Our Case Files

As I was playing around on CNN instead of studying, I saw this article about the Supreme Court took a case about a kid who held a 14 foot banner saying "Bong hits for Jesus," at an off-campus but debatedly school-sponsored event. They will have to decide whether the school infrindged on his 1st amendment rights by suspending him for the banner. The case is interesting, it is relevant more or less to our everyday lives, and its why the law can actually be fun.

I honestly think one of the things preventing law school students from getting sick of the thousands of pages of reading that we have to do is that the cases that we read are usually very interesting. Cases can be interesting in different ways.

First there's the "wow, that's really bizarre, you can't make that" kind of interesting. For example, there was a guy who had an unexpected epilectic seizure while driving, crashed into a construction site that had a kettle with 400 degree boiling hot liquid enamel, flew in the air, got splashed by the enamel, burst into a ball of flames, somehow survived, and sued the constructiion site owners. (He won)

Then there's the "that's just really funny" interesting. We read a case where an ex-husband retained nude pictures of his wife, and pictures of the two of them having sex. He made photocopies of the photographs, put her name and address, and distributed it around the neighborhood. (She sued and won a lot of money). Speaking of scorned lovers, there was another woman who woed her seperated husband to Florida saying that her mother was dying, she was leaving the country, she loved him, and needed to see him. When he arrived at the airport, she met him with a police officer and served him papers for a lawsuit. (No, you can't do that).

A lot of the interesting cases were the "hey, that's relevant to my life" cases. Compuserve tried to sue a company that was sending out junk mail for "trespass the chattel" because all of the junk mail was slowing down the whole system and causing compuserve to lose business. (Compuserve got the injunction). And you start to wonder if the junk mail in your inbox should be legal.

There's many more interesting cases but my mind is so numb from studying that I won't try. I can't wait though to see what cases criminal and constitutional law bring next semester. And as I'll be wrapping up my constitutional law class, the Supreme Court will be ruling on the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case and I can see if I agree with them.

PS: If anyone can tell me why exactly someone would hold up this sign, besides just being a punk, please let me know. It doesn't even make sense to me.