How we can help New Orleans Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

There will be a lot of people who will claim to have a connection to New Orleans in the next several weeks who really don't or didn't. I have no such connection, having neither family nor residence nor patrimony nor any educational background in that city. It is American, but somehow its own sort of place, with the Napoleonic Code, unique culture and its uninhibited spirit at Mardi Gras and really throughout the year. New Orleans and Louisiana do not give a damn what the rest of the country think about them, and for that they deserve respect.

Now we face the nearly unthinkable. In a certain sense, New Orleans does not exist anymore.

The city will rebuild, in some sense, but 80% of the city is now under poisonous water, and gravity is keeping the entire city filled like a soup bowl under a running faucet. As is well-discussed elsewhere, New Orleans is built perhaps 10 feet below sea level; houses in New Orleans do not typically have basements due to flooding issues. Several levees broke, and we now have a city 10-20 feet below polluted water with debris, industrial waste, corpses from mausolea, gasoline, the inventory of the retail trade of a metro area of 1.5 million people (what did not get looted, anyway), dead animals, sewage and sewage and sewage. The pumps that keep the city dry do not work; the water is higher outside than within, so even if they did work gravity would pour the water right back.

Reasonable people can conclude that more will die from this hurricane than died on September 11th. Thousands are dead, but the bodies are floating; no vital records office can tabulate the bodies because the hospitals and mortuaries and the vital records offices themselves are filled with 10 feet of water, so no one is filling out any forms, since no one has a house. The public transit system of New Orleans was pretty good, but it contains neither boats nor submarines nor, sadly, helicopters. Electric generators could work, if there were only dry land and gasoline, both of which are unavailable in New Orleans. It will take a long time to get New Orleans up to the current infrastructure level of Baghdad. There is no drug trade in New Orleans for the first time in a century; dealers and users cannot meet on the street corner because there is no street.

It's not just New Orleans, either. The Mississippi River basin has flooded; some counties have disappeared.

As an attorney, I don't know what we could do to help our sisters and brothers in the Bar. I envision an army of insurance lawyers, including both locals in retirement and some out of state lawyers getting really smart on Louisiana law really fast. I envision a swarm of volunteer public defenders to represent all types of defendants charged with social disorder crimes in the aftermath, similar to the efforts of volunteers after the 1968 riots. Property lines will move, dissolve, kink, buckle. Disasters are good for law practices in the long term - divorce, bankruptcy, drug charges, crimes of despair and of madness and of frustration from weeks of the unremitting September heat.

Crablaw's friend Craig has suggested Second Harvest as an appropriate charity to assist the impoverished, the devastated and the displaced. I pass the recommendation on without personal verification, though Craig's skeptical eye is essentially a Good Crabbing Award in itself.

-- Bruce Godfrey

The White Badge of Courage Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

A minor thought.

You can tell whether a father of a baby is right handed or left handed by looking at his left shoulder. If he has a white formula stain on his left shoulder, he is right-handed.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Chicken-Necker - Paris Hilton's Crab Mallet? Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

This page from Celebrity Appliances (tm) offers a "Crab Mallet" for the princely sum of $9.14.

A crab mallet is designed to be light and simple - a long skinny wooden dowel handle and a short wide head - to tap the crab shell into large pieces to access the crab's meat with a crab knife. A crab mallet is more like a pencil, in a way, than a hammer. It is almost a throw-away item; you literally throw them away after a while because they are semi-porous wood and it gets difficult and arguably unsanitary to try to wash the stinking crab remains off of them. The idea that one would sell a crab mallet for that price is ridiculous, sort of like selling a No. 2 pencil for $3.95.

In mitigation, the ad does identify a product number "CM-8" suggesting a set of 8 mallets for $9.14, which is not a great price for ordinary crab mallets but not outrageous. The ad identifies "Crab Mallet," however, not "MalletS." One can buy a crab mallet or mallets easily where one would likely buy crabs or seafood generally, whether from a brick-and-mortar retailer or through a mail-order crab packer such as Linton's. Either way, paying retail plus a shipping charge to buy crab mallets from a Pennsylvania company called "Celebrity Appliances" seems bizarre, a sort of "brainless hotel heiress celebrity" thing to do. Nothing in the ad would bar the merchant from getting away with selling only one mallet for that price. As an attorney and a Marylander, I cannot leave this one alone.

