Dam Those Beavers

beaver disputeCheck out this “cease and desist” letter sent by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality regarding the unauthorized construction of two dams on some property, and the amusing reply (some paragraph breaks for reading ease).

CERTIFIED

December 17, 1997

Dear Mr. DeVries:

SUBJECT: DEQ File No. 97-59-0023-1 T11N, R10W, Sec. 20, Montcalm County

It has come to the attention of the Department of Environmental Quality that there has been recent unauthorized activity on the above referenced parcel of property. You have been certified as the legal landowner and/or contractor who did the following unauthorized activity:

Construction and maintenance of two wood debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond. A permit must be issued prior to the start of this type of activity. A review of the Department’s files show that no permits have been issued.

Therefore, the Department has determined that this activity is in violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, … being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Michigan Compiled Laws annotated. The Department has been informed that one or both of the dams partially failed during a recent rain event, causing debris dams and flooding at downstream locations.

We find that dams of this nature are inherently hazardous and cannot be permitted. The Department therefore orders you to cease and desist all unauthorized activities at this location, and to restore the stream to a free-flow condition by removing all wood and brush forming the dams from the strewn channel. All restoration work shall be completed no later than January 31, 1998. Please notify this office when the restoration has been completed so that a follow-up site inspection may be scheduled by our staff. Failure to comply with this request, or any further unauthorized activity on the site, may result in this case being referred for elevated enforcement action. We anticipate and would appreciate your full cooperation in this matter.

Please feel free to contact me at this office if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

David L. Price

District Representative Land and Water Management Division

REPLY:

Dear Mr. Price:

Re: DEQ File No. 97-59-0023; T11N, R10W, Sec 20; Montcalm County

Your certified letter dated 12/17/97 has been handed to me to respond to. …

First of all, Mr. Ryan DeVries is not the legal landowner and/or contractor at 2088 Dagget, Pierson, Michigan–I am the legal owner and a couple of beavers are in the (State unauthorized) process of constructing and maintaining two wood “debris” dams across the outlet stream of my Spring Pond. While I did not pay for, nor authorize, their dam project, I think they would be highly offended you call their skillful use of natural building materials “debris.”

I would like to challenge you to attempt to emulate their dam project any dam time and/or any dam place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.

As to your dam request the beavers first must fill out a dam permit prior to the start of this type of dam activity, my first dam question to you is: are you trying to discriminate against my Spring Pond Beavers or do you require all dam beavers throughout this State to conform to said dam request? If you are not discriminating against these particular beavers, please send me completed copies of all those other applicable beaver dam permits. Perhaps we will see if there really is a dam violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, … being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Michigan Compiled Laws annotated.

My first concern is–aren’t the dam beavers entitled to dam legal representation? The Spring Pond Beavers are financially destitute and are unable to pay for said dam representation – so the State will have to provide them with a dam lawyer. The Department’s dam concern that either one or both of the dams failed during a recent rain event causing dam flooding is proof we should leave the dam Spring Pond Beavers alone rather than harassing them and calling them dam names. If you want the dam stream “restored” to a dam free-flow condition – contact the dam beavers – but if you are going to arrest them (they obviously did not pay any dam attention to your dam letter-being unable to read English) – be sure you read them their dam Miranda rights first. As for me, I am not going to cause more dam flooding or dam debris jams by interfering with these dam builders.

…

In my humble opinion, the Spring Pond Beavers have a right to build their dam unauthorized dams as long as the sky is blue, the grass is green, and water flows downstream. They have more dam right than I to live and enjoy Spring Pond. So, as far as I and the beavers are concerned, this dam case can be referred for more dam elevated enforcement action now. Why wait until 1/31/98?

The Spring Pond Beavers may be under the dam ice then, and there will be no dam way for you or your dam staff to contact/harass them then. In conclusion, I would like to bring to your attention a real environmental quality (health) problem: bears are actually defecating in our woods. I definitely believe you should be persecuting the defecating bears and leave the dam beavers alone. If you are going to investigate the beaver dam, watch your step! (The bears are not careful where they dump!) Being unable to comply with your dam request, and being unable to contact you on your dam answering machine, I am sending this response to your dam office.

Sincerely,

Stephen L. Tvedten

— Thanks to Lihwei Lin. Lihwei’s sleuthing verified that the letters are authentic.

Warning: Do Not Even Think About Using the Stairs

Warning on stairsJust one question: Is it okay to use the stairs?

Not surprisingly, since they are full of law professors and law students, law schools are pretty safe places.  Be hard to overlook these warnings at the University of Memphis law school.

Wait, what is that in the background? Looks like a dead body. Maybe just a tired 1L.

Poor Poor “Poopi” the Poodle

pet malpracticePoopi the poodle and her owners sued their veterinarian after Poopi underwent anesthesia for teeth cleaning and woke up with a three-inch scar on her abdomen. The vet mistakenly tried to spay Poopi, even though she had already been spayed as a puppy.

Poopi’s owners sought emotional distress damages for themselves as well as for Poopi, including expenses for Poopi’s psychological care. Plaintiffs conceded that under Ohio law dogs are considered to be personal property, but argued that the court should “do the right thing” by distinguishing pets from inanimate objects. They quoted from a law review article that equated the death of a “companion animal” to “the wrongful killing of any other family member.”

The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the trial judge, which had rejected the claim, although one member of the appellate panel concurred “reluctantly” and suggested that the legislature consider allowing damages for tortious injuries to pets.

Now that the suit has been wrapped up, perhaps Poopi should consult independent counsel about the possibility of pursuing emotional distress of having to go through life named “Poopi.”

— Oberschlake v. Veterinary Assoc. Animal Hosp., 785 N.E.2d 811 (Ohio Ct. App. 2003).

Viagra Not for Newborns

viagra warning labelFrom what I hear, Viagra is a high-quality product, but like all prescription products, it’s not for everyone. Specifically, Viagra is NOT FOR NEWBORNS.

This is the kind of warning people read and think “Those crazy [fill in the blank: lawyers, consumers, manufacturers …].” Who needs to be told that Viagra is not for newborns?

Healthcare providers. That’s right. Turns out that sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, has been found to be useful in preventing “rebound pulmonary hypertension” in infants.

But since it’s not FDA-approved for such a use, one can understand why Pfizer, the manufacturer, might feel a need to warn against this foreseeable use or misuse of the product.

(Since I posted this, I found out my 93-year-old mom is feeding Viagra to her female dog on her veterinarian’s instructions for some kind of pulmonary condition. This comes out in a phone conversation where the topic thread started like this: “Have you heard about this product they have for … oh, what’s it called? I forget, but it’s for men so they can keep having sex forever.” “Uh, yeah, mom, I’ve heard of it.”)

About Legal Oddities

Of the millions of strange events that occur every day in the world, an amazingly high percentage of them have some connection to the law. Why? Because the law permeates every aspect of human existence. The law’s intertwining with daily life is limited only by the ability of human beings to act properly, rationally, and legally. In other words, there are no limits at all.

The world is overflowing with weird legal news, way more, it turned out, than Lawhaha.com could handle. We decided to leave current legal news reporting to others. Legal Oddities focuses on legal curios with a longer shelf life, in these categories:

About Strange Judicial Opinions

Strange Judicial Opinions is dedicated to those robed raconteurs, rascals and renegades who brighten up the lives of lawyers and law students everywhere by daring to be different.

A legitimate debate exists as to whether it is appropriate for judges to use their written opinions and orders as vehicles for personal creative expression, including humor. Needless to say, at Lawhaha.com, we favor such efforts when they are clever, intelligent, cute, or just plain weird, and don’t unnecessarily demean lawyers or parties.

Even the soberest of judges can’t help writing amusing opinions and orders in cases involving odd facts, issues or parties. When, for example, a judge has an ex parte communication with a talking cat, is required to address lawsuits against God or Satan or respond to a plaintiff claiming to be a Martian, it’s not easy to retain the solemn tone that is the norm for legal proceedings.

Strange Judicial Opinions collects a variety of amusing or otherwise unusual judicial writings in the categories below. Enjoy!

About Tortland

• Warnings and Instructions

• Spot the Tort

• Interesting Tort Cases

Tortland is an odyssey into that great body of mishaps, missteps, misdeeds, slips, falls, spills, chills, thrills, botched operations, vicious dogs, tainted food, falling ladders, collapsing reservoirs, defective products, slander, libel, and pain and suffering that collectively make up one of the world’s most controversial and certainly most interesting adjudicatory mechanisms: the American tort system.

Tortman! Andrew J McClurgI got the nickname Tortman way back in the day.  Walking past a group of students, one of them looked up and said, “Yo, Tortman, whazzup?” For some reason, the nickname stuck.

In most cases, there’s nothing at all funny about real tort cases because they involve people who were injured or even killed. (See blog post about humanizing torts.) But it’s that same human element–combined with some very unusual fact patterns–that makes tort law so fascinating.

Spot the Tort — Making the World Safer One Tort at a Time

Rolling TortMy kid’s nickname is Tortgirl because—no kidding—one of her favorite games when she was a child was “Spot the Tort.” It worked like this: We’d be sitting in a public place and I’d say, “Tortgirl, spot the tort!” Then I’d time her as she ran around trying to identify the nearest defective premises condition. Sound sick? Probably, but I’ve taught thousands of first-year law students to play Spot the Tort over the years and they’ve lived happier and healthier lives because of it.

Send in pictures of potential torts you spot out there in Tortland. The moment you start paying attention, you’ll realize tortious risks are everywhere. (Technically, Spot the Tort is really Spot the Risk because a completed tort doesn’t occur until someone is injured by the dangerous condition.) You don’t have to be a lawyer to spot a potential tort, which can be defined in this context as any observable physical condition that looks “unreasonably dangerous.”*

* For the non-legally inclined, an “unreasonable danger” is one where the burden of eliminating the danger (such as the cost of fixing a hole in the sidewalk) is less than the probability of the danger resulting in injury multiplied by the potential severity of the injury–that is, how likely is it someone will step in the hole and how badly could they be hurt?

Warnings and Instructions

Product or activity warning labels and instructions can provide great entertainment.  Seriously.  If you are bored, dig out some instruction booklets for products you own.  It will be a good time, I promise.  I even tell my students to take their dates to Walmart on a Saturday night for a fun night of strolling the aisles reading product warning labels.  At least one student took me up on the idea.

Send in any funny or interesting warnings or instructions you come across. Use the Contact link at the top of any site page, which allows for attachments.

In the meantime, here are three things most people don’t understand about “wacky” product warning labels:

Three Things Everyone Should Know About Product Warning and the Law 

(1) Product makers do not owe a legal duty to warn of obvious dangers, but often warn of them anyway to protect themselves. After all, extra warnings don’t cost much to include and who knows what a jury might conclude in hindsight was or was not an obvious danger? Unfortunately, there is an intangible cost to unnecessary warnings, which is that they dilute the impact of important warnings that people need to pay attention to.

(2) Some warnings that sound wacky are included because consumers have in fact misused the product in exactly that way. Take, for example, this warning on a blow dryer-type hair dryer:

Never use while sleeping

What the heck? What moron would use a hair dryer while sleeping? It turns out some consumers use blow dryers to keep their beds warm on winter nights.

(3) Some warnings that sound crazy are, in fact, good warnings that provide information about product risks unknown to reasonable consumers. As Exhibit A, I offer this warning from a set of non-stick cookware, one of my all-time favs (click to expand the pic):

Silverstone Harm to You or Your Bird

Harm to “you or your bird”? An unusual warning to be sure, but the non-stick cookware coating polytetrafluorethylene, which is used in Teflon® and a number of similar products, apparently omits fumes when overheated that can kill birds. If you have a bird, you’d definitely want to know that.

