A recent declaration by our sister publication, Virginia Lawyers Weekly, that the “Shaggy defense” is a term of legal art went national this week.

That’s thanks to Slate, the online magazine that picked up a recent VLW story on a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling on a summary judgment motion. In Preston v. Morton, David Morton said he was working on traffic lights in a bucket truck when William Preston, driving a tractor trailer, hit the truck.

Preston’s defense? “It wasn’t me.”

You can read more about U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser’s opinion in the civil case here. The defense — coined during the 2008 child pornography trial of singer R. Kelly and attributed to the song “It Wasn’t Me” by reggae star Shaggy — got me thinking of other uses of popular culture in cases. As someone who has not gone through law school, this kind of terminology helps me to understand the basic facts.

For example, South Park taught me one way to win a case is with the Chewbacca defense. O.J. Simpson’s intrepid lawyer, Johnnie Cochrane, was cartoon-ized on “South Park” in the season 2 episode “Chef Aid.” He wins his case despite an absurd argument:

“Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor? If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit!” he shouted to the jury.

Here are two other cases that show popular culture making its way into law:

• The Matrix defense: Three defendants claimed insanity from being convinced they committed the crimes in a Matrix-like virtual reality. Two were found not guilty, but Joshua Cooke, accused of murdering his parents in February 2003, ended up pleading guilty later that year.

• The Twinkie defense: Dan White, a former San Francisco city supervisor, claimed that junk food diminished his mental capacity, resulting in the murder of city mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. White’s lawyer successfully argued the case and the sentence was reduced to manslaughter.

From a man at work who enjoys Men at Work, here now some news tidbits from Australia.

• The headline says it all: “Ninja students foil Aussie mugging.” Three blokes in the middle of beating a man for his iPod and cell phone fled the scene of the crime when “five black-clad ninjas” came to the rescue. The ninjitsu students were training at a nearby hall when one saw the mugging in progress. Two of the men have been arrested.
• People entering Australia must now declare at customs if they are carrying pornography. An affirmative declaration allows customs officials to search the luggage to determine if the material is legal. The move has drawn protest as an invasion of privacy by the Australian Sex Party, which notes there is no formal definition of pornography on the customs form.

Now, if you’re like me, your first thought about the second story was, “Australian Sex Party? Really?” At the risk of getting fired, I performed a quick Internet search which indicates that it does in fact exist.

G’day to everyone.

As filming of the second season of “Jersey Shore” continues, footage from the first season has been the topic of discussion in a New Jersey courtroom.

A Superior Court judge on Monday allowed a lawsuit to proceed alleging the show’s producers “engaged in a ‘criminal enterprise’ by profiting from showing fights that cast members deliberately provoked,” AP reports.

The decision came after Judge Joseph R. Foster dismissed part of the lawsuit Friday that tried to stop MTV from distributing DVDs and video clips of the first season. The judge held the three plaintiffs were not shown in a false light because their faces were blurred out on the show. The next hearing in the case is set for May 28.

NOTE: If you’re not a “Jersey Shore” fan, you can stop reading right now. Otherwise, you’ve been warned.

The plaintiffs, not surprisingly, were all involved in incidents with Ronnie. Two were the married couple  who engaged in the back-and-forth with Ronnie and Sammi on the boardwalk, which ended with Ronnie and the husband wrestling. (You can see part of the fight in the video accompanying The Asbury Park Press story.) The third plaintiff is the guy Ronnie knocked unconscious with his infamous, “That’s one shot, kid! That’s one shot!”, which put Ronnie in jail for a night.

In other Jersey Shore legal news, here’s one situation The Situation shouldn’t find himself in anytime soon.

Maryland Lawyers for the Arts is marking its 25th anniversary with a “Conference on Creativity & Law” tomorrow afternoon at the American Visionary Art Museum. The conference is free and open to non-lawyers, but you need to RSVP here.

Marcia Semmes, MLA’s executive director (pictured left), called it a “do-it-your-self copyright event,” featuring discussions on copyright law and a screening of “Copyright Criminals,” a documentary about music sampling that will be followed by a talk from filmmaker Kembrew McLeod.

“We think all of the pieces are there for an interesting afternoon,” Semmes said.

That MLA is celebrating its 25th birthday is an interesting story in itself. The organization existed in name only by the late 1990s until it re-launched in 2006. Two years later, MLA started “Arts Brief,” a quarterly e-newsletter that now has more than 10,000 subscribers. Semmes said she received a call from an artist in Washington State this week asking if Saturday’s conference will be available online. (It won’t, she added, but future events might.)

Semmes said MLA still wants to increase its reach beyond the Baltimore region, where most of its volunteers and artists reside. It will also be planning an event this fall to formally celebrate 25 years.

