Throw The Book At Him
July 3, 2008
Bill Hobbs and Glenn Reynolds report the judicial “spanking” of a trial lawyer who took on a librarian and lost.
We first reported on this last April. The trial lawyer is one Clifford J. Shoemaker, who specializes in suits that blame autism on vaccine makers. When blogger and librarian Kathleen Seidel criticized Shoemaker’s legal tactics, the lawyer subpoened her, requesting Seidel provide a laundry list of “documents pertaining to the setup, financing, running, research and maintaining” of her blog.
Seidel responded by authoring her own legal brief that cited case law proving that a journalist’s right to protect her sources extends to a “citizen-journalist” blogger. The judge sided with Seidel and laced into Shoemaker for “abuse of the legal process.”
Here’s Hobbs’s description of how the judge’s ruling will haunt Shoemaker in Google eternity:
“For quite some time to come, all the many, many blog posts about the Shoemaker-Seidel legal tussle will appear near the top of the Google search result for ‘Clifford Shoemaker,” so future potential clients of his will be able to learn that he’s a malicious hack of low ethics who got beat in court by a librarian.”
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Trial Lawyers
2 Responses to “Throw The Book At Him”
Now that’s what I call “credit bureauing a lawyer”. This is the “spotlighting strategy” that every victim of a shyster attorney (and there are thousands of us) should utilize to “give the lawyers a dose of their own medicine”. The attorney owned and operated 50 state “fox guarding the chicken house” attorney discipline bureaucracies are a sick joke. So it up to fed up victims of shyster attorneys to join hands and launch an all out, no holds barred and never ending “whistle blowing counter offensive” against the rascals by “making them very famous” –, as in “notorious”. I suggest that everyone who reads my posting visit http://www.halt.org When the site comes up click on “Reform Projects” in the left window, then click on “Lawyer Accountability” and then click on “2006 Lawyer Discipline Report Cards”. Then click on the state map -, state by state to view the “Report Card” on attorney
“discipline” in each state. It is here that you will really learn why -, and how -, the lawyers are “getting away with they’re getting away with”. It’s an “incestuous good ole boy clique system” which makes the “Thin Blue Line” law enforcement version look like an “assembly of Saints” in comparison.
Ivan L. Fail, Retired Federal Correctional Officer–, who respecs and trusts many convicted felons a lot farther than I do most attorneys. That is because many felon are not hypocrite and few if any felons are politically empowered and protected hypocrites with a license steal, bilk and fleece at will with little if any fear of consequences.
I was one of the bloggers named in Shoemaker’s subpoena, which is my dog in the hunt.
You may find Seidel’s two latest posts of interest.
Billing the Adversary
http://www.neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/165
Numerous decisions issued over the twenty year history of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) document the extent to which the limits on attorney compensation have been tested by practitioners seeking remuneration from its taxpayer-financed coffers. The following review summarizes decisions involving the recently-sanctioned VICP specialist Clifford Shoemaker, Esq. — a central instigator of the campaign to convince the public of the speculative, scientifically unsupported hypothesis that a significant number of cases of autism result from vaccine injury, co-founder of the Institute for Chronic Illnesses, and a founding member its Institutional Review Board, which sponsors and provides ethical oversight of medical research and experimentation on autistic children and adolescents conducted by his long-time colleague Dr. Mark Geier.
Inspecting the Outstretched Palm
http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/166/
The potential for procedural and billing improprieties by Vaccine Injury Compensation Program petitioners’ attorneys — especially those representing numerous clients with similar, speculative claims — is made painfully evident in Special Master Denise Vowell’s recent fee and cost decision in Carrington v. HHS, Case 99-495V (Fed.Cl.Spec.Mstr., June 18, 2008) (unpublished), posted to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims website three days ago.