Terra Extraneus

During the sub-prime crisis, many people started out by blaming the poor people. You know, the dead beats that could not pay their mortgages. They were the people that tricked the billion dollar banks into giving them mortgages they could never afford, especially those on floating interest rates.

The front page of The Oklahoman reported today that Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland at the Oklahoma Health Summit has diversified the game into blaming the sick people for their lack of health insurance. Her suggestion is that there have to be government imposed penalties on people that do not have health insurance.

Holland believes the sick people really can afford health insurance but prefer to stand in line at emergency rooms to drain state resources and participate in a culture of non-payment of medical bills.

Holland has suggested that season football tickets should be forfeited by those that do not have health insurance (as well as driver’s licenses, hunting and fishing licenses, and, of course, state tax refunds). Her underlying premise is that the sick people really have money and are spending it on everything but health insurance. Holland correctly, however, diagnosed that one third of Oklahomans do not have health insurance, but she thinks it is their fault rather than the Insurance Commissioners’ fault.

Holland has apparently never spoken to anyone in those emergency rooms. She has never spoken to any family that has to pay its own insurance premiums. Holland probably enjoys her health coverage provided by state taxpayers and believes she could trade places with those that do not have state benefits.

Obviously, Holland does not understand the insurance system she is supposed to be regulating. Health insurance in Oklahoma is not affordable, just like everywhere else in the United States, because the insurers cannot solve the cost of health care in this country any better than anyone else. If Holland wants universal health insurance coverage in Oklahoma, she should have the legislature pass a cap law that limits the exposure of health insurers to $500,000 and has the state pick up everything above that on a covered claim. With that limitation on exposure, the price of premiums for health insurance would begin to decline. If they did not decline enough, then the cap could be lowered to $400,000, and so on.

Who would pay for the state’s “above the cap” share of medical expenses? Wrong question. What are we as state taxpayers already paying and would this be better? State tax payers are paying for the medical care of one third of the state’s population from zero. By making health insurance more affordable, and thereby reducing the third to a smaller percentage, by having more people buy insurance, the cost would likely be less.

To work the problem from the other end, the state should make health insurance premium payments for children deductible from state income taxes. That would also increase the number of middle income tax payers that could afford health insurance.

If the Insurance Commissioner needs a funding source, maybe she could propose a special tax on season tickets to OU and OSU football seasons. Maybe she is so smart she could retool the lottery into not only the funding rescue for Oklahoma education, but the funding source for health insurance (or season football tickets for everyone). But, blaming the sick people, or the poor people, for their lack of money, or their lack of fiscal responsibility, is based on the bogus notion that people want to stand in line at the emergency room, want to lose their homes in foreclosure, and are just wastrels and ne’er do wells.

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• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

Terra Extraneus happily adds seven more entries to our list of Oklahoma Law Blogs. Six are based in Tulsa, which had been poorly represented on our Oklahoma Law Blogs directory. We now list 19 blogs: 9 in OKC, 8 in Tulsa, and 1 each in Paul’s Valley and Pine Ridge.

The newest additions come thanks to some help from a few friends. Michael Bates at the popular BatesLine blog was the first to join us in sounding the call for Sooner State blawgs. J.M. Branum of JMBzine.com also mentioned our quest. Bates and Branum were also kind enough to point us in the direction of law blogs they knew about. Thanks also to Jim Calloway at the OBA, who mentioned our directory on the OBA.net forum, which brought us a few more responses.

Here are the seven Oklahoma law blogs newly added to our list:

• Reinsurance Law Blog: Jody R. Nathan is a Tulsa attorney at Stauffer, Graves & Nathan. The firm works in insurance-related cases. Nathan has been writing the blog since Feb. 2006.

• Oklahoma Criminal Defense: Tulsa defense attorney Glen R. Graham has also been writing his blog since 2006. Graham is a frequent blogger on a variety of legal topics.

• Tulsa attorney Dan Nunley reports that he is now writing four law blogs. I mentioned Nunley’s Oklahoma Family Law blog in Part Two of this series. Nunley followed up in an email to tell us that he recently started three more blogs to promote his other practice areas: Personal Injury Lawyer Blog, Social Security Disability Blog and Workers’ Compensation Blog.