This ad - not necessarily the company as a whole, just this ad - gets a Chicken Necker "award" for its ambiguity and for connecting the Hollywood concept of "Celebrity" to the noble crab mallet, a very non-Hollywood product used by very non-Hollywood Marylanders on the Eastern Shore and elsewhere. I will revoke the Chicken-Necker award - and will consider a Good Crabbing award instead - if Celebrity Appliances or its loyal customers can reasonably establish the bona fides of its wares to a Maryland customer base.

-- Bruce Godfrey

New Date Calculator Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Craig Harman has generously drafted a model deadline date calculator for Crablaw. It is so good to have friends who have the brains to do honest work, not just practice law.

The current draft calculates a 45 day response time for a model discovery filing under the Maryland Rules. We will adjust to reflect specifically for District Court and Circuit Court rules in the near future, and from there to include fancier calculations such as those for filing an Answer or preliminary Motion to Dismiss, counterclaims, etc.

Ultimately, I would like to be able to draft calculators that will accommodate standard Circuit Court scheduling orders from various county in civil and, potentially, criminal matters.

Thanks again to Craig. Please feel free to make comments here on bells and whistles that you would like to see added or considered.

-- Bruce Godfrey

The Hotel Baltimore Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Almost enough ink has been spilt about the new Convention Center Hotel. Since every voice but a libertarian voice has been heard, so for the sake of beating the horse finally out of its misery....

If the hotel is profitable, why is the private sector scared of making money for the first time ever by investing in this hotel? Hotel chains build and run hotels; to paraphrase the young boy at the Passover Seder, why is this hotel different from all other hotels ever? If the hotel is a money loser, but building money losing hotels is a good idea, why not build 25 of them?

If the hotel is a profitable, and it turns out that private financing plans are available (which they are by recent reports), why is the city competing with private industry in this field? What's next - the City going into the florist business? how about City candy stores? Would the City like to build restaurants in Little Italy to promote the broader consumption of veal piccata?

The answer, of course, is that City councilmen and the Mayor get political props, such as favoritism for City residents in employment and patronage from the unions who will build and perhaps ultimately operate this municipal experiment in socialist industry models.

Baltimore City has the nastiest personal property taxes and real estate taxes in the State. Theoretically these horrendous rates are due to special needs of an impoverished urban citizenry. Yet the tax rates are driving businesses and residents to the suburbs and the City responds by ... competing with the hospitality industry and the financial sector. Assuming that one believes in heavy taxation philosophically (I don't, but nonetheless), why is this use of City funds better than the same expenditure for criminal prosecution of sexual predators, mass transit development or public school repair? Why not get government out of the way of development, rather than taxing it to death with one hand while competing with it with the other?

If the City really wanted to help development, it would make Baltimore a more attractive place to do business by lowering the insane tax rates and developing the basic transportation infrastructure for residents and tourists alike so that private financiers and investors will stop looking at Baltimore as the little syphillis-and-heroin-ridden-tax-hell that "couldn't." You don't have to be a liberal fanatic to believe that modern urban environments require modern urban transportation systems, and you don't have to be a libertarian wacko like me to think that the City of Baltimore should not go into the hotel and resort business.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Summertime .... Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I have not noticed much in the way of news here in Maryland. It has been a difficult few weeks professionally and personally. One suspects that the heat is keeping most news from occurring, or perhaps the wilted reporters lack the will to report.

The Governor is keeping a low profile, perhaps with his children and a fishing rod, one would hope. The Mayor has scarcely been heard. The legislature is not in session, meaning that our property is not newly endangered and will not be for several months more. The heat is tiresome, the Orioles flounder, drugs continue to be sold in Baltimore so criminal defense attorneys will survive.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Back to Business Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

After a two-week hiatus, the Crab is back in business.

-- Bruce Godfrey