Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Writer Sues Book Reviewer for Libel

It seems that an Israeli author has filed a libel lawsuit against a book reviewer who dared point out the weaknesses in her book.  Normally, I would laugh about this kind of misguided and frivolous lawsuit, expecting that the plaintiff would end up losing and having to pick up the court costs of the defendant.

But this one gets complicated.  According to the newser website:
...the Israel-based writer of an English-language book by a Dutch publisher that was reviewed in 2007 by a German professor for an American journal decided to sue in a French court.
The idea of shopping the world for a sympathetic judge is becoming more common as an increasing number of countries allow that kind of thing to happen - a scary trend, in my opinion.

As for the alleged libelous statements...how does this grab you?
Thomas Weigend wrote it (the book) has "analytical nuggets" and “meticulously covers all relevant topics,” but observed that it rehashes "the existing legal set-up" and found the author's “conceptual grasp” of some matters to be questionable.
If that is libelous, I suspect all book bloggers are guilty as charged by this crazy woman. It's disturbing to see yet another author trash her professional reputation by doing something so ludicrous. Here's hoping it costs her a bundle of Israeli, German, French, Dutch and American currency.

9 comments:

  1. And here I thought stupid lawsuits were just an American thing.

    Even if this doesn't lose the author future sales, I doubt anyone will ever want to review this person's works again, unless they are bribed to say only good things. And something like that would not (I hope) be published in a respected journal.

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  2. This made me laugh but I suspect its more serious undertones shouldn't have. Ridiculous.

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  3. with over 80,000 lawyers in florida alone,,,they need to sue someone and litigation is their favorite thing to do,,aka,,holdup like a stagecoach in the wild west

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  4. I would think she has pretty successfully trashed her professional reputation, Library Girl...a shame, really.

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  5. Leah, it's one of those things best laughed at, I think. Hard to take such stupidity seriously.

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  6. Mark, you just ruined my day with that statistic. I'm in fact involved right now in a grievance I filed with the Texas State Board against an incompetent attorney who cost me a good bit of money because I had to hire another attorney to fix her mistakes.

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  7. Thanks for sharing. It sure make one think and how we all need to be edited some in what we say...

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  8. Sam, how do some of these lawyers stay licensed? All I wanted was a simple will. The lawyer emailed me a copy for review - at my request - before we went into her office to sign. This was her final copy.

    Not only did she not get the details of who gets what correct, but she got our names wrong. Yes. She got my name and my husband's name completely wrong! Not misspelled, but WRONG!

    I emailed her and told her to proofread the damn document. She wanted to know what her errors were. I told her to compare what she had written to what I had already sent her.

    Then I decided I didn't want to work with her at all, so called the legal services plan my husband had been paying for for 8 years through his work and changed to another lawyer. I can't believe he had paid all these premiums and we got such a crappy lawyer. He canceled the legal services plan. What a waste of money.

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  9. Factotum, I have had similar problems with lawyers more than once. They seem to keep these "boilerplate" forms on their computers for things like wills and trusts that are all basically the same. They just go in and change the names and print the document out at a cost of several hundred dollars to the client. Of course, this is all done by some clerk who tends to miss the fact that a stray name is left in the new document because they didn't blank them all out before saving the "master" last time it was used.

    These people have quite a racket going and it irritates the hell out of me.

    We are still trying to get a statement from our incompetent attorney to show what works she CLAIMS to have done. Since she has already cost me a bundle in lost claims and duplicate attorney fees, I would like to get some of my money returned. She continues to ignore me, however.

    So, maybe the folks in Austin can get through to this airhead and make her understand that she is breaking, at the very least, the ethics code she pretends to follow - and, at the worst, some actual law I can charge her with.

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