Speaking of Christmas, here’s a t-shirt you can give as a present to all your employees.  Should preserve that esprit de corps among the rank and file.  And, of course, if they’re looking to get a present for you, make sure you let them know about the Care-o-Meter. 

I wrote an article this week about law blogs for one of the local bar association magazines — it’ll be published next January, maybe – and it was rather interesting to see what’s out there.  You could literally spend hours every day finding informative or entertaining stuff.  The Volokh Conspiracy, a politico-legal blog, had a link to a good take-off on A Wonderful Life featuring George W. Bush.  It also led me to this post on another blog about the recent shootout between Atlanta police doing a drug raid and a 92-year-old woman.  The author reviews the basic rules — if the police break into your home and you mistake them for intruders and shoot them, you’re at fault, but if the police break in, mistake the remote in your hand for a gun, and shoot you, nobody’s at fault — and concludes that the best solution might be to stop breaking into people’s homes for nonviolent offenses.  (And this, of course, after the US Supreme Court decided earlier this year that the exclusionary rule shouldn’t apply any longer to police violation of the “knock-and-announce” rule.)

That’s the weird thing.  I found lots of interesting legal commentary, but I also found stuff like a blog devoted to the humor of intellectual property law.  Don’t laugh; or rather, do.  One of the things I learned there is that if you’ve got a business named Speed of Art, you might want to give a second thought to your Internet domain name, unless you want your company associated with the name www.speedofart.com.

One of the things I also learned is that there’s not a lot of blogs devoted to Ohio law.  The Cleveland Law Library has a decent one, which I’ve included on the Blogroll on the right.  But with all due modesty, this blog is probably the best blog providing commentary on general Ohio civil and criminal law, primarily because it appears to be the only blog doing that.

Still, there are a lot of blogs out there, and I’ve added some in the Blogroll on the right.  I’ll be highlighting one or two each day.  You can also click on the Blog Taxonomy link there.  It actually takes you to the 3L Epiphany blog, run by a recent graduate of Ohio State Law School.  He’s got a listing of legal blogs — I don’t have any idea of how exhaustive the list is — organized by jurisdiction, specialty, subject, author, and just about anything else you can think of.  If you want, spend a little time there, and see if you can find something that might be helpful to you.

I have’t done a legal post since last Tuesday, and the cases are backing up on me, so I’ll be getting to that the rest of the week.  In the meantime, in the category of When Bad Things Happen to Bad People, check out the 8th District’s decision in Fazio v. Stefano, a personal injury case in which the plaintiff had $8,100 in medicals and the defendant’s insurer, Allstate, offered $6,300.  A week before trial, the plaintiff reduced his demand from $30,000 to $20,000.  Allstate didn’t budge.  The jury awarded $115,000.  (In keeping with the season, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.)  To add insult to injury, the trial judge awarded $32,700 in prejudgment interest, which the appellate panel upheld. 

See you tomorrow.