Bill said:

“But in one high-profile case last month, Goetschel represented a dead pike after an animal protection group accused the angler who caught it of cruelty for taking 10 minutes to haul the fish in.

The angler was found not guilty.”

A lawyer with a dead fish for a client.

Actually, that seems like the perfect client. It won’t refuse to take the advice of its lawyer, it won’t complain about the representation, it won’t make unreasonable demands.

Sounds like the dream client, except of course for the smell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTpUVAcvWfU

The angler was found not guilty.”

A lawyer with a dead fish for a client. Yep, they really will represent anyone. This guy is an embarrassment even to the legal profession.

Until they can conclusively prove that every human being with a legal problem or in an abusive situation has free access to the top-notch, best of the best, worldclass legal team (which even in Switzerland, I doubt), the notion that animals should be represented is offensively ridiculous.

Honestly though, who really wants to have the law of their country make it so they could have to defend themselves in court because it took a while to reel in a fish?

It’s similar to the relationship, at the societal level, between actual health and perceived health. Members of societies that score high on objective measures of health generally rate their health as lower than members of societies that have objectively poor health. The reason turns out to be that as the overall level of health in a society rises, its members’ expectations of what good health is rise even more. If you live in a society where, for example, it’s common for kids to die of infectious disease, you’re not going to view occasional headaches or stomach aches or muscle pains or feeling run down as “ill health.” But in a society where most people don’t have to worry about serious disease until late middle age at the earliest, you start expecting that life should be free of everyday somatic complaints and that you should physically act and feel like you were perpetually seventeen.

        Michael said:

just one minor thing:

you write above “but the politicians of Switzerland apparently took the idea pretty seriously – seriously enough to call for a referendum on the issue.”

afaik (and I’m not Swiss, but from a neighboring country), they have referenda on, well, basically everything. From how I know how it works (and I stress that I might be wrong), if some random group of citizens gets enough signatures together (rather low number) they can force a referendum on basically any issue (I guess provided it doesn’t go against the constitution or something).

So, in this specific case, placing blame on the politicians may be wrong.

Well in that case I suppose it would be a case of a lot of Swiss activists with way too much time on their hands. Still, I find it disturbing that 30% would be nutty enough to support it in any case.

I’m all for the legal system going after people who mistreat animals, but there has to be some sanity in how it’s done.

you write above “but the politicians of Switzerland apparently took the idea pretty seriously – seriously enough to call for a referendum on the issue.”

afaik (and I’m not Swiss, but from a neighboring country), they have referenda on, well, basically everything. From how I know how it works (and I stress that I might be wrong), if some random group of citizens gets enough signatures together (rather low number) they can force a referendum on basically any issue (I guess provided it doesn’t go against the constitution or something).

So, in this specific case, placing blame on the politicians may be wrong.

eTextbooks that Professors can Edit

I posted a comment:
‘Initially sounds like a good idea, but there are foreseeable potential problems with this.

I am led to believe that there is a well-known university [www.liberty.edu] with a museum that apparently has dinosaur fossils that are labelled as dating to only a few thousand years old. I believe this is ideological pseudo-science [Intelligent design / Creationism] masquerading as science.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M

From: @1:01 to 1:05′

Note: Comments in brackets were not included in my post.

My post hasn’t been posted, after about a week!

The article on the ‘The CM Law Library Blog’, is by Sue Altmeyer [nominative determinism?]