It will be interesting to see if Nunley can write quality posts for four blogs and keep them all up-to-date. He has been posting once or twice a month with consistency for almost two years. If he follows that pace on all four blogs, he will still be writing less than 10 posts a month, which is certainly doable.

• Jeffrey Taylor is an Oklahoma City University Law School grad who just took his bar exam last week. Taylor plans to enter private practice, and he has gotten a jump on his law marketing by beginning a blog, Legally Easy, at the beginning of this year. Taylor plans to practice in personal injury, business development and protection, and family law.

• Last by hardly least in today’s batch of law blogs is the Bill Kumpe Blog. Bill Kumpe is a Tulsa attorney who has been blogging since July 2006. Kumpe’s blog is by far the most interesting of the bunch. Kumpe passes along his strong opinions about the law, politics and the Christian faith. He brags, “My redneck Okie credentials are impeccable.” I’m not sure, but I think the very use of a four-syllable word like “impeccable” may disqualify you as a redneck, Bill. Kumpe and his blog are interesting enough that I believe I will review it further in a separate post.

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If you know of any Oklahoma law blogs, please tell us about them in the comments section. Our goal is to assemble the most complete list possible of active Okie law blogs.

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Part One
Part Two

Here at Terra Extraneus we are assembling what we hope will become an authoritative listing of Oklahoma law blogs. In two previous posts, we searched the 526 blogs listed on the Blog Oklahoma directory and found 7 blogs which meet the criteria (a table of those blogs is on our Okla Law Blogs page).

Now we expand our search, turning to the website of the Oklahoma Bar Association. Sadly, unlike the American Bar Association, the OBA does not maintain an online directory of Sooner law blogs. However, the OBA does have a blog of its own. Jim Calloway directs the OBA’s Management Assistance Program and writes the Law Practice Tips blog. Calloway lists a half-dozen “Oklahoma Blawggers” on his site, so I checked them out.

First, of course, there is Calloway’s own blog, Law Practice Tips. Calloway’s favorite area is technology, from software to online resources to the latest gadgets. He also occasionally writes reviews of other law blogs. I enjoy Calloway’s blog; it is an interesting blog and worth reading.

Calloway is a big proponent of law blogging. He wrote “Blawg: Marketing Your Practice with a Weblog” in the Aug. 2006 issue of the ABA’s Law Practice Today. He also writes occasional articles on law blogging for the OBA website. Since Calloway is an enthusiastic advocate of law blogging, I am surprised that he only lists six Oklahoma blawgs on his Law Practice Tips blogroll. He lists only one of the seven blogs we have on our list, the excellent Phosita, which I mentioned in Part Two of this series.

Of the remaining five on Calloway’s list, one is actually a Pennsylvania blog: Benefits Blog, written by attorney B. Janell Grenier. Grenier is from Oklahoma, but left our Sooner State for Pennsylvania pastures several years ago.

Another blog on Calloway’s list is Res Ipsa Loquitur (a legal term which means, “the thing speaks for itself”). RIL is written by “Rita.” Rita describes herself as:

A middle-aged slightly right-wing conservative living in the People’s Republic of Fayetteville, Arkansas, with my husband, two dogs, and a cat. I work as a court-appointed children’s attorney for abused/neglected kids over in beautiful downtown Jay, Oklahoma.

Sounds like Rita is using the law to help others, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, Rita does not choose to blog about her practice or about any legal issues. I scanned through the 27 posts she has written in 2008 and not a one is law-related. I’m going to have to turn to our panel of judges for a ruling. No, sorry, a Fayetteville woman writing a blog about her personal and family life does not qualify as an Oklahoma law blog.

Happily, we do pick up three more bonifide Okie blawgs from Calloway’s blogroll to add to our list. Here they are:

• Consumer Law Updates: Written by Elaine Dowling, an OKC attorney. Dowling blogs once a month like clockwork about bankruptcy, debt relief and other consumer law issues.

