Matthew Strugar

death to standard time

There’s a sucker born every minute I’ve been thinking about a famous quote attributed to various people, including the circus entrepreneur P.T.

Trump-curious vegans are suckers slaughterfreeamerica.substack.com/p/theres-a-s...

47! Barely off.

You should request publication. This is an important decision.

Many 'undercover' officers in lawsuit over LAPD photos are just regular cops, city says Los Angeles dials back its claim that hundreds of cops were put at risk after their photos were made public, saying most of them weren't working undercover.

This is WILD: After a YEAR of whining about it, LA is finally admitting that NONE of the officers whose photos were released *by them* thru a *public records request* are actually undercovers anyway, so the whole claim it would endanger undercovers was … not true.

www.latimes.com/california/s...

just saw a cease and desist from a landlord claiming it is defamatory to call him "greedy." lord, give me strength.

Reposting from @strugar.bsky.social's "X" account:

At the Eighth Circuit court of appeals with @profalankchen, @DavidMuraskin, & @CristinaKladis trying to protect our win against Iowa’s 2nd and 3rd ag gag laws! Alan & Dave argued and were both incredible.

hurricane wasn’t shit

because talkin shit is good and cool

(Assume no damages from A telling B and only B, apart from B’s republication to the world.) Is B a necessary party? Maybe the cleaner Q is whether the original speaker is liable for a republisher’s republication?

defamation q: A tells B something about Z. B then publishes it widely. Z knows of both A & B but sues only A for defamation per quod for harms from the public knowing it. But A didn’t tell the public. Has Z pleaded damages for the defamation claim?

here’s a nice article about our efforts to fight sex offender registration for historical (pre-lawrence) sodomy convictions in mississippi https://mississippitoday.org/2023/07/28/mississippi-to-pay-over-400k-in-attorneys-fees-over-unconstitutional-sodomy-law/

I’m announcing my new social media app BLOCKED where you can talk about everything blocking: everyone you’ve blocked, why you blocked them, who should be blocked, who got blocked elsewhere by some other person or app.

just spoke with the mods... they said theyre adding DMs on this web site as soon as they get one user who people actually want to talk to

just heard from a formerly incarcerated client calling to say hi and he's like "life is great, man! i live in a huge RV; I'm somewhere different every day. And I got this security gig with 12 hour shifts where i don't do shit but sit there and watch karate movies!" :')

lawyers charging a lot of money

i would try to not lose fee shifting cases if these were my firm's rates that i swore under oath reasonably reflected the market

Anyway, victory is sweet. Victory against Paul Clement's firm is sweeter. And victory against an animal abuser is the sweetest.

Now Ziebold is on the hook not only for his own expensive lawyers' fees, but for ours, too. The protests are going to start up again right away. He's only bought himself more pain. And all he had to do to avoid all of this was not sell foie gras.

The Court largely stayed away from the First Amendment argument, buying our argument that protest activity directed at a business (even if the protesters name the owner) are not "stalking" of an individual. In other words, if anyone is a real party in interest, it's the business.

Anyway, Clement's firm's brief wasn't that good. And today the court granted our anti-SLAPP motions, dissolved the temporary restraining orders, and dismissed Ziebold's claims with prejudice.

In response to the anti-SLAPP motions, Ziebold hired *Paul Clement’s* firm. On a damn anti-stalking petition! Maybe Ziebold is richer than I thought, maybe the right wingers love foie gras and hate animal rights activists more than I thought.

We argued not only that the protest activity was protected by the First Amendment, but that this activity was directed at the *business*, not at Ziebold personally. Businesses can't get anti-stalking order; only people can. This was an attempt to get around that limitation.

Together with my co-counsel (not on here), we filed anti-SLAPP motions to Ziebold's petitions. D.C.'s anti-SLAPP law is still pretty new and we're pretty sure no one had tried to apply it to civil harassment or anti-stalking order petitions yet.

And the judge issued a temporary restraining order saying the activists couldn’t go near the restaurants or say anything “false” about the restaurants on the internet.

Procedures are truncated, discovery is limited if at all existent, trials are quick, evidence rules are relaxed. This is all really appealing to people who want to shut someone up. So that's what he did.

Why not just take the quick and easy route and seek to shut up the activists by claiming they are stalking you? Like most state's civil harassment restraining order procedures, DC lets you go in without notice and get an order to shut someone up.

But like a lot of litigious jerks these days, Ziebold didn't want to go the normal route of filing a lawsuit for interference with business advantage or even defamation or trespass. Those are expensive and take a long time. And he's not looking for money, anyway.

The protests took a variety forms. People held signs and chanted outside of the restaurants. Sometimes people went inside the restaurants and chanted until they were asked to leave. Activists left all kinds of negative reviews of the restaurants. And they called; a lot.

A new group in D.C. called the D.C. Coalition Against Foie Gras is trying to end the sale of the cruel product in the District. And Ziebold’s fancy French restaurants sold and served it. So they started protesting at the restaurants.