Plus A Dishonorable Lawyer Who is also an Ignorant Idiot?

The following might be believed. The title and contents of this post are nothing but a report of the opinions and reactions of others. They are not objective reports about what I actually believe, nor are they accusations of any kind.
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There once was a girl named Shen[i]na,
She bitched about Don’s Pagent[ina]. 
“No slot have I got, though all think I’m that hot.”
“No” said all others, “You are not, not, not.”
Shenn opened her mouth, did not shut it at all.
And these errors have lead to her fall.
Five Mill she owes; no help from her crews,
So she’ll buy no more shoes,
Since Don’s pageant now has all the clues.

Sheena Monnin (“Sheena”) was “crowned” Miss Pennsylvania USA, and this “honor” “promoted” her to the next beauty pageant competition up the line, it being the Miss USA Pageant  (the “Pageant) the winning of which leads to the next and highest level competition, the Miss Universe Pageant. It is the crowning worldwide title.  The social functions of all of these will be ignored here.

Sheena did not do as well in the Miss USA Pageant and she firmly believed she should have done much better. She publicly asserted that at least one of the other contestants told her that she had empirical evidence that the results were rigged, which she–Sheena–apparently herself thought was true. She told the world, in effect, that she had been cheated and that the Pageant was a fraud. Poor Sheena either implied or left the impression that Donald Trump–a narcissistic trumpeter if ever there was one–was involved in this conspiracy.  The informant that she alleges gave her crucial disclosure denied Sheena’s claim about the nature of what she said.

Sheena made these charges on Facebook and then on national television.  At its best, her verbalizations were unwise. On the next step down, the discourse of TV was damnably foolish.  Thereafter, she didn’t even go through an act of presenting some sort of public apology–or something that looked and sounded like one and failed to volunteer to submit to a mouth-shutting injunction.  Probably, if she had done this forthwith and publicly announced that she had not known what she was talking about or what she was doing, she probably would have saved herself from a lengthy and very unpleasant period of there being a contemptuous “super-swirl” into which she was caught up–it making her life maximally miserable.

Some have suggested that her oral performances followed by her verbal omissions, were the result of a certain kind of typhoon-sized hubris, in other words, her self-image was intensively narcissistic and she has simply projected it onto Donald.  Some believe she should get therapy.  (Perhaps, Donald might pay for it, if she said she was crazy and desperately needed help, and then do the apologizing after she got out.) Switzerland is a nice place for this sort of thing.

In any case, Sheena had signed a contract with Pageant which required that all relevant disputes go forward by means of arbitration.  Once served, Sheena hired a lawyer (L) from Philadelphia.  He refused to interact with the plaintiff, Pageant, in a variety of ways, e.g., refusing to participate in mediation and probably in other ways.  (There were other ways for Sheena to find ways out of her troubles, maybe: “Good God. I can’t believe I said something so false and insane. I must have gone crazy because of the stress.  Heavens! How can I make things right?”) A confession by Sheena that she was crazy at the time of her utterances and thereafter might even have suspended the arbitration itself. Sheena needed sound advice. L refused to cooperate in any way. Some say she should have offered to enter a convent for a while.

L took the position, among others, that Pageant had no authority to institute an arbitration since the contract had come to an end. Eventually, he informed his client that since he was licensed only in Pennsylvania, he could not help with the arbitration since it occurred in New York.

Various lawyers laughing about this in bars have a number of reactions:

  • L should be disbarred.
  • L should be sent back to any law school that would take him.
  • L should be horsewhipped.
  • L should seek a teaching position at the University of Phoenix or somewhere equally prestigious.
  • L should be sued for a number of transgressions.
  • Sheena should somehow join forces with Pageant to ruin L, and if that took an apology, an attack on L and almost anything else Pageant wanted, except for acting out parts of Chapter 26 and 29 of The Prune in the Silver Bowel, a classic of 14th-century Japanese poetry.

The splendid opinion of the able arbitrator was 19 single pages and it is virtually exempt from further criticism. Empirically and logically the very model of a modern major “arb” opinion. It is that good!  The district agreed and said so, roughly.

The pageant went to federal court to get the arbitration award vacated.  The district judge, of course, lacked any justification. After all, he said, there was controverted evidence that BP (“British Petroleum,” in former days) canceled its support for one of Pageants pageants, this one in a Gulf state. Hence, complained Pageant, the contest had to be moved to Las Vegas.

The judge seemed somewhat sympathetic to poor Sheena.  He agreed that L was atrocious. Unfortunately,  he also said, Sheena was stuck with her lawyer.  His mistakes are her mistakes since he is her agent.   One can only hope that Section II.B.3. becomes a classic of its type.