• OK Blawg: the Oklahoma Law Blog: Apparently named by the department of redundancy department, OK Blawg: the Oklahoma Law Blog is written by James Dee Graves. Graves is or was an assistant district attorney in Garvin County and is also a law professor. Graves hasn’t posted since Nov. 2007, so we’ll see if he keeps OB:OLB active, but we’ll add him to the list for now.

• Direct Appeal: By OKC attorney Russ Wheeler. Wheeler posts 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decisions in criminal cases. No commentary added, just the decisions. Wheeler’s blog is no doubt a valuable asset to attorneys and those who want to stay ahead of the news. Wheeler has been blogging since December 2004, making his blog the oldest one on our list.

A similar blog is Opinions From Oklahoma and the Northern District. OOND is not on Calloway’s blogroll, but was referred to us by Michael Bates of Bateline in his response to this series (thanks again, Michael). The blog is written by Tulsa attorney Spencer Bryan. Bryan posted from June to December 2007, but hasn’t posted since, so his blog is teetering toward inactivity, but we will add him to the list.

So, we have doubled our list of Oklahoma law blogs to 12. Nine of the bloggers are in OKC, 2 in Tulsa and 1in Paul’s Valley. In the next part of this series we will search the American Bar Association directory for more blogs to add to the list. If you know of any Okie law blogs, please tell us about them in the comments section.

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• Part One
• Part Three

It appears that nobody is doing the very important work of maintaining a directory of Oklahoma law blogs. Ever eager to serve the community by meeting a need that no one else even knew existed, we at Terra Extraneus are stepping forward to host and maintain such a list. We have begun that directory on this page: Oklahoma Law Blogs.

What constitutes an Oklahoma law blog? No need to define it too narrowly, but surely at least these three criteria are appropriate:

• The blog addresses issues related to the law and practice of law in a significant portion of its content.

• The blogger is based in Oklahoma or has some obvious connection to our state.

• The blog is active. If it has not been updated in six months, we may arch an eyebrow. If a year has gone by, we may employ the strikethrough tool (or worse).

I have gone out in search of blogs that meet the above description. I am startled at how few active Oklahoma law blogs there are. I detailed my search methodology in Part One of this series. In this post I will list and comment on the six active law blogs I found on the Blog Oklahoma directory.

(1) Phosita: Phosita is the blog of the intellectual property firm of Dunlap Codding & Rogers, OKC. Phosita is the most impressive Oklahoma law blog I’ve come across so far. Phosita is written mostly by Douglas Sorocco, a distinguished lawyer and blogger and a recipient of the Journal Record’s 2008 Leadership in Law award. Phosita is a well-designed and well-written blog that has been around for a while. By the way, PHOSITA stands for “person having ordinary skill in the art.” It’s a patent law thing.

(2) Oklahoma Family Law: Tulsa attorney Dan Nunley writes the OK Family Law blog. Nunley practices in and blogs about divorce and other family legal issues. Nunley is a pretty faithful blogger, posting at least once or twice a month since December 2006.

(3) JMBzine.com: James Matthew Branum (“JMB”) is a 30-something solo practitioner. Branum’s blog is “dedicated to non-violent revolutionary change for peace and justice in Oklahoma and the world.” Peace AND justice — quite a tall order. Branum is a Mennonite and therefore a pacifist. Branum is pretty intense, but he also has a sense of humor. His blog header proclaims: “When Jesus said love your enemies, he probably meant, ‘Don’t kill them.’”

Branum is a prolific blogger. He has blogged about every other day since September 2003! I think it is fair to say that JMBzine is only peripherally a law blog; most of Branum’s posts are about politics and religion.

Rod Heggy reviewed Branum’s blog in 2006. Rod didn’t agree with much, and titled his review: “A Blog to Disagree With.” I also disagree with the doctrine of Branum and his church that Jesus’s teachings preclude the military and military action. However, I have a lot of admiration for Branum, from what I can discern by reading his blog. I admire Branum for deriving his political views from his faith rather than from self-interest, and for trying to be a person who makes a difference, rather than just another person taking up space. And, of course, despite disagreements on secondary doctrines, we are brothers in Christ, and that counts for a lot to me, as I know it does to Mr. Heggy. I’m guessing Branum is a fascinating person to know, and I look forward to meeting him one of these days.

