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Saturday, February 07, 2004

Law - Several interesting law-related stories today in the NY Times

"Irwin Schiff, the nation's best-known promoter of claims that no law requires the payment of income taxes, suffers from delusions including a fantasy that he alone can properly interpret the tax laws, according to papers that he had his lawyers file in Federal District Court in Las Vegas." So reads the lead to this story today in the NY Times.

Another Times story today, also on the front page of the Business Section, headlined, "Asian-Americans Take Offense at a Law Firm Memo," begins:

Responding to a note seeking someone to adopt a puppy, a partner in the London office of the law firm of Dewey Ballantine wrote, "Don't let them go to a Chinese restaurant."

Some of the firm's associates found the message offensive and said so; dozens of Asian-American law student associations and bar associations have criticized it as well. Senior partners at the firm almost immediately sent out a firmwide apology. So did the author of the message.

The firm had already put its lawyers through sensitivity training in the wake of a skit performed at a dinner last year when lawyers mocked stereotypical Asian accents to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," singing that they were "so solly" that the firm was closing its Hong Kong office. The firm no longer even holds that annual dinner.

A third Times story deals with the problems of growth in Boise, Idaho<
As isolated as Boise is, at the nexus of the high desert and the western edge of the Rockies and still close to the middle of nowhere, it became a migration magnet in the 1990's. It drew scores of jobless people from California and other depressed states to what was, until recently, an economic oasis.

Micron Technologies, now one of the world's leading manufacturers of superconductors and Idaho's largest private employer, was founded here in 1978. Hewlett-Packard is here, and Boise's other high-tech companies were spared much of the strangulation from the dot-com bust that left most of the Northwest in the dumps.

Recreation, the weather and the outdoor life are other big lures. Boise is known as the City of Trees, because the French-Canadian fur traders who came through the desert and discovered it in the early 1800's were delighted to find a cottonwood forest flanking what is now the Boise River. ("Les bois!" they shouted. The woods!) * * *

The Treasure Valley has a growing air quality problem because of smog resulting from cars. And its temperate inversions, once beautiful, now troubling — this happens when cold air gets trapped under warm air in the valley — are trapping pollution with them.

Growth is a topic everywhere these days, especially in the West. But the unusual thing about what is happening in Boise is that city officials and other concerned citizens are examining the problems of growth before they are full-blown problems.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 7, 2004 01:17 PM
Posted to General Law Related