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Category: Law
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Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling defends against another lawsuit
The estate of a dead writer who created a fictional wizard named Willy wants $50 million from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, claiming she stole passages from their man’s book and infringed on his – and now the estate’s – copyright.
The estate also says it intends to sue Rowling individually.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)The showdown – Rowling’s second plagiarism lawsuit – will take place in London and invoke the ghost of Adrian Jacobs, author of The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, published in 1987. The book was first rejected by Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, more than a decade before it gave Rowling’s her start.
Jacobs died about the time the first book in Rowling’s hugely lucrative series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, hit the market.
Tuesday, Bloomsbury responded to the plagiarism accusation in the London Daily Mail, calling it “unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue,” dismissed Jacobs’ book as “a very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution,” and said the claim was first made in 2004 – years after the first several Potter books were published – and the publisher was “unable to identify any text in the Harry Potter books which was said to copy Willy the Wizard.”
Rowling, who prevailed in an unrelated 2002 plagiarism suit after that writer was found to have changed evidence to bolster her own claim, had no comment about the latest clash of wizards.
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Mark Walsh gets another crack at Lehman fundsJune 21, 2009 at 10:10am
The man some blame for the investments that brought Lehman Brothers Holdings down is getting a second chance to profit from those investments.
Lawyer Marc S. Dreier awaits sentencing after plea
But for Bernard L. Madoff, Marc S. Dreier might be a household name.
Accused of money laundering, wire fraud, securities fraud and other charges, Dreier pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Manhattan. He had been charged with selling nearly $700 million in fake promissory notes. Investors may have lost as much as $400 million.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)He faces a sentence of 20 years to life on each of the most serious charges against him.
“I understand that everything I was doing was illegal,” Dreier told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on the day before his 59th birthday, Bloomberg news reported.
Rakoff allowed Dreier to remain under house arrest until his July 13 sentencing.
By a purely monetary standard, Dreier’s offenses did not match those of Madoff, who took investors for as much as $68 billion.
However, Dreier beats Madoff on style points, according to Robert Kolker of New York Magazine.
“Dreier took a starring role in his own financial drama,” Kolker wrote. “Where Madoff was outwardly quiet and self-effacing, Dreier was openly egotistical, even smug. He seemed to think he could lie to his victims’ faces and get away with it, to thrill, even, in the art of deceiving people.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Dreier was the founder of Dreier LLP, a 250-member firm that had offices in New York City and Los Angeles before it fell apart after Dreier’s arrest.
Seemingly successful, Dreier lived the high life before his troubles became public. He collected cars, art, celebrity friends. He gave to charities; dated beautiful women.
He also created a financial house of cards that began to tumble last year as some investors asked for their money back.
Scrambling for funds, Dreier flew to Toronto in December. While there, he represented himself to a hedge fund executive as an official with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
Something seemed wrong to the hedge fund guy; the police were tipped off. Dreier was arrested for impersonation. He spent a few days in jail and then was released on $100,000 bail.
Unshaven, looking like someone coming up for air after a binge, Dreier headed back to the U.S. Authorities welcomed him a LaGuardia Airport with an arrest warrant.
He stayed in jail until February when he was released on a $10 million bond.
Under the terms of his bail, Dreier, who is represented by defense attorney Gerald L. Shargel, can’t leave his Upper East Side apartment without court permission.
He has to pay for security guards and can’t have a cell phone. (The apartment is now for sale for $10 million.)
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GM considers move from Detroit’s Renaissance CenterMay 14, 2009 at 8:08am
When GM CEO Fritz Henderson raised the possibility that the automaker could vacate the Renaissance Center, it raised the threat of both real and symbolic devastation for Detroit.
Henry Schuelke brings history of probes to Stevens case
Henry F. Schuelke III, a lawyer with links to a wide variety of high-profile cases, has taken on the task of investigating the bungled prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the job to Schuelke, whose resume includes an in-house investigation of Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)Schuelke will try to determine if six government attorneys committed possible crimes in their handling of the corruption trial that led to Stevens’ conviction last year a few days before Election Day.
Stevens, 84, a Republican who had served in the Senate for 40 years, lost by fewer than 4,000 votes, his defeat at the polls attributed by many to his loss at trial.
The Justice Department withdrew the indictment against Stevens last week. Sullivan threw out the conviction on Tuesday, citing prosecution misconduct that included the failure to turn over to the defense evidence favorable to Stevens.
The Justice Department is investigating the prosecution, as well. However, Sullivan said an outside investigator was needed.
“The events of this case are too numerous and serious to leave to an internal inquiry by the Justice Department,” Sullivan said.
Schuelke, 66, a partner in the Washington firm of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler and a former assistant U.S. attorney, has taken on the investigation of government officials before.
In 1981, He served as special Democratic counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when it was considering the nomination of Alexander Haig to be secretary of state in the Reagan administration.
In 1989, he acted as special counsel to the U.S. Senate committee looking into allegations against then-U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York. After a long process, the committee chose not to censure D’Amato.
In 1996, During the Clinton administration, Schuelke represented Carolyn Huber, the special assistant to the president who found some missing papers related to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s work while at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas.
Later Schuelke represented Betty Currie, President Clinton’s personal secretary, during the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Away from government, Schuelke has represented Ben F. Glisan Jr., the former treasurer of the Enron Corporation, and Jack L. Williams, a former lobbyist for Tyson Foods.
In 2004, Greenberg Traurig LLP hired Schuelke to conduct an internal investigation into the conduct of Abramoff, a lobbyist with the firm who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion.
Fellow attorneys said this week that Schuelke brings the right blend of experience and temperament to the task of looking into the handling of the Stevens prosecution.
“He’s somebody who is scrupulously balanced, which I think is what you are looking for,” W. Lawrence Barcella Jr., a litigator with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, told the Associated Press.
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Commerce Secy Gary Locke is longtime advocate of Boeing, MicrosoftApril 10, 2009 at 8:49am
From the outset of his political career, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was bullish about business.
2008 bust is boom for H. Rodgin Cohen
As the financial crisis spread wider and wider in 2008, H. Rodgin Cohen got more and more work.
For all of this, The American Lawyer magazine has named Cohen, the chairman of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, the No. 1 dealmaker of 2008.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)By the magazine’s count, Cohen took part in at least 17 “global credit crisis-related mergers, bailouts and cash infusions” during the year.
Cohen was a key player in the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase, and he represented Fannie Mae in its takeover talks with the U.S. government.
He advised Lehman Brothers Holdings during its bankruptcy, just as he counseled Barclays Bank when it acquired some of Lehman Brothers.
Cohen was there for Wachovia Corporation when it was sold to Wells Fargo, and he helped Goldman Sachs become a bank holding company.
Why did Cohen get all this work?
“He probably has the most impressive reputation in terms of banking and work with Treasury and the Fed of any lawyer out there,” Stephen Ashley, former chairman of the Fannie Mae board of directors, told The American Lawyer.
“It’s like going to see a surgeon,” said Robert Steel, the former chief executive of Wachovia. “You want a surgeon who has seen a lot of these operations.”
Cohen suggested to the magazine that he’ll have plenty of work as 2009 goes on, as well.
He didn’t think the Troubled Asset Relief Program was well packaged, though he did express faith in President Obama and Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary.
A native of West Virginia and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Cohen, 64, has worked with troubled banks for more than 30 years. In 1980, he was also involved in the resolution of the Iran hostage crisis.
In March, Cohen reportedly withdrew his name from consideration to be deputy treasury secretary.
The American Lawyer’s No. 2 dealmaker for 2008 was Edward Herlihy, a lawyer with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, outside counsel for Bank of America. Herlihy advised the bank in its merger with Merrill Lynch & Co.
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Commerce Secy Gary Locke is longtime advocate of Boeing, MicrosoftApril 10, 2009 at 8:49am
From the outset of his political career, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was bullish about business.
Harvard Law ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
To save on travel expenses, the Harvard Law School Class of 1991 might as well have its reunion this year at the White House.
The best-known graduate of the class, President Barack Obama, is both working and living there, and he’s shown no reluctance to hire his classmates.
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(requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Class of ‘91 members Cassandra Q. Butts and Norman Eisen are serving as deputy counsels to the president.
Their classmate Michael B.G. Froman is a deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic security affairs.
David Kris, also ‘91, has been picked to head the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. And Thomas J. Perrelli, ‘91, has been nominated to be associate attorney general.
The 1991 graduates are just part of what the Harvard Law Record has called the “avalanche” of Harvard law alumni who have joined or are soon to join the Obama administration.
The best-known member of this group is Michelle Obama, the First Lady, and a 1988 Harvard Law graduate.
Daniel J. Meltzer, ‘75, and a professor at the law school during Obama’s time there, is the president’s principal deputy counsel.
Michael J. Gottlieb and Danielle Gray, 2003 graduates, are associate counsels to the president. Blake Roberts, Class of 2006, will be a deputy associate counsel.
Samantha Power, ‘99, is serving on the National Security Council. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2003 for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
Power had been a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as well as an adviser (sometimes controversial) to the Obama presidential campaign.
Todd Stern, ‘75, is the special envoy for climate change.
And Jocelyn Frye, ‘88, a law school classmate and friend of Michelle Obama, is serving as director of policy and projects for the First Lady and as a deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.
Obama has nominated Elena Kagan, Harvard Law ‘86, to be the U.S. solicitor general. Kagan was dean of the law school. David W. Ogden, ‘81, has been nominated to be deputy attorney general.
One Harvard Law School graduate and 1991 alum not working at the White House is Bradford A. Berenson, a Republican and a former associate White House Council in the George W. Bush administration.
While at Harvard, Obama and Berenson worked together at the Harvard Law Review, Obama serving as president, Berenson as Supreme Court Editor.
According to Berenson, Obama may have learned how to mediate competing factions while running a Law Review staff that was divided not only by politics but also by legal philosophies.
“You know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views,” Berenson told Frontline on PBS last year. “And Barack very much fell into the latter category.”
Obama will probably feel right at home at cabinet meetings, as the room will be full of lawyers:
There’s Vice President Joe Biden (Syracuse Law), Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. (Columbia University), Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack (Albany), Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (University of Virginia), Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (Michigan) and Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton (Yale University).
Gary Locke, the nominee to be secretary of commerce, graduated from Boston University Law School.
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Edward Liddy caught in the eye of AIG stormMarch 15, 2009 at 9:42am
AIG has been described as the company where federal dollars go to die. It may also be a career killer for Edward M. Liddy.
Lawsuit against Skull and Bones renews mystery about Geronimo’s remains
The descendants of Geronimo, the Apache chieftain whose skull is rumored to be part of the initiation rite of Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding the return of his remains.
The lawsuit, which named Yale’s oldest and most powerful secret society, the university and the U.S. government, was brought by 20 members of the legendary warrior’s family on the 100th anniversary of his death.
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The society, whose membership includes three U.S. presidents, including two Bushes, supposedly makes new members kiss the Chiricahua Apache’s skull as part of their induction.
“It’s been 100 years since the death of my great-grandfather in 1909. It’s been 100 years of imprisonment,” Harlyn Geronimo said outside of court in Washington D.C.
“The spirit is wandering until a proper burial has been performed. The only way to put this into closure is to release the remains, his spirit, so that he can be taken back to his homeland in the Gila Mountains, at the head of the Gila River.”
The suit contends that Geronimo’s descendants are entitled to his remains and funerary possessions under the 1990 American Indian Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The Geronimo family is being represented by Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson. “In this lawsuit, we’re going to find out if the bones are there or not,” Clark said.
The latest support for the claim that Geronimo’s remains had been swiped by members of the powerful clandestine society was uncovered two years ago by a researcher at Yale. It’s a June 1918 letter from one Bonesman, Winter Mead, to another, F. Trubee Davison:
“The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club . . . is now safe inside [the clubhouse] together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn.”
Another account alleges that Prescott Bush was one of the grave robbers. But at least until now, no member of the society has ever come forward to answer questions.
We’ve written before about how Sen. John McCain tried to broker a meeting in the mid-1980s between George H.W. Bush and one of his Arizona constituents – a former Apache chieftain name Ned Anderson seeking the return of the remains.
Bush, however, wasn’t interested, and the matter was dropped, according to Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb. A 2006 appeal for the skull’s return, this time to George W., from Harlyn Geronimo, also went unanswered, according to a report by the Associated Press.
For all the intrigue, some believe the whole thing is a story concocted by drunken frat boys.
“It’s all a bunch of poppycock,” said Towana Spivey, a Geronimo expert, a Chickasaw, and director of the Fort Sill National Historic Landmark Museum told the Washington Post. “He’s still buried where he was originally.”
Spivey says he is so certain because the Apaches deliberately misled outsiders as to the location of the grave, and a description of the tomb the Bonesmen allegedly found doesn’t match Geronimo’s.
Of course, Skull and Bones could clear up the controversy, if it wanted, by sending out its skull for forensic testing, said Garrick Bailey, professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa and former member of the board that oversees the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“You should be able to tell whether or not it’s that of an elderly Native American male,” Bailey told the Hartford Courant. “Geronimo was one of the great iconic figures of American Indian history, particularly as it relates to the spirit of resistance. If I was his descendant, I would be appalled that the question lingers.”
Yet those questions are what give a secret society its grasp on the imagination. The order, founded in 1832, has always been a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists because of its closely held secrets and its powerful membership.
In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members. George W. Bush wrote in his 1999 autobiography: “[In my] senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society; so secret, I can’t say anything more.”
When asked what it meant that both he and Bush were Bonesmen, former Presidential candidate John Kerry said, “Not much because it’s a secret.”
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This post is tagged with: George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Geronimo, Harlyn Geronimo, John Kerry, John McCain, Law, Prescott Bush, Ramsey ClarkRead related stories: Law · Recent Stories0 Comments
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Citigroup’s Pandit plays game of musical chairs with fedsFebruary 25, 2009 at 1:46pm
Vikram Pandit is still working out a rescue plan that would turn over as much as 40% of his bank to the U.S. government. The question is whether he will manage to hold onto his job – and whether he will want to.
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