Dowbrigade

Our trip to the Middlesex County Courthouse
today went smoothly, although we failed to find any trials involving
passion, drugs or violence. As might be expected, judges lawyers and
court personnel like taking their vacations in August just like normal
people, and although there is a constant stream of minor miscreants and
urgent business pushing their way through the system most of the interesting
or complicated trials and hearings are being postponed until September.

We did watch arraignments and motions in courtroom 6B for
a while, and my foreign lawyers were amazed at the speed with which the
lady judge raced through the cases; 30 names were called during the 45
minutes we were in her courtroom. Bail set, excuses recounted, delays
ordered, dates set, charges dismissed, defendant absent, warrant issued,
case continued. Usually one of the smart ass students asks why all of
the defendants are "people of color" and all of the lawyers are white,
but today we had the pleasure of watching a huge black attorney who
could have been a retire NFL offensive lineman handle five or six of
the cases, and most of his clients were white.

Later we went upstairs to the 11th floor, where there was
a civil case going on involving a guy who was suing the City of Malden
for water damage to his basement caused by repeated flooding of his street.  Actually,
it was more interesting than it sounds; the plaintiff, who was on the
stand most of the morning, was the guitarist of the Paul Winter Jazz
Quartet, although he seems to have fallen on hard times and there was
mention of a 2002 bankruptcy. And the amount of the suit was $1,000,000.

It seems that this guy had installed a complete recording
studio in his basement, and that the flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd
in 1998 not only destroyed all of recording and electronic equipment,
but also dozens of tapes and CD’s containing new and unreleased musical
compositions of which no copies exist and which represented years of
artistic effort and output. He wants $400,000 for these basement tapes
alone.

Now, normally cities are not liable for hurricane damage,
but when we left the plaintiff’s star witness, an expert hydraulic engineer,
was testifying that the drainage system in the street in question was
receiving 10 times the waterflow for which it was designed, due to uncontrolled
development over the years funneling much more rain runoff into the old
10-inch pipes in this neighborhood, resulting in the constant flooding,
allegedly due to negligence on the part of the city.

The truly interesting thing, at least if you are a lawyer
interested in municipal civil law and the rights of people to sue their
government ( which strange as it seems describes most of my students),
is that precedent has established that while a local government cannot
be held liable for design flaws in drainage systems, they CAN be held
liable for the maintenance of said systems.  Anyway, we guess you
had to be there.

Anyone interested in the kinds of exercises and questions
we discuss with our students might check out the
article and exercise we
just posted on Monkeybrain,
the Dowbrigade’s sister blog which we use in our teaching.  It concerns
yesterday’s decision by Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to allow
the web publication of photos, addresses
and work addresses of "level 3 sex offenders, the most likely to continue
doing their thing.