How come items sue states? While looking up my most favorite in-rem case (&quot;US vs. approximately 64k Pounds of Shark Fins&quot;), I stumbled over a few quite strange ones: Pensylvania was sued by a car Kansas was sued by some books Massachusetts was sued by a single book The US tops ridiculousness: they were sued by a truck full of jam All of these are named &quot;Item v State&quot; and technically, it was a representative for the items' owners that sued, but how come we name these cases &quot;Item vs. State&quot; and not &quot;Representative for Item vs. State&quot; or &quot;Owner v State&quot;?
The original filed case would have been &quot;Government v. Item&quot;, with the government (plaintiff) suing the item (defendant), not the other way around. But these are appellate cases, and the title convention there is &quot;Appellant v. Respondent&quot;, regardless of who was the original plaintiff or defendant. So in each case, the item presumably lost in some lower court and is now appealing to SCOTUS. Taking 62 Cases of Jam as an example and chasing the citations, the original case in US District Court for the District of New Mexico was United States v. 62 Cases, 87 F. Supp. 735 (D.N.M. 1949). The government sought to condemn the jam on the grounds that it was only 25% fruit, where federal standards for jam required that it must contain at least 45% (or more depending on the type of fruit). The District Court dismissed the &quot;libel&quot; on the grounds that the product was clearly labeled &quot;imitation&quot;. The government appealed to the Tenth Circuit (183 F.2d 1014 (10th Cir. 1950)); here the case was still titled &quot;US v. 62 Cases&quot; since the United States was the appellant; appeals cases are always titled &quot;Appellant v. Respondent&quot;. The circuit court reversed, ruling that since it looks and tastes like jam, it has to meet the standards for jam, its label notwithstanding, and ordered the jam to be condemned. The jam petitioned for certiorari to the US Supreme Court, (340 U.S. 593 (1951)), and now for the first time the title of the case is &quot;62 Cases of Jam v. US&quot; since the jam is now the petitioner. Again, &quot;Petitioner v. Respondent&quot; is the norm. As the defendant party was &quot;62 Cases of Jam&quot; throughout the lower courts, it wouldn't make sense to change it to &quot;Fred Smith, Owner of 62 Cases of Jam&quot; at this point. SCOTUS reversed, and the jam was finally exonerated, free to resume its ordinary jammy activities.
You can read about (federal) damages from the Surface Transportation, but they are at least liable for 60 cent per lb. for damages. The company has to inform you that you have the option for full-value, which you can waive. In addition, they are allowed to limit their liability for damages for items of high value such as furs and jewelry, things worth more that $100/lb (sounds like the coffee table might be such a thing). You are also required to give notice of high-value items. If you waived full coverage in exchange for a lower rate, then it would be non-productive to take them to small claims court. Also, under state law, there may be an arbitration clause which would prevent you from suing them (so, check the contract).
When people talk about the "American rule," they usually mean a system where every party pays their own legal costs, and the winner is not compensated in any way for the costs of litigation. Using that as your basis, the American system itself is actually a "hybrid." The details change a bit from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But in general: The loser in many American civil cases is required to pay the actual court costs. These are not as substantial as the attorney's fees, but they can easily run into hundreds or thousands of dollars. These costs are for things like filing fees, process servers, witness fees, court recorders and transcripts, and other costs that, generally speaking, are going to be the same no matter how much your lawyer charges. (Again, what specifically is included in costs depends on your jurisdiction). This imposes a non-trivial expense on the loser of a lawsuit, without allowing the other side to run up the costs to an outrageous figure by hiring huge teams of expensive lawyer, as is possible under the pure English system. While the "American rule" is the default rule in most or all American jurisdictions, there are generally rules that allow the Court to shift part or all of a prevailing party's legal fees to the other side under certain circumstances. For example: in many courts, if you bring a frivolous motion, or a motion designed primarily to inflate the costs of the suit, the court can require you to immediately pay any attorneys' fees expended in responding to that motion, even if you eventually win the lawsuit as a whole. This is a more specific and targeted penalty for misconduct than the English rule. Similarly, if the Court finds that the entire lawsuit you brought &ndash; or the defense you presented &ndash; was frivolous, or presented in bad faith, or under certain other circumstances, the Court can include attorney's fees in the final damage award, just as would have been done under the English rule. The result is a hybrid system. The benefit of this hybrid system, at least in theory, is that frivolous lawsuits are discouraged, but lawsuits that have some merit &ndash; even if they are ultimately unsuccessful &ndash; do not have to worry about the imposition of massive costs. However, the disincentive is not as much as it might be, since the standards courts use to judge a motion or lawsuit "frivolous" are generally quite stringent.
See http://uscode.house.gov/download/download.shtml to start. But what exactly do you mean by a "law"? Lots falls under that term: do you include case law? SCOTUS decisions? Administrative policies? Read earlier Law SE question Naive approach to aggregating all US Federal Laws?
In some jurisdictions, California probably being the most well-known in the US, there are Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statutes, which allow a defendant to file an anti-SLAPP claim (for sake of clarity I'm going to keep calling that person the "defendant") when the plaintiff's suit appears to have been filed for the purpose of infringing upon the defendant's rights by forcing them to bear the costs of litigation or settle the claim in order to avoid them, and itself has little merit or the plaintiff clearly does not expect it to succeed. In California, if the Anti-SLAPP claim succeeds and the plaintiff's claim is dismissed as a SLAPP, the defendant is normally awarded attorney's fees from the plaintiff. The Anti-SLAPP claim also halts discovery in order to reduce the costs on the defendant, so in effect it allows a defendant to challenge the plaintiff's right to sue them on the particular issue before the defendant has to bear the majority of costs.
In fact, the first recognition of the First Sale doctrine came about precisely because a publisher attempted to do something of the nature of what you suggest. In Bobbs-Merrill Co. vs Straus, the Bobbs-Merrill Corporation attempted to enforce the following restriction, printed on the inside of a book it published: "The price of this book at retail is one dollar net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright." They made the mistake of attempting to enforce it against, among others, R.H. Macy and Co., who they then had to take to court - and lost. This established the First Sale Doctrine, which then later (in 1976) was codified (in 17 U.S. Code § 109. Textbooks recently tested another element of this; in the 2013 case, Kirtsaeng v John Wiley and Sