There have been more than three years of Lowering the Bar (the blog), but only three so far of the year-end summaries I've written for the law journal The Green Bag. (Another one is in the works and will be published early next year.) If you're interested, I just posted them in the sidebar (PDFs here, here, and here) under "Great Literary Works," which is not a reference to them specifically but to "If Great Literary Works Had Been Written by Lawyers," two editions of which were also published in The Green Bag a while back.
Many of the events mentioned may be familiar to you if you've been keeping up on this important news by coming here often, but these are summaries arranged in chronological order, so you can see just how ridiculous that year was at any particular time. Examples:
Apr. 7 [2011]: From a report of cases filed in New Orleans on this date: "John B____ v. Bethala, et al., No. 2011-12066. Negligence action. While the plaintiff was staying on the third floor of the defendants' hotel, a wasp flew into his room. While the plaintiff was attempting to kill the wasp, he fell out of the window."
Jan. 24 [2011]: Clarence Thomas admits in letters to the Committee on Financial Disclosure that for years he has routinely failed to disclose information about his wife’s employment, as he is required to do by federal law. Thomas, who is one of the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, states that the information "was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions."
May 1 [2010]: "This has got to rank as one of the worst attempted jailbreaks ever," says a spokesperson for the UK’s Prison Service after a man dressed as Snoopy tried to free a relative from prison. Officers said the jailbreak failed partly because the man was armed only with a water pistol, and partly because he had the wrong prison. An apparently frustrated Snoopy then damaged a number of cars in a parking lot. "It's not every day you see a giant cartoon dog go on the rampage after trying to break into a prison," the spokesperson says.
There's no shortage of material this year, either.
Thanks again to Ross Davies et al. at The Green Bag.
