This has happened to me before, in some rather amusing ways. In one case, Pacific Legal Foundation moved for attorney fees after winning a case, and the other side’s lawyer filed a brief arguing that we shouldn’t get fees because PLF is primarily supported by donations (since it doesn’t charge clients). I don’t get the logic there, but to support that claim, the lawyer cited a comment I had made on a Volokh Conspiracy post, in which I’d said that only about 1 or 2 percent of PLF’s annual budget comes from attorney fees. Like I said, I don’t get the logic.
In another case, the government’s lawyer moved to dismiss our lawsuit challenging an occupational licensing law, and mentioned in her brief that we’d filed similar lawsuits in other states—a fact she can have learned only through our blog posts. I guess she thought that proved that the case was frivolous or something…anyway, that allowed me to explain in my reply brief that, yes, we had—and all those courts had denied motions to dismiss.
But by far the best was Surrey v. True Beginnings in 2008, in which a self-proclaimed “men’s rights activist” sued a dating site for “discrimination” on the grounds that it charged women less than men. I wrote an amicus brief arguing that nobody’s harmed by this—in fact, both men and women benefit from it—and that the lawyer bringing the case was well known for predatory lawsuit abuse. In fact, he’d recently been sanctioned by a federal court for his bounty-hunter litigation. Well, he didn’t like that, and filed a hilariously angry brief responding to mine, which included such gems as
PLF attorney Timothy Sandefur is a self-proclaimed business-first advocate. For example, Mr. Sandefur refers to his car as “The Lochner-mobile,” which bears the personalized license plate “198US45”—the citation for the much-maligned U.S. Supreme Court case Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). Lochner held the “right to free contract” was implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Lochner era, the Supreme Court invalidated scores of federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and Great Depression…
...and cited three Freespace posts, including pictures of my car.
Of course, while I am not a “self-proclaimed business-first advocate”—others may have proclaimed me as such—I do indeed have the license plate 198US45 and my car is indeed the Lochnermobile.
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