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1L of a Ride is assigned as recommended or required reading at law schools across the country and has eighty-one Amazon Customer Reviews with an average 5-star rating.     
A new book, Tales from the Courtroom, by English lawyer Brian Harris offers an interesting mix of historical, mysterious and humorous legal vignettes, mostly of UK origin, but also including a few American tales. The book includes a fair share of dark legal humor, such as the tale of a Scottish judge named Kames who in 1780 found himself trying Matthew Hay, his former chess partner, for murder. When the verdict of guilty was returned, Kames chillingly remarked, “That’s checkmate to you, Matthew!” (Harris points out that the statement must be read in a Scottish accent Andrew Jay McClurg, Firearms Policy and the Black Community: Rejecting the “Wouldn’t You Want a Gun If Attacked” Argument, 45 Connecticut Law Review ___ (forthcoming 2013). The gun lobby has succeeded in focusing the gun debate on a narrow, oversimplified question: “If a criminal attacked you, wouldn’t you prefer to have a gun to protect yourself?” This article asserts that the question—which correlates with a “more guns” argument—is a red herring, a diversion that leads us off track and blinds us to the need for comprehensive strategies to address the complex, polycentric issues of gun violence in America. 
For funny and clever legally related cartoons, there is no beating Stu Rees and wife Maddy Dodson. But we always need more legal humor. Here’s a new sample from aspiring cartoonist, legal and otherwise, Mark Purdy. What do you think? 
There are potential torts and there are POTENTIAL TORTS. This hanging rusty spike stands out even on the gritty, tort-filled streets and sidewalks of downtown Memphis. As you can see in the second picture, it’s hanging at a level where a person could walk right into it. I snapped this shot on my way to the annual law review banquet a week ago and was surprised to see it still hanging yesterday on my way back from lunch. The headline reference, of course, is to a line from the Rolling Stone’s 
In Torts, we were talking about product warning defects and, particularly, the warnings found on most plastic bags. These are warnings to adults to keep plastic bags away from babies, cribs, etc. because they present a suffication hazard. Using various bags as examples, we talked about the efficacy of such warnings in terms of size, placement and whether they needed to be in multiple languages. (We also discussed whether the risk is obvious, in which case there would be no duty to warn of it.) This week a student brought me a plastic bag that attempted to solve the efficacy problems by omitting written warnings 
When you were a kid, or maybe still, did you ever wonder why, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t reproduce the product results with your toys similar to those represented in the advertising? These failures caused massive wounds to self-esteem to millions of children. The examples are too many too count. Legos, Erector Sets, Lincoln Logs. How were we supposed to build that 10,000-piece castle on the box with fifty pieces? At least one modern manufacturer is paying attention to protecting the egos of today’s youth via product warnings. Play-Doh warns kids, at least the ones who read product warnings, to not get their artistic hopes up because: 
Can you interpret this pictorial warning? The entertainment lawyer who sent it along thought maybe her landlord was warning tenants not to practice their parcours on the trash dumpster. “That stick figure is having far too much fun,” she wrote. “Look at his exuberant arms! He definitely does appear to be celebrating a ”Ta-Da!” kind of moment. Remember: In evaluating a pictorial warning, you have to imagine you can’t read the textual warnings, either because you can’t read at all or can’t read English or other language the verbal warning is printed in. This one rates only 
Slow down. The Incredible Hulk’s offspring may be playing in your neighborhood. Hmm, maybe kids really are getting bigger. First, we had the titan-tyke falling from the diaper-changing station and now we have, courtesy of a first-year law student at the University of Memphis, this sign cautioning that children are at play. Very large children. Children who, judging by the picture, could contend in the decathlon at the Olympics. –Thanks to Rob Clapper. … to the tune of Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Lawhaha.com has collected funny law school stories from seventy-four law schools, but since the site was transformed into a WordPress blog, story submissions have dwindled. Must have something to do with the layout or maybe it’s the annoying CAPTCHA program on the Contact page, which requires people to type in those hard-to-read words as a spam-filter. Whatever the reason, we know hilarity continues to unfold in the world’s law schools and want to preserve it here. Please send along your |
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Books  1L of a Ride: A Well-Traveled Professor's Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School  The 'Companion Text' to Law School: Understanding and Surviving Life with a Law Student  Practical Global Tort Litigation: United States, Germany and Argentina  Gun Control and Gun Rights  The Law School Trip: The Insider's Guide to Law School  Amicus Humoriae: An Anthology of Legal Humor Selected  Fight Club: Doctors vs. Lawyers - A Peace Plan Grounded in Self Interest  Neurotic, Paranoid Wimps - Nothing has Changed  Kiss and Tell: Protecting Intimate Relationship Privacy Through Implied Contracts of Confidentiality  Dead Sorrow: A Story About Loss and A New Theory of Wrongful Death Damages  A Thousand Words are Worth a Picture: A Privacy Tort Response to Consumer Data Profiling  The Public Health Case for the Safe Storage of Firearms: Adolescent Suicides Add One More 'Smoking Gun'  Armed and Dangerous: Tort Liability for the Negligent Storage of Firearms  Good Cop, Bad Cop: Using Cognitive Dissonance Theory to Reduce Police Lying  Poetry in Commotion: Katko v. Briney and the Bards of First-Year Torts  The Tortious Marketing of Handguns: Strict Liability is Dead, Long Live Negligence  Bringing Privacy Law Out of the Closet: A Tort Theory of Liability for Intrusions in Public Places  The Rhetoric of Gun Control  It’s a Wonderful Life: The Case for Hedonic Damages in Wrongful Death Cases  Your Money or Your Life: Interpreting the Federal Act Against Patient Dumping  Logical Fallacies and the Supreme Court: A Critical Analysis of Justice Rehnquist's Decisions In Criminal Procedure Cases  |
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