(4) Attorney at Blawg: We can’t forget our old friend Dave Walker, who segued a couple of years ago from teaching in a public school classroom to lawyering in an OKC law office. I reviewed and recommended Dave’s personal blog, DaveTown, in 2006. Dave still writes DaveTown and occasionally posts to Attorney at Blawg, too. Dave practices at Beets McNaughton & Walker.

(5) Satellite Sky: Satellite Sky is written by Fred Roper of OKC, a former bankruptcy attorney who is now in-house. He is also a chess champion. Roper has been blogging since 2006. His blog is a lot less active this year (14 posts during the first seven months of 2008), but he’s still active.

(6) Terra Extraneus: Last, hopefully not least, there is our own little blog, Terra Extraneus, written by OKC attorney Rod Heggy and myself.

Interesting to note that of the six active law blogs found on the Blog Oklahoma directory, five are based in OKC and one in Tulsa. Is there not a single law blogger in Lawton, Stillwater, Enid, Bartlesville or Muskogee? Is there only one in Tulsa? Only five in Oklahoma City? I continue to be amazed.

I will expand my search for Oklahoma law blogs in Part Three of this series.

* * * * *
Thanks to Michael Bates of BatesLine for linking to this post, and plugging our search for OK law blogs. Michael is one of Oklahoma’s premier bloggers, drawing more than 800 readers a day. I reviewed Michael’s excellent blog a couple of years ago here. His post should be a big help in tracking down more OK law bloggers.

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• Part Two
• Part Three

I decided to survey what’s happening among fellow Oklahoma law bloggers. Back in 2006, when Terra Extraneus was young, Rod Heggy and I surveyed several Oklahoma blogs, including some law blogs. I wanted to see if any new blog stars have emerged in the Sooner State legal community.

In my attempt to identify any Okie law blogs lurking out there, I employed the following strategy:

(1) I began with the Blog Oklahoma directory. Blog Oklahoma lists 526 member blogs. Only 7 of them are tagged “law.” To make sure I didn’t miss any, I also searched on the word “law,” and found a few more that way.

(2) I then checked the Oklahoma Bar Association website. Sadly, the OBA does not maintain a directory of blogs. However, the OBA does have a blog of its own. Jim Calloway directs the OBA’s Management Assistance Program, and writes the Law Practice Tips blog. Calloway lists some “Okahoma Blawggers” on his site, so I checked them out.

(3) I then moved on to the American Bar Association, which does maintain an extensive blog directory (and we are glad for it, because we get occasional visitors to our blog through our ABA listing). I surveyed the blogs ABA has listed under the Oklahoma heading.

(4) Then, I circled back to the law blogs I identified, to see if they linked to other Oklahoma law blogs on their blogrolls. I also did a Google search to see if I could shake any more grains out of the sack.

So I think the resulting list of Oklahoma law blogs is fairly comprehensive. I am surprised at what a short list it is, and that the list sure hasn’t grown much in the last two years. Here they are, presented in a series of posts. Let’s begin with law blogs found at Blog Oklahoma. I found about a dozen self-described law blogs on the Blog Oklahoma list. However, only half of them meet these simple criteria: active, Oklahoma-based, and writing on legal issues.

DEAD LINK
• One of them, Credit Wrench, is a dead link. I Googled Credit Wrench to see if the site had moved to a new URL. It hasn’t, but I learned that Credit Wrench was once written by Bill Bauer, who is apparently some kind of credit repair guru. Bauer got into a full-blown fuss with one debt collector, leading to a federal lawsuit or at least the threat of one. Maybe his website was collateral damage.

UPDATE 07/28/08: Credit Wrench lives! See Bill Bauer’s response in the comment field. Bauer is quick to say he is NOT a credit repair guru. Also, Credit Wrench is alive and well and online. The site is now located here: Credit Wrench. I see that Bauer’s blog goes back to Nov. 2005. Bill, we will be adding you to our Oklahoma Law Blogs roll.