“We face the same challenges as any non-profit, but, knock on wood, we’re as stable as we’ve ever been,” she said.

I don’t do karaoke, but I’ve thought I should have some go-to karaoke songs if ever in a position where my singing could save a damsel in distress or my own life. (Preliminary list: Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy With It”, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” and, of course, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’”)

Now, thanks to The New York Times, I know that if my sing-or-death scenario ever happens in the Philippines, there is one song absolutely to avoid – Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

According to The Times:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The story does not say if anyone has been prosecuted for the karaoke-related attacks, unlike a Seattle woman charged in 2007 with hitting a man as he began singing Coldplay’s “Yellow.” But it does point out that karaoke is something of a national pastime on the archipelago, and many karaoke bar owners have simply removed the Sinatra standard from their playlists.

No one is quite sure why “My Way” elicits such a deadly response, but The Times offers an anecdotally-based guess:

Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. Indeed, most of the “My Way” killings have reportedly occurred after the singer sang out of tune, causing other patrons to laugh or jeer.

Yup, I’ll stick to practicing those Steve Perry high notes.

Certain people would have no problem being snow-bound for a couple days at the Bethesda home featured Friday in a fabulous Washington Post story. The Tone Drive mansion has hosted several BDSM parties the past few months.

(“BDSM”, as the story notes, stands for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.” If you want to find out more, I suggest using your home computer, not your work one.)

The story is about how one of the home’s renters received a written warning from Montgomery County zoning officials because he has been charging admission to the parties, commercial activity largely prohibited in residential areas.

The zoning issue alone would have been enough for me to blog about this story. But then there’s this gem of a quote about the type of people who attend the parties:

“An amazing cross-section of humanity,” says Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. “Men, women, transgender, heterosexuals, gays, bisexuals. Every ethnicity. White-collar and blue-collar. It’s really very, very diverse — though we do have an unusually high percentage of lawyers. I don’t know why.”

Sounds like I have a story to work on after I dig out of the snow.

I’m not ashamed proud to admit it: I love “Jersey Shore,” the MTV reality show that became a cultural phenomenon.

For the uninitiated, the show followed eight twentysomethings for a month last summer as they lived and worked together on the beach in Seaside Heights, N.J. The Situation, Snooki, battling beats, GTL… the show has captured the cultural Zeitgeist with a pound of hair gel to spare.

Now comes word that one of the show’s stars has taken the LSAT. Vinny Guadagnino, known as simply “Vinny“, said he got a “mediocre” score on the test, which shot his plan of doing really well and enrolling at Yale or Harvard.

Vinny said he would like to practice business or corporate law one day. But right now, he is putting any law dreams he has on hold to ride out his newfound stardom.

“To tell you the truth, man, [being a] lawyer isn’t something I wanted to do,” he said.  “Nobody wants to be a lawyer — it’s hard work. But it was kind of my academic route.”

No matter where Vinny ends up, “Jersey Shore” fans know one thing – Vinny’s mom will love him.

The mess at NBC involving “The Tonight Show”, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien has already launched a thousand monologue jokes.

But the high-profile kerfuffle might ultimately boil down to something more mundane: contract law, specifically Conan’s deal with the network. Concurring Opinions broke down the case and gives the slight edge to NBC based on the information that has been made public.

The most interesting point to me is that NBC never stated in Conan’s contract when “The Tonight Show” would air, only that he would host something called “The Tonight Show.” That fact, as Lawrence Cunningham on Concurring Opinions and others have noted, might explain why Conan has been arguing his case to the “People of Earth” in the court of public opinion – and winning in the view of many.

HT: Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes.

(Full disclosure: I’m a Letterman guy. I’ve never liked Leno. These days, I flip back and forth between Dave and Conan.)

The University of Maryland School of Law soon might be able to add “location for an Academy Award-winning film” to its promotional materials.

“The Response,” written by alum Sig Libowitz and filmed at the school in February 2008, is one of 10 films in the running for Best Live Action Short.

The 30-minute movie is based on the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and follows a trio of military judge advocate generals as they decide on a detainee’s guilt or innocence. The law school has an executive producer credit.

The shortlist will be pared down to no more than five next month, and the nominees will be announced Feb. 2. The Academy Awards will air March 7.

The lawyer has become the client.

Baltimore attorney Paul W. Gardner II, who has made headlines as counsel for alleged White House party-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi, has now himself retained a lawyer.

The lawyer, Mark R. Dycio of Fairfax, Virginia, tells me that when the Salahis told the Today show that Gardner had invited them to a Congressional Black Caucus dinner in September–another event they were accused of crashing–Gardner became a witness in their case. As such, Gardner no longer represents the Salahis, Dycio said.

Stay tuned for a full story on the Gardner angle.