Brushes with notoriety
American Heritage Magazine was once a bi-monthly print magazine with a wide readership. Near the end of some issues was a column with submissions from subscribers called “My Brush with History.” The articles detailed things like readers' meetings with famous historical personages, or how they happened to be present at the moment of some historic event.
I never expected that this column would get any notice outside the readership of this publication. But I've been writing it for, well . . . let's just say for quite a while. And with enough time, especially in the Internet era (when almost anything is just a Google-search away), it's actually gotten notice from a few other folks over the years. This is still surprising, given that whatever ends up here, it's almost always from a court opinion already in print. Nevertheless, in the spirit of “My Brush with History,” for this week here are a few times when this column has — ever so briefly — met with some outsize (or at least outside) notoriety.
A good example is a Wikipedia article about the late historian and university professor (and restaurant critic) Richard H. Collin. In 1974, Collin colorfully lambasted a Louisiana restaurant in one of his reviews, saying that its food, “T'aint Creole, t'aint Cajun, t'aint French, t'aint country American, t'aint good.” The restaurant promptly sued him for harming its reputation.
The dispute made it all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which in 1977 decided that Collin's review was an opinion protected by the First Amendment. I wrote about the case in August, 2012 — and if you check out Collin's Wikipedia biography, there are four references to that column in the footnotes.
So this column is now, um . . . a reference work?
Well, maybe so. I recently discovered a 2023 article (or one soon to be published) in the Boston College Law Review, making similar use of one of these columns. (Law reviews are scholarly legal journals that practically no one except a few law professors and judges actually read.) The entry, written by a recentlyminted attorney named Duncan Hosie, discussed how, these days, dissenting Supreme Court opinions often have a political as well as a legal motivation. He focused on a dissent by Justice Elena Kagan in a 2018 case, Janus v. Illinois, which struck down “fair share” fees charged by public labor unions to non-union members.
About two-thirds of the way through the article, Mr. Hosie noted that, “The Daily Ukiah, a small newspaper with a circulation of 7,000 in Northern California, ran a piece whose concluding paragraph copied and pasted from Justice Kagan's concluding paragraph.” His footnote cites a June 28, 2018 column in which I compared the court's decision in Janus to a notorious 1905 Supreme Court decision, Lochner v. New York, which was heavily criticized for 30 years but finally overruled.
(I'll note that I didn't just “cut and paste” Justice Kagan's concluding paragraph; I had to edit it to make it short enough to meet my word limit. But I'll be a good sport and not point out that he botched the name of this publication in his text.)
Still, the “citation” I most enjoyed didn't even mention the contents of a column. In director Susan Saladoff's 2011 documentary, Hot Coffee, the first segment of the film criticizes how big corporations intentionally distort certain lawsuits as “frivolous” by leaving out certain facts, all in an attempt to discredit the civil justice system. The primary topic of Hot Coffee was (as the title suggests) Stella Liebeck's injuries caused by a cup of Mcdonald's coffee that was so hot it caused severe, life-threatening injuries when she spilled it in her lap.
A similar case was Charles Bigbee's lawsuit against Pacific Telephone. Bigbee lost a leg when a drunk driver hit the telephone booth he was using. The booth, placed too close to a busy street, and having a hard-to-open door, had been hit by other vehicles before, but the phone company quickly replaced it at the same spot with no barrier to prevent the same thing from recurring. Bigbee's case likewise was criticized as being “frivolous.”
Partway through that segment, a column I wrote about notable court cases dealing with phone booths, entitled “Phone Booths Along the Legal Highway,” is displayed briefly (but quite prominently) — including my byline on the story. It was a source of great amusement (at least to my family).
The two things one has to know about the Internet is, first, that most of the things on the Internet eventually disappear. Often, they can be found, if at all, only on the Internet Archive. The second is that, in a commonlyused phrase, “the Internet is forever.”
So if that's immortality, I guess I'll take it.