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Mayor Bloomberg has problems with 1st as well as the 2nd amendment
According to the New York Sun, Mayor Bloomberg has moved, in the suit against a GA gun dealer, to forbid the defense from mentioning the Second Amendment. As the paper notes, "While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity."
I suppose we'll see if Hon. Jack Weinstein has problems with both amendments as well.
UPDATE: it's called "long arm jurisdiction." A very technical end of the law (took a case to the state Supreme Court on it once). Basically, you can sue a person or company where they reside, and also sue a company where it "does business," so to speak. If you go beyond that, it's a denial of due process. The question of how much contact the company has to have with a State is confused and confusing, even at the US Supreme Court level. But local courts of course want to assert jurisdiction (having locals sue out of Staters sounds like a great idea). In my case, it was product liability, a single action being dropped and firing. The mfr was in Italy. At the time the gun was sold, the mfr had no advertising in the US, no local company. Its sole contact had been to make one lot of arms, which an American importer based in Connecticut picked up in Italy and sold in the US. Twenty years later, one of them was dropped in AZ and fired, killing a local. How it got from CN to AZ was not determined; someone could have bought it back east and moved here.
AS Supremes held that the AZ courts had jurisdiction over the Italian manufacturer, and the US Supremes denied cert..
Purposeful availment--I forget how they dealt with that. Claimed to go with the Asahi plurality, using that standard, but then construed it to mean ... memory is faint, but it was something like: this was shipped to the US, a single-action is a Western looking gun and would be likely appeal to a person in a Western state such as AZ, aha, that's purposeful availment of AZ markets! The state Supremes were very pro-plaintiff then, which I didn't mind since I mostly do plaintiffs' work. The case was A. Uberti v. Leonardo, 181 Ariz. 565, 892 P.2d 1354 (1995).
Comments
Why does a federal court in Brooklyn even have jurisdiction over a crime that was (allegedly) committed in Georgia?
A Crime that the Federal Government chose not to prosecute?
And speaking of crimes the feds chose not to prosecute, what about Bloomberg's conspiracy to commit strawman purchases?
Posted by: Flighterdoc, MD at May 9, 2008 10:12 AM
Weinstein putting the law above his own ideology?????
Not unless the pigs are flying today.
Posted by: RSweeney at May 9, 2008 10:38 AM
That was my first question too, why is the trial being held in NY and not Georgia?
Posted by: Mainsail (Chris) at May 9, 2008 10:51 AM
What happened to the princple of "purposeful availment?" Ie you are only subject to jurisdiction if you've done things in a forum that you could get enforced by the local courts- like selling things, being party to contracts, etc- you're enjoying the protective benefits of a court's jurisdiction so you should also enjoy the prospect of being subject to suits there. An italian gun maker shouldn't be liable in an AZ court because it has no intentional contacts with anyone in the state.
Isn't this the correct law or have I completely forgotten my civil procedure?
Posted by: Jim W at May 9, 2008 11:08 AM
"Minimum Jack" Weinstein only needs a whisp of a hint of a shadow of a pretext to go after gun dealers.
Posted by: Turk Turon at May 9, 2008 11:52 AM
>>>"Minimum Jack" Weinstein only needs a whisp of a hint of a shadow of a pretext to go after gun dealers.
Is that something like "emanations of the penumbra"?
hahahaha
Gawdamighty. It's really not funny at all.
Posted by: Anonymous at May 9, 2008 05:23 PM
I thought they called "Reversable Jack."
Anyway, I think David and other lawyers would generally agree: there's nothing worse than a judge who has a mind of his own, who thinks for himself and outside the box. I want a judge who has never had an original thought in his *life*.
Posted by: Letalis Maximus, Esq. at May 10, 2008 05:04 AM