Bullshit lawsuit of the week.  You go to retrieve your father’s car, which is in a parking garage.  When you get in, the car blows up, causing you serious injuries.  Turns out it blew up because your half-brother planted a pipe bomb in it, intending to kill your father so he could inherit about $300,000.  You

• Check Craigslist for “family therapists,” because it looks like there’s some work to be done here.
• Figure, “Well, that’s $300,000 more for me.”
• Get a lawyer and sue your half-brother for your injuries.

The answer for Preston Scott was “none of the above”:   Not precisely, anyway; he got a lawyer and sued his half-brother and the garage, obviously figuring that the garage was the deep pocket here, since the half-brother hadn’t gotten the aforementioned $300,000.  In Sigmund v. Starwood Urban Retail, the DC Circuit affirms summary judgment for the garage, deciding that the half-brother’s criminal act wasn’t sufficiently foreseeable to impose liability:

Solon, the ancient Athenian lawgiver, made no law against patricide because he thought it impossible that anyone could commit so unnatural a crime. Two and a half millennia later, Freud famously claimed the opposite — that every son harbors murderous impulses toward his father.  In this case, we side with the lawyer not the psychoanalyst.

Time for some girly pictures.  Without the girl, unfortunately.  I’ve got a subscription to the Victoria’s Secret catalogue — actually, my neighbor does, but he hasn’t gotten it in a while — and apparently they’ve developed a “Delicious” product line, featuring tank tops (like the one featured at right), skin fragrance, lip gloss, and self-tanning cream, promoted by the Delicious Girl <your joke here>, Miranda Kerr.  (For those of you who find your appetite for photos of beautiful women unsated by this blog — go figure — you can find Ms. Kerr’s picture here. 

Well, if Victoria’s Secret spent as much on lawyers as they do on models, they’d know that Fortune Dynamic, Inc., was the “owner of the incontestable trademark DELICIOUS for footwear.”  Fortune sued, and although Victoria’s Secret won on summary judgment, that was reversed the other day by the 9th Circuit.  The opinion wanders through various areas of anti-trust law, tossing out terms such as “post-purchase confusion,” supporting the latter point, whatever its significance might be, by mentioning that several celebrities, including Britney Spears, have been espied wearing the tank top.  If you’ve ever entertained any fantasies about Ms. Spears, be forewarned that the above link takes indeed takes you to a picture of her adorned in a Delicious tank top, but while in the process of leaving her latest rehab stint; the photo does nothing beside prove conclusively that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

While we’re on the subject of footwear, a new, and probably one-time, feature at The Briefcase:  the Fashion Tip.   Shoes are a big thing for women:  I don’t know any woman who has fewer than twenty-five of them.  Well, ladies, you’re wasting time and money.  I am unabashedly heterosexual, my first proctology examination convincing me beyond the shadow of a doubt that to the extent sexual orientation is a choice, I made the correct one.  I have had any number of discussions about the fair sex with other unabashedly heterosexual males, and I have yet to hear a single one of them say, “Wow, did you see the shoes on that broad?”

See you on Monday.