INACTIVE
• New York State of Mind hasn’t posted since Sep 2007. Besides, what kind of name is that for an Oklahoma blog? The blog’s author, a self-described “female attorney,” is:

a Manhattan girl currently trapped in Oklahoma. It is T minus about two years before my reprieve. In the meantime I must vent my frustrations at the lack of Sephora, Tiffany, Brownstones, the subway system, and virtually everything else NYC.

Apparently NYSofM finally managed to escape our dreaded Sooner State. She can probably be found today, riding on a subway, humming a Billy Joel tune.

• Also inactive is Oklahoma Solo. OK Solo was written by Luke Anthony, a 30-something Stillwater attorney. Anthony blogged for 15 months in 2006 and 2007 about “the opening of an Oklahoma solo law firm.” Sure enough, Luke’s last post, on June 3, 2007, is titled: “Off and Running.”

Whew, Just wanted to let everyone know that just over a month ago I launched Anthony Law Firm, PLLC. My first month was fantastic. Dozens of new clients and just as many new legal issues. The small firm life suits me well. I get to meet with my clients and really get to know them. Just last week one of them actually gave me a hug.

Luke accomplished his goal, has left his blog online as a testament and tutorial, and apparently has otherwise abandoned the blogosphere.

ACTIVE
• Another blog, Sidebar: Law and Order, Okie Style, is written by non-lawyer Brian Bates. Bates’ blog is teetering toward inactivity, with no posts since January. Bates is rather famously known as the Video Vigilante, for capturing men on camera in the act of hiring prostitutes. That’s gotta keep a guy busy, which must explain why Brian hasn’t done any blogging lately.

• Still active, and far less flamboyant, is the OCU Law School blog. I scrolled through the blog’s recent posts, and all of them are announcements of law school activities. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not really a law blog. The posts are unsigned, and I imagine they are written by the school’s PR department.

ANY LEGITIMATE OKLAHOMA BLAWGERS?
So are there any active law bloggers in Oklahoma? There aren’t many, but there are a few. I found six legitimate Oklahoma law blogs on the Blog Oklahoma directory. I will list and describe them in the next post of this series.

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UPDATE****3/26*** The Court withdrew its order on a 5-4 vote to restudy the internet access issue. Hopefully, the Court will retain the new rule requiring exercise of care when putting individual identification information in public pleadings. But, internet access to court files should be retained.
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The Oklahoma Supreme Court, though not unanimously, hurled the Oklahoma Court system backwards with such force the court system is now back in 1982. Pleadings are no longer available on line from the Oklahoma court system’s internet presence, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network.

This action was imposed unilaterally by our highest and usually most sensible Court for the stated reason that it would protect privacy. Forgetting for the moment that the other way the Court addressed it, by passing a rule limiting personal and financial information disclosure, was the only effective way to address it, the Court’s fear of gadgetry was both humorous and sad.

Pleadings are public records that can be viewed at any Court Clerk’s office, so the court did not remove them from the public sphere, but just made them harder and more expensive to review, because now it takes a trip to the courthouse to view and copy the pleadings. The Court just reduced the convenience of review by eliminating the instant review possible on line. Because court dockets and court cases can still be searched on line, the pleadings can still be easily identified, as can the parties to law suits. Exact identification of parties might be harder, but that only is true until one makes the trip to the courthouse to review the pleadings.

Of course, only 80% of Oklahoma’s court system was ever on line, not all 77 counties were on line, and only in one or two counties could every pleading be accessed, although some access was available to pleadings in all the counties that made up the 80%. Nevertheless, our Court system seemed quite modern and efficient because of this access.

The great contradiction, and the humor, in our high court’s pull back from the 21st century, is that the unstated and underlying premise has to be that Oklahoma state court pleadings are somehow more valuable and more dangerous than federal court pleadings. Every federal court pleading in the United States, much less in the federal courts sitting in Oklahoma, unless under court ordered seal, can be downloaded for eight cents a page on the Pacer system.

The great sadness resulting from Oklahoma’s action is that because of the Court’s failure to reconcile the virtually complete access to federal pleadings with Oklahoma’s sudden phobia about access, the Oklahoma action seems to be reactionary and parochial.

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I attended the showing of this great movie twice, so far, with a bitter sweet attitude. The movie brought back many memories of my own debate career. My debate partners were among the finest people and greatest minds I have ever known. One would be famous during one of America’s most tragic times, one would be commercially successful beyond the ability of an Oklahoman to comprehend and only able to achieve that success away from the limitations we have placed on ourselves, one would be a great debate coach, and another would be a well respected minister. I met my wife because of debate. I travelled the United States because of debate and saw the great universities of the day. In the National Debate Tournament of 1976 in Boston, my partner and I, representing “SE Okie,” debated not one but two Harvard teams. While I may be unable to place myself in the shoes of the first nationally recognized black debaters, or comprehend the black experience in America, debate is another matter.

The movie, The Great Debaters, also reminded me of the fact that at one time in things intellectual, Oklahoma universities, like Oklahoma City University, were leaders. That has been lost and replaced by sports.

In part, it was lost because forensics education in Oklahoma was systematically dismantled. Without a forensics education system, no debate coaches were trained or qualified.

In Oklahoma, the large universities have always lagged behind the smaller ones in debate even if they excelled in sports.

While the University of Oklahoma attended the National Debate Tournament eleven times during the history of the tournament, from 1947 to 2007, Northeastern Oklahoma State University attended fifteen times, University of Central Oklahoma (formerly Central [Oklahoma] State University attended fourteen times and Southeastern Oklahoma State University attended ten times. In other words, to become the preeminent debate power in Oklahoma, OU must qualify teams to the NDT at least four more times. Also, the University of Oklahoma would have to do one more thing: win it at least once.

Only Southeastern Oklahoma State University has won the National Debate Tournament among Oklahoma higher educational institutions.

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One thing that distinguishes a “great” film from a “good” one for me is the discussion it prompts on the drive home, and whether I’m still thinking about the film the next day. Was it merely entertaining, or did I learn anything from it? Did it make me think?

I saw Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters last night. It is a thoroughly entertaining movie, well acted and beautifully filmed, with a decent script. Even better, the movie continues to make me think, and has prompted me to dig a little deeper into the history of race relations and civil rights in 20th century Texas and Oklahoma.

The Great Debaters, which has received a Golden Globe nomination for best dramatic movie, is the true story of the debate squad of Wiley College, an African-American school in Marshall, Texas, in the Depression-era 1930s. Washington plays the debate coach, Melvin B. Tolson, and Forest Whitaker is a campus theologian and local minister who is the father of one member of the squad. Under Tolson’s tutelage, the Wiley debate squad gains national attention, and in a day when separate but unequal was the norm, invitations to compete against white teams (in the movie, when his debaters refer to white collegians, Tolson corrects them, saying they are “Anglo-Saxons”).

I competed in high school debate, and my blogging partner, Rod Heggy, went to college on a debate scholarship and competed in the National Debate Tournament. In an early scene, Tolson draws a square with chalk on the classroom floor, the “Hot Spot.” Students step into the Hot Spot to speak extemporaneously and field cross-examination questions. It reminded me of an exercise my own speech coach employed in which students were called to the platform, handed a large grocery sack which contained numerous items, and required to reach into the sack, pull something out and give an impromptu speech about that object.

However, despite the title, The Great Debaters is not primarily about collegiate debate. Debaters may complain that the movie fails to reveal much about the process and art of debating. They may observe, as some reviewers have, that the African-American debaters were conveniently assigned debate topics that always involved race relations and civil rights, and that they always drew the “right” side of those topics. True enough, but such comments miss the point.

The Great Debaters is not a story about college debate; it is about race relations in the generation immediately preceding the modern civil rights movement. The film uses college debating as a story device to illuminate the great race debate that has always been a prominent thread of American history. When the majority uses the force of law to deprive a minority of their God-given rights, how should the minority respond? Should they exercise moderation and patience? Should they employ civil disobedience? Resort to violence? The debaters wrestle with these questions on the platform and in real life. If the modern civil rights movement began in 1954 with Brown v Board of Education, The Great Debaters gives a glimpse of the sickening Jim Crow days of the segregated South in which the great civil rights leaders were born and raised.

Some (including Washington himself) have compared The Great Debaters to the slough of sports movies about small schools that win state championships against great odds. Others have placed it in the “great teacher” genre (To Sir With Love, Dead Poets Society, countless others). But most of the The Great Debaters does not occur in classrooms or at debate tournaments, but in the real world. One of the most haunting scenes is a confrontation between white and black families after the black family accidentally hits and kills a pig while driving down a country road. As that scene and others illustrate, a black man in the segregated South literally had no rights, for the “law” was squarely behind the white man, regardless of what he chose to do to a black man.

Another emotion-charged scene is a conversation between two young African-Americans, as they recall an earlier scene in which they witnessed a lynching. Volumes are spoken in the question one of the black teens asks: “I wonder what he did wrong?” referring to the man who had been lynched. What an atrocity to foster a culture in which racism is so pervasive that when a black teen witnesses the gruesome murder of a black man by a hate-filled white mob, he is led to wonder what the black man did wrong.

The movie prompted me to learn more about Melvin B. Tolson and James L. Farmer Jr. I was surprised to discover that Tolson spent the last 20 years of his life teaching at Langston University in Langston, Okla., just 30 miles from my home. James L. Farmer Jr., who in the movie is a prodigious 14-year-old college student, went on to become the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. Farmer was a courageous freedom fighter who championed non-violent civil disobedience and who had a huge influence on the civil rights movement and on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Farmer’s philosophy of civil disobedience is foreshadowed in a stirring speech the young debater gives in the movie’s climactic scene.

The Great Debaters is a great movie. It is not a great exposition of college debating or classroom mentorship, and it brings nothing new regarding underdogs rising above humble beginnings. What it does do is depict an important chapter in race relations in our not-so-distant past, and introduce us to remarkable men like Tolson and Farmer. The inspirational story here is not about a debate contest won or lost, but about men and women such as these who did not allow legally enforced racism to prevent them from being the people God created them to be, and making their mark in this world.

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MORE NOTES ON THE GREAT DEBATERS

• Another memorable scene is an argument that erupts between Farmer Sr. the theologian and Tolson the debate coach. The minister is concerned about Tolson’s left-wing politics. Tolson responds, “Jesus was a radical,” to which Farmer shouts back, “Are you comparing yourself to Jesus?” According to my research, that scene may misrepresent Farmer Sr. His son, Farmer Jr., did say that his father advocated a more moderate approach than the path of civil disobedience Farmer Jr. pursued. However, according to Tolson’s writings, it was in fact Farmer Sr. who presented “a vivid picture of Jesus the young rebel” in a 1938 Mother’s Day sermon.

• Denzel Washington also directed The Great Debaters. It is his second time in the director’s chair (after Antwone Fisher in 2002). The Great Debaters has some beautiful shots. One that particularly caught my eye is toward the end of the movie, when the debate team boards a train in Texas to head for the climactic debate at Harvard University. As the train leaves the station, it moves into the heavily wooded terrain of east Texas. Washington gives us an aerial view of acres of green trees into which the train disappears, except for billows of gray smoke pouring from the engine, marking the train’s path through the lush greenery. I loved that shot.

• Jurnee Smollett plays the first and only female member of the Wiley debate squad. I see from her bio that Smollett, 21, has been playing TV roles since she was 5, so she is already a veteran actor. She is not only beautiful but quite talented, and I expect her to become a star.

• Denzel Washington recently gave an interview about his Christian faith and the role his faith plays in his movie career. See: Denzel Washington’s Ministry of Movies.

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The District Attorney of Oklahoma County according to The Oklahoman has announced that the sellers at the Affair of the Heart craft show will not be prosecuted for violation of trademarks of the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. The District Attorney has not announced and has reserved on the issue, according to the newspaper, whether that office will prosecute representatives of OU or OSU for confiscating crafts displayed at Affair of the Heart that bore either or both school logos.

Obviously, I am not privy to what precisely what happened, and all I know of the facts came from the newspaper. But this incident bothered me. Trademark and copyright protection of late has become very edgy. Now frustrated with the deliberate machinery of the court system, or maybe in ignorance of it, it may be turning to something else.

Self-help repossession, of course, has been permitted to secured creditors under the Uniform Commercial Code for many years. Indeed, the leading case on self-help repossession, Williams v Ford Motor Credit Co., dates from 1982. The rule has been in such cases that self-help repossession remains lawful under the uniform commercial code for secured lenders if there is no breach of the peace. But in Williams, the court made it clear that if the car owner had objected to the repossession, it would have been a breach of the peace for Ford to proceed to repo the car.

There is no corresponding right of self-help repossession in trademark or copyright law. It is possible to get a court order permitting seizure of the infringing goods, especially in cases in which the infringing goods are in fact ringers, i.e., counterfeit knock offs. See, Lorillard Tobacco Co., Inc. v. A&E Oil, Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2007 WL 2736622 (7th Cir. 2007)(counterfeit cigarettes with counterfeit tax stamps), in which a couple packs of the counterfeit cigarettes were purchased by Lorillard and then used as evidence to support a seizure order. This would have been the correct procedure for OU and OSU to follow. Also, they could simply have photographed the infringing items and then prepared lawsuits against the crafts people.

Both OU and OSU have so many lawyers in their employ that they own their own small law firms, and they no doubt employ many private law firms as well. Therefore, there would have been no excuse if in fact OSU and OU personnel wrongfully seized anything. If they seized anything without a court order and over the objection of anyone, it was a breach of the peace, and if they acted under color of state authority, it was a violation of civil rights statutes.

If the OU and OSU people, as alleged in one news story, had in their company a law enforcement officer, then that officer, too, breached the peace, because without a warrant or a court order and over the objections of anyone, even a bystander, the law enforcement officer was violating the civil rights of the owners. The law enforcement officer could have stood there and prevented disturbance of any evidence if a crime was being committed in the officer’s presence, while lawyers scrambled to obtain the appropriate court orders. While the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act might shield some the actors, or place dollar limits on some of the theories of recovery, it likely would not much impact a federal lawsuit under §1983.

The other thing that bothers me about all of this is that OU and OSU are public universities, not private businesses. They are political subdivisions of the State of Oklahoma. They survive on legislative appropriations, regardless of the profitability of their fund raising, their R&D programs (if any) or their sports programs. While that does not place their logos in the public sphere for random or unlicensed use, it does at least morally qualify their claims to protect those logos.

Moreover, both OU and OSU use their logos to brand high profile products, their multi-million dollar sports programs: revenues of $30 million for OU and $15 million for OSU. Legitimate public comment about those logos is lawful. Honoring one’s favorite team by creating a homemade craft incorporating one or both of the logos is just as much a fair comment as making fun of them. That a crafts hobbyist made a few extras and sold them at Affair of the Heart is hardly a threat to those logos, especially since they exist, as a practical if not a legal matter, partly in and partly out of the public domain.

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As everyone knows, Oklahoma but not Texas is in the 10th Circuit. Nevertheless, sometimes a federal court sitting in diversity jurisdiction in Oklahoma, for example, must apply Texas law because of a choice of law provision that is for some reason enforceable. Thus, it may not be all that helpful, as decisions go, for future guidance.

In Rash v J. V. Intermediate, Ltd, the 10th Circuit, under Texas law, held that a forfeiture of the fee owed to an agent is not to be automatically forfeited upon a finding of disloyalty to the principal, but is to be applied only to “clear and serious” violations of fiduciary duty. Not every agency relationship is fiduciary, but the one in this case was considered one by the district court and the 10th Circuit did not disagree.

Moreover, under Texas law, the 10th Circuit required that the forfeiture be considered the other relief accorded to the principal is a significant “equitable factor.” In other words, no double dipping allowed. However, the forfeiture might be appropriate to address damages not otherwise compensated.

This case is one more likely to be misquoted and over extended, and those faced with the typically draconian remedy of forfeiture of compensation should be alert to its limitations.

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