Enjoy Lawhaha’s collection of warning label and instructions.

Interesting Tort Cases

Tort law has produced more than its share of classic cases, often known and remembered because of the unusual circumstances befalling ordinary people. These classics range from a five-year-old boy being sued for battery for pulling a chair out from under an elderly woman (Garratt v. Dailey) to Helen Palsgraf’s fateful afternoon at the Long Island train station in 1920 (Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co.). Interesting Tort Cases includes tort cases both old and new, serious and amusing.  Please send along any particularly interesting tort cases you come across.  Use the Contact link at the top of any site page.

Consensual Sex Answer Not What the Prof Had in Mind

–From Paul Aaron Edwards, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Date of event: Spring 2005

The case under discussion in Constitutional Law was Bowers v. Hardwick. The professor called on me asking me such special questions as “What is your definition of unnatural sex?” As I dodged attempt after attempt by the professor to draw me into a farcical statement which would grant him hundreds of laughs at my expense, he finally slipped up with the following: “So, Mr. Edwards, when is consensual sex particularly harmful?”

To which I replied:

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you’re the one she likes, or the one she’s cheating on!”

The class erupted in laughter, at the professor’s expense, and I received the greatest reward of all: he called on a different student to recite the rest of the day’s questions.

 

About Law School Stories

Enjoy Lawhaha.com’s collection of funny law school stories in these categories:

Believing that law school humor lore is part of our cultural legal heritage that should be preserved, Lawhaha.com collects funny stories about law school, with a current inventory of more than 100 stories from students and graduates of 74 law schools.

Share your funniest law school moments!  Use the Contact link at the top of every page. Please include the name of the law school and approximate year in which the event occurred.

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying law school leaves indelible marks on the psyches of those who attend. Numerous studies show law students suffer disproportionate anxiety, depression, and other psychological dysfunction compared to the public at large. But despite (or perhaps because of) all the stress, tedium, and exhausting workloads, law schools can at times be hilarious places. All lawyers and law students have memories of comic relief that broke the tension and brightened their journey down the long road toward a Juris Doctor degree. Please share yours.

Schools Represented in Law School Stories and Number of Entries Per School

Below are the law schools, and number of entries per school, represented in Lawhaha.com’s collection of amusing law school stories. Help us grow this important cultural library of legal education humor history.

University at Albany (3)
Appalachian School of Law
University of Arkansas-Fayetteville (2)
University of Arkansas-Little Rock (6)
American University
Barry University
Boston University
Brooklyn Law School
Campbell University
Catholic University (2)
University of Cincinnati
Cleveland-Marshall University
Columbia University
Cumberland University
Dalhousie (Nova Scotia) (2)
Duke University
University of Florida (3)
Florida A & M University
Florida Coastal University
Florida International University (3)
Georgetown University
Georgia State University
Gonzaga
University of Georgia (2)
Harvard University (3)
Hastings University
University of Hawaii
University of Houston
Indiana University (Bloomington)
University of Kansas (2)
University of Kentucky
Université Laval’s Faculty of Law (Quebec) (2)
Lewis & Clark University
University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Loyola University (Chicago)
Loyola University (Los Angeles)
Lousiana State University
Marquette University
University of Maryland (2)
University of Massachusetts (2)
University of Memphis
McGeorge University
University of Michigan (3)
Michigan State University
University of Nevada-Las Vegas (2)
Northeastern University
University of North Carolina
University of Oklahoma (5)
Oklahoma City University
Pacific Coast University
University of Pittsburgh (2)
Ohio State University
Regent University
Southern Illinois
St. John’s University
Stanford University (2)
University of San Diego
University of South Texas
Southern Illinois University
Southern Methodist University
Temple University
University of Tennessee (2)
Texas Wesleyan University (2)
Thomas M. Cooley University
University of Utah
Valparaiso University
University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg)
University of Virginia
Wake Forest (4)
Washington University
Washburn University (2)
Willamette University
College of William & Mary
University of Wisconsin