My maternal grandfather, Pasquale Cupito, was a legend. I have far too many stories to list here, but one of them involves a giant garbage can lid that he used as a cooking utensil. See, he could make a mean homemade pizza, but there was never enough to keep everyone satisfied. One day he concluded that a garbage can lid might make a dandy and enormous pizza pan, so he hammered one out, washed it,…

I promise not to discuss COVID-19 in detail in this post. The recent deluge of hot legal takes about the pandemic may be making a lot of people sicker than the virus itself. So, let’s talk about a different, earlier disaster. Believe it or not, eight years after the winds of Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey, they’re still blowing through the state’s court system. Recently, the Appellate Division upheld a multimillion-dollar verdict against an insurance…

In the 2008 film Wall-E, Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland with nothing on it but the abandoned remnants of human society, and a forlorn, trash-compacting robot. The robot’s only living company is a pet cockroach named Hal, which I guess is Pixar’s nod to the popular notion that cockroaches will outlive us all. (Or maybe it’s a tribute to Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) You know what else will outlive us all? Law firm…

Here’s a piece of useless trivia for you.  You know that old saying that something “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”? The saying apparently originated back in 1861, when Count Johann Bernhard von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen (remember him?), an Austrian statesman, was presented with a document recognizing Italy as a nation-state, and first uttered those now-familiar words. You might want to remember Count Johann’s opinion the next time someone shows you a certificate of insurance. …

Not long ago, there was a kerfuffle over the use of the term “OK, Boomer,” which I guess is a pejorative term aimed at my generation for being out-of-touch with the modern world.  (See the Vox article here.)  Truth be told, maybe we are out of touch, at least about some things. As someone who grew up without a laptop or an iPhone, and whose family had a rotary phone on the wall, with…

In the “Cheese Shop” sketch from the old Monty Python comedy series, John Cleese plays a customer trying to buy some cheese from “Ye National Cheese Emporium, purveyor of fine cheese to the gentry (and the poverty-stricken too)”. The cheese shop proprietor, played by Michael Palin, seems to have no cheese in stock, not even common varieties like cheddar.  Cleese keeps trying, by asking for different and increasingly obscure types of cheese, but Palin only…

If you’re involved in the legal business for any length of time, every once in a while, you’ll come across a case in which the facts are so horrible, and the result so seemingly wrongheaded, that you can’t help but feel that our entire system has failed. A recent decision from the Third Circuit, Arena v. RiverSource Life Insurance Co., which you can read here, sadly falls into that category. Christine Arena was a…