Some day, I intend to look back at the last several days and laugh. Probably not for a really long time, mind you, but one day. Stands to reason, right? I mean, it kind of has to be that way. If not, I will be very sorry indeed.

Anyway, a bright spot on the horizon. I am off to have dinner with Simon, that exceptionally smart, erudite and all around good guy from Hong Kong. We're off for Austrian food way downtown. I'm very much looking forward to this and have been for weeks. And right now, at least, it looks as if I will not have to cancel on him, which is nice since he came all this way. Anyway, I'm pretty excited.

Finally, in lieu of any other post today, I will leave you with the words of the Girl Child from this weekend informing her mother and me about her plans for the future:

GC: When I grow up, I want to be a ballerina and a butterfly. The only problem is that I don't know how to make a cocoon.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 05:09 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Some friends have checked back in to see if I updated from the Bay Day post of Thursday. I would have, but I didn't feel like whining. So, instead, I opted not to post. Let me just note that Friday was actually worse than Thursday. I was actually despondent, a word I do not use lightly. Indeed, I actually, in the little cracks of time I could find, managed to get out 6-8 job applications to places all over the country -- Phoenix; San Diego; and at least one or two other places I can no longer recall. May have been an act of desperation, beats me. I am not going to examine it too deeply or too closely. Instead, I'm just going to roll with the punches and see what happens.

I think I'll know better by Monday end of day or Tuesday morning how its gonna shake out. Right now, I guess it could go either way.

Anyway, thanks for caring enough to check in and request an update.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 09:16 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Expect no posts today.

Having one of those bad days with respect to a case I have an emergency in wherein one alternates between vertigoes feelings of despair, complete with desire to vomit and feelings that legal research reveals a glimmer of hope through which the needle can be threaded, the rocks and shoals successfully navigated, and the ship brought home safely without foundering on issues better left to the imagination.

I think I want a new career. Just saying.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 01:00 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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My desk is a lovely shade of reddish/brownish wood. I had forgotten it was so lovely. It only took just under five hours today to clean it up enough for me to see it again. Also, while on the subject of good news, I do not appear to to have buried anything of a time critical nature such that I have defaulted on something, let a statute of limitations run, missed an important deadline, or otherwise committed malpractice per se. That's always the really big risk with having a messy, messy desk.

Yup, looking mighty shiny and clean in here today. I can practically see my reflection in the surface of the desk.

What the hell. Beats working!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 04:24 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Thanks to some guy in Missouri, vicarious liability is dead in NY. Vicarious liability ("VL") is a really interesting concept. It has to do with ownership of a conveyance -- a motor vehicle now but a carriage before. VL means that liability for the damage caused by the motor vehicle is imputed to the owner of the vehicle and not merely the operator. This meant that car companies were on the hook if a leased car got into an accident. NY was one of the only states with this law.

VL dated back quite some time and came into being when horse and carriage travel was popular. It made a lot of sense. Horses and carriages were very expensive things but they were generally driven not by the owners but by a poor and poorly compensated carriage driver. If the driver hurt someone, there was no recourse. So the NY State Legislature provided recourse to the owner of the horse and carriage, generally a person of substance.

The concept was simply carried forward to motor vehicles later.

At the time, it seems to me that VL was not particularly revolutionary. I recall from my days studying Roman Law (literally, the laws and legal system of Rome and the Roman Empire) that it provided for VL. If you threw something out of a rented apartment and hurt someone, the injured person had recourse against the owner of the apartment building, whether or not the owner had anything to do with throwing the object out the window. VL, no?

However, VL in NY has made leasing cars very, very expensive and caused all sorts of havoc in terms of insurance and in terms of indemnification of the car companies by the lessee. I know because I got involved in one of the cases once. Went all the way to the Appellate Division where we lost.

Representative Sam Graves, put an unexpected end to the issue.

The provision is in the federal transportation bill under "Title X: Miscellaneous Provisions." It states that people who rent or lease motor vehicles to others "shall not be held liable under the law of any state" for any harm their vehicles cause, as long as they are not guilty of "negligence or criminal wrongdoing."

Representative Graves's amendment passed the House in March by a vote of 218 to 201, mostly along party lines, and it stayed in the bill through the conference committee process. When the full bill went to a vote, it passed overwhelmingly, because it included billions of dollars of spending on transportation projects that lawmakers in both parties wanted for their districts.

If the president signs the bill, officials said, the federal law will take precedence, and New York's vicarious liability law will no longer apply.

No matter what you think of VL, it was the law of NY and has been hotly debated, again and again in the Legislature. For some schmuck from Missouri to come in and change NY law is, to me, an abuse of the federal system. I may not have liked the law, but I resent like hell this hick coming in and usurping the powers granted to the dysfunctional NY State Legislature by the equally dysfunctional citizens of the State of NY.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:30 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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