Month: April 2011

In ‘Oh, Really?’ the Biederman Blog’s editors — voracious consumers of all matters pop culture — cast a curious, skeptical, fun and smart end-of-the-week eye on popular productions, sharing their keen observations about legal matters these raise. The pursuit of lively legal prose leads lawyers to seek entertaining references, with some of these surprising citations devoted to pop culture and especially the movies. But what crops up in those legal briefs can be amusing — or an utter fiasco. Let’s look at some instances where lawyers and judges either have made their formal documents delightfully breezy — or left nothing less than memorable stink bombs. The blogosphere has buzzed plenty about a recent cinema citation, which Kevin Underhill from Lowering the Barpresents as the “New Contender for Worst Legal Brief.” In this instance, a lawyer apparently based his appellate argument on the premise of the movie “The Hangover.”  It’s something you must see for yourself. The argument from the first paragraph of the brief begins with: “In the 2009 movie The Hangover, the ultimate Las Vegas bachelor party goes bad when the groom’s men wake up in their suite at Caesar’s Palace with a tiger in the bathroom, a 6-month old baby in the close, and the groom nowhere to be found.  What’s more, nobody can remember the previous night’s events, due to the effects of the alcohol they ingested together with...