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The True Stella Awards : Honoring real cases of greedy opportunists, frivolous lawsuits, and the law run amok
Gathered from the popular website www.StellaAwards.com, The True Stella Awards is an outrageous collection of America’s most frivolous lawsuits Named for Stella Liebeck, the woman who won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit after spilling hot McDonald’s coffee on herself, humorist Randy Cassingham’s popular website chronicles the hard-to-believe and amusing claims brought before the U.S.courts. The most ridiculous of these lawsuits are given the “honorable” Stella Award. In The True Stella Awards, Cassingham documents the most outlandish of these real-life cases, including:
* The man who legally changed his name to Jack Ass, and then sued MTV because their TV show and movie Jackass infringed on his trademark and demeaned his “good name”
* The songwriter who left a minute’s silence on his record only to be sued by the estate of another songwriter who copyrighted his own “silent” song
* The man who sued an amusement park after being the victim of the ultimate “act of God”: He was hit by lightning while standing next to his own car in the parking lot
Stunning and hilarious, The True Stella Awards reveals the extremes people will go to in the pursuit of “justice.”.
Price: $5.99
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Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue
Thanks to constant political oratory against "frivolous lawsuits" and "jackpot justice," it is widely known that there's a legal crisis in this country President Bush never misses an opportunity to call for laws that would bring more "common sense" to a legal system that, he claims, is out of control, wrecking the economy, driving doctors out of their practices, bankrupting small businesses, and costing American jobs. Journalists repeat the charges without examining them. As a result, the lawsuit issue has moved to the political front burner, and in the past three years, state after state has responded by limiting citizens' rights to sue. Just this year alone, the Republicanled Congress has passed restrictions on class action lawsuits and is steps away from enacting limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. But is there really a crisis? National data show that the number of civil suits is falling, not rising, and that the average damage award is also going down. Despite intense media hype to the contrary, the number of personal injury lawsuits filed every year has been tumbling for the past decade. Upon closer examination, the stories of ridiculous lawsuits usually turn out to be false or badly misleading. The crisis, in short, appears to be a phantom. So how do we explain the scary headlines? Who's behind the "tort reform movement," and what are the real goals? Blocking the Courthouse Door will show that the movement against so-called greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations to get this issue on the table and thus limit their own vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "astroturf " grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to all-too-gullible journalists. For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments in the bond market, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors in turn blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients. And for Republicans, the campaign provides an extra bonus: defunding the Democratic Party. Limits on lawsuits cut into the income of some of the Democratic Party's most generous donors, the trial lawyers, who are often the only source of campaign cash for Democrats in many states. By exposing some of the dubious characters, corporate chicanery, skewed research, fudged numbers, and bogus journalism that have buttressed the calls for lawsuit reform,Stephanie Mencimer shows who's behind the movement to close the courthouse doors, and how they've successfully persuaded millions of Americans to give up their critical legal rights without fully understanding what they're losing -- often until it's too late..
Price: $2.76
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The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac (Bison Book)
In 1746 the French philosophe Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous, Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this. .
Price: $8.00
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Shakedown: How Corporations, Government, and Trial Lawyers Abuse the Judicial Process
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Be Careful Who You SLAPP
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America guarantees its citizens freedom of speech. This book is an extraordinary, true-life account of two law-abiding gadflies who unwittingly became embroiled in the Mother of All SLAPP's and refused to be silenced by corporate corruption and judicial malfeasance. Facing financial ruin, death threats and incarceration, these stalwart Americans used the power of the Internet and the words of the World Wide Web to take on the Varian SLAPP terrorists. The threat is real, the story is true.
Price: $9.75
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Whiplash: America's Most Frivolous Lawsuits
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Love Stuff: 515 Delightful, Delicioud, Sexy, Silly, Fun, Frivolous, Passionate, Positive and (Above All) Romantic Things to Do With Your One-and Only
Love makes the world go round . . . but sometimes the world spins so fast that romance gets put on hold. Love Stuff puts romance front and center with 515 creative ways to fall in love with your one-and-only all over again. Author-illustrator Lorraine Bodger's tantalizing ideas are bound to jumpstart any relationship and will enlighten and inspire even the most passionate couples. Whimsy is mixed with insight, with ideas such as, "Bake him an angel food cake when he's being angelic. Bake him a devil's food cake when he's being devilish," and "Find a sidewalk caricaturist and have him draw your portraits together." .
Price: $1.25
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The Litigation Explosion: 2
Walter K. Olson is fast becoming the legal world's foremost whistleblower. A columnist for Reason magazine and author of The Excuse Factory, Olson makes complex legal issues understandable to people without law degrees. In The Litigation Explosion, he tells of how the United States turned into the world's most litigious society. The account is entertaining because Olson is a good writer, but also infuriating because the problems he describes are severe--ambulance-chasers, junk litigation, and plaintiff awards that line the pockets of lawyers instead of the victims they allegedly represent. A good book for everybody, but a must-read for those in the legal profession..
Price: $1.50
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