Archive for November 4th, 2007

Some Things In The News

Fetus with Intent Who­ever came up with the word “twin­sep­a­ra­ble” needs med­ica­tion and insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion. The most irri­tat­ing part about this soft news piece (aside from being soft news, of course) is the reporter’s insis­tence on ascrib­ing intent to a fetus: Mrs Jones decided to let doc­tors oper­ate to ter­mi­nate Gabriel’s life. Firstly they tried to sever his umbil­i­cal cord to cut off his blood sup­ply, but the cord was too strong. They then cut Mrs Jones’s pla­centa in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother. But after the oper­a­tion which was meant to end his [ . . . ]

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Snyder v. Phelps Update

The jury awarded $2.9M, pur­port­edly find­ing lia­bil­ity on all four counts. (Remem­ber, they were defama­tion [which did not stem from the funeral protests them­selves], inva­sion of pri­vacy: intru­sion on seclu­sion, inva­sion of pri­vacy: pub­lic dis­clo­sure of pri­vate facts, and inten­tional inflic­tion of emo­tional dis­tress.) I still think the inva­sion of pri­vacy suits should have failed because if we’re going to have pub­lic prop­erty, the Con­sti­tu­tion con­trols the con­tra­dic­tion. I do not think the behav­ior of the WBC pro­test­ers was suf­fi­ciently extreme or out­ra­geous to war­rant a find­ing of lia­bil­ity for inten­tional inflic­tion of emo­tional dis­tress. And I find the defama­tion claim unin­ter­est­ing, mean­ing that [ . . . ]

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