The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case of National Rifle Association v. City of Chicago. The suit was filed by the NRA and others against the City of Chicago and Village of Oak Park which have ordinances that ban the possession of most forms of handguns. The suit was filed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller which struck down D.C.’s handgun ban.

The Seventh Circuit declined to apply Heller to subdivisions of the state, reasoning that Heller applied the Second Amendment to the federal government. In the past, the Supreme Court has rebuffed efforts to apply the Second Amendment to the states. In this case, Judge Easterbrook reasoned that, while the rationales for not applying the Second Amendment to the states may well have been undermined by subsequent decisions, it was the Supreme Court’s prerogative — and not that of the Seventh Circuit — to bury past Supreme Court precedent when the time comes.

The New York Times has an article indicating that Southern District of Indiana Judge David Hamilton will be President Obama’s choice to fill a vacancy on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Sounds reasonable to me. Judge Hamilton wrote a well thought out opinion (pdf) when he enjoined the legislature from state endorsed prayer. (My digest of the opinion here.) Seems like a solid pick to me.

A story in today’s Lafayette Journal & Courier raises a principle I’ll call “Masson’s Inverse Law of Judgments.” (Never mind that I probably picked it up from an older, wiser lawyer years ago.)

It goes something like this: “The difficulty of obtaining a judgment is inversely proportional to the difficulty of collecting on the judgment.”

The story in the Journal & Courier has to do with a $157 Million default judgment obtained by jury trial. That is an oddity on a number of levels. First, it is rare that a jury is called in to make any default decisions. Typically, in default situations, a plaintiff will be entitled to a finding that the defendant is liable by operation of law and then will have to put forth some prima facie evidence of damages. The damage determination will be made by a judge, usually without a lot of in depth scrutiny. If it passes the laugh test, the judge will usually grant the default judgment. Second, it’s a whopping big judgment. The article suggests that, after some review, nobody can point to a bigger wrongful death claim. (The suit alleged that a tree stand malfunctioned, causing the death of a man while hunting.)

So, now, having obtained a large, relatively easy judgment, plaintiff will have to go looking for assets. That will be the tough part. If they find any pockets, the people attached to those pockets will likely attempt to set aside the default judgment which, while depending on the circumstances, is achievable — more so, probably, when the court looking at the motion to set aside sees that the person is looking at such a huge judgment.

The 7th Circuit issued a bankruptcy decision (pdf) that answered a question, the answer to which I had just taken for granted. In Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you get to claim a homestead exemption which exempts some portion of the value of your residential home from going to the bankruptcy trustee for distribution to your creditors. The level of the exemption is set by state law. In Illinois, it was $7,500 at the time the bankruptcy in the above case was filed. (In Indiana, it’s $15,000. My understanding is that Texas and Florida have very high residential exemptions; perhaps unlimited. So, if you want to screw your creditors, it might be advantageous to have a lot of your assets tied up in really nice homes in your Florida residence.)

If you have spouses who own the home and are filing bankruptcy, they each get to use their exemption — so $15,000 in Illinois and $30,000 in Indiana. The question came up, what if both spouses are filing bankruptcy and both live in the house, but only one is titled as owner. At the trial level, the court determined that the non-titled spouse who had a possessory interest in the residence was entitled to an exemption. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that, at least with respect to the Illinois exemption, the non-titled spouse is not entitled to an exemption.

The 7th Circuit issued an opinion today (pdf) that provides a nice review of some general principles involving an individual’s constitutional right (or lack thereof) to government protection.

Generally speaking, a citizen does not have a right to government protection; at least not one that’s compensable if it’s violated. In Christine Sandage v. Vanderburgh County, the plaintiff was murdered by a man who was out of jail on work release. Prior to her murder, the plaintiff had complained that the eventual murderer was harassing her. The complaint basically alleged that, by failing to act on the complaint of harassment by revoking the murderer’s work release privileges, the county had violated the plaintiff’s rights by depriving her of her life without due process of law in violation of the 14th Amendment. The district court dismissed the case on a 12(b)(6) motion which means, even assuming the facts alleged in the complaint are all true, the complaint fails to state a claim recognized under the law. In other words, even assuming that the county’s failure to act to lock this guy up was reckless, the plaintiff (or her estate, technically) was not entitled to be paid by the county for violation of her constitutional rights.

The court pointed out that there is a distinction that is sometimes compensable where the government has acted in a way that deprives you of the ability to care for yourself. For example, if the government recklessly fails to protect you or provide reasonable medical care while you’re in jail, that can result in a constitutional claim.

Back in May, I put up a post discussing some of the political shenanigans leading up to the conviction of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic Governor of Alabama who appears to have been the target of a political prosecution by the Department of Justice.

Time Magazine (via Firedoglake) is reporting that the jurors in that case were communicating with the prosecution during deliberations and that those communications were not disclosed to the judge or the defense.

A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government’s legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror’s romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. “The jurors kept sending out messages” via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as “very interested” in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court. The same juror was later described reaching out to members of the prosecution team for personal advice about her career and educational plans.

The article discusses other irregularities and improprieties in the trial, but this one seems open and shut. You just flat don’t communicate with jurors when they are deliberating. And, if through no fault of your own, a juror communicates to you; you tell everyone immediately.

(H/t Indiana Law Blog) The New York Times has a fairly good article on some troublesome aspects of the use of expert witnesses in litigation.

Basically, there is a tendency for experts to be hired guns who spout opinions favorable to the side that hires them:

“To put it bluntly, in many professions, service as an expert witness is not considered honest work,” Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in the Wisconsin Law Review. “The contempt of lawyers and judges for experts is famous. They regularly describe expert witnesses as prostitutes.”

Melvin Belli, the famed trial lawyer, endorsed this view. “If I got myself an impartial witness,” he once said, “I’d think I was wasting my money.”

At the end of the day, it tends to be an expensive and not very useful sidetrack in the legal process. If one side has an expert, the other side tends to feel a need to get one as well. The two will often cancel each other out, and the two sides have just spend several thousand dollars to stand still.

I stay well away from family law cases to the extent possible. The emotions are far too high and of an ugly nature compared to the resources typically available to compensate me for dealing with those emotions. However, I did want to flag an article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that highlights some interesting issues as well as reinforcing the notion from a previous post that, frequently when you pass up a reasonable settlement offer, you’re going to end up losing.

The case is the divorce case of the former New Jersey Governor who resigned and admitted being gay. He offered his ex-wife $300,000 as a settlement early on in the case. She was mad and refused. She ended up getting $110,000. The four year case ended up generating $1 million in legal fees.

It also raised interesting questions about the implications of gay partnerships in places where gays aren’t allowed to get married. For example, should the income of McGreevey’s partner be considered in determining how much child support McGreevey is able to pay?

Anyway, once again, refusal of a reasonable settlement offer results in nobody winning but the lawyers.