friday, the National Park Service issued a release quoting acting park service director Dan Wenk as saying negotiators had worked "non-stop and in good faith" to resolve their differences. Wenk further declared he was "extremely encouraged by how the negotiations have gone" and said he hoped to "have a more definitive announcement in the coming days."

Exactly.

Now, contrast this with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's declaration on June 11, when he warned:

"If we are not able to reach agreement during the week of June 8 through 12, 2009, it will be necessary to continue the legal processes that were initiated with the landowners in our letters of May 6, 2009."

Legal processes = the threat of eminent domain = politically ugly.

Here is what Suits & Sentences predicted on Thursday the park service would do:

Expect a late Friday afternoon press release that says something like:

"In light of the significant progress being made, we will be pressing hard to finalize negotiations over the next few days so that this important memorial may be completed by the 10th anniversary of 9/11."

Score!

The Coast Guard's administrative law judges, which Suits & Sentences will venture to call an unsung group, get a good grade Friday from the Government Accountability Office.

In a new 56-page report, the GAO concluded the Coast Guard's six ALJs are following rules and regulations, and mariners are being appropriately protected. The administrative judges are busy. Each year, the ALJs preside over some 600 "suspension and revocation" hearings in which merchant mariners face the potential loss of their credentials.

Some press reports and congressional hearings had raised questions about the program. In particular, a Baltimore Sun investigation found that mariners prevailed in only 14 out of 6,300 charges brought over eight years. In other words: a deck stacked in favor of the prosecution.

By contrast, the GAO found that 62 percent of the 1,675 cases it studied were resolved by a negotiated settlement. For instance, the mariners may have agreed to give up the credentials while completing safety training. In 27 percent of the cases, the mariner either failed to respond, admitted to the allegations or voluntarily surrendered their credentials permanently. Only 3 percent of the cases resulted in a formal decision and order from the ALJ.

In essentially every respect, moreover, the GAO investigators found the administrative law program was running well. For ALJ fans, in particular, the report provides a useful side-by-side comparison with administrative law programs run at the Agriculture Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Like a clown holding a hatchet, there's something particularly eerie about ostentatiously childhood things tainted with potential danger. For the full-bore eerieness, it's not enough that the item be merely associated with childhood; a baseball, say. Rather, the child-friendly aspects must be so exaggerated as to become as garish as the clown's makeup.

Like, say, the Barbie Dream Puppy House Playset. It's not just Barbie, it's her Dream Puppy too! Awww!

Ooops, watch out for the Chinese lead.

On Friday, in the Federal Register, the Consumer Product Safety Commission formalized a settlement by which Mattel will pay a $2.3 million civil penalty for importing and selling toys from China with excessive lead levels. The settlement was announced a week ago, but the Federal Register notice makes it official. The public now has until June 29 to comment.

Mattel and its subsidiary Fisher-Price said they were simply settling the complaint, and not admitting to any wrongdoing. In a statement, Mattel stressed that the company "promptly took a series of steps after discovering compliance issues with some of our toys" and that they launched a "fast-track recall" in 2007 of potentially contaminated toys.

According to the CPSC, Mattel between September 2006 and August 2007 imported 633,000 units of potentially affected Barbie accessory toys from China. Some 439,000 of these were sold, for $10 a unit. A recall was instituted when, as the CPSC noted:

"Test results demonstrated that certain samples of each of the Mattel Products contained levels of lead in excess of the permissible 0.06 percent limit set forth in the Lead Paint Ban."

Lead poisoning can cause neurological damage and learning disabilities, among other things.

The super fun items cited in the Federal Register notice include the Barbie Dream Kitty Condo, Barbie Table and Chairs, Barbie Living Room, Barbie Desk & Chair and Barbie Couch and Table.

Mattel, in its statement, said that since the 2007 recall, the company has "taken several steps to enhance our product compliance protocols and procedures to confirm that every Mattel toy is safe for children to enjoy."

The National Park Service's plans for a Flight 98 Memorial in rural Pennsylvania have raised the prospect that eminent domain -- cue scary music -- might be used to secure all the necessary land. Seems, somehow, paradoxical to use the coercive power of the government to force installation of a symbolic memorial, no?

The Volokh Conspiracy has pointed summing up here.

This week, negotiations are supposed to come to a head, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar seemingly giving landowners a Friday, June 12 deadline. Now, late Thursday afternoon, comes a press release from the National Park Service, quoting acting park service director Dan Wenk as saying:

"This week, the parties involved have been working nonstop, and in good faith, to get the deals done. I commend the landowners, the Families of Flight 93 and our Park Service employees for their efforts to find a solution and I believe that we are making good progress in these negotiations."

What to make of this? Certainly, the Interior Department doesn't want to be seen as forcing this memorial down an unwilling landowners' throat. Balancing the soothing words uttered by Wenk against the difficulty of making a final deal, Suits & Sentences expects Interior officials will say the 'deadline' is being extended since so much substantive progress is being made; perhaps even an "agreement in principle" that will be i-dotted and t-crossed over the weekend.

Under this entirely speculative scenario, expect a late Friday afternoon press release that says something like:

"In light of the significant progress being made, we will be pressing hard to finalize negotiations over the next few days so that this important memorial may be completed by the 10th anniversary of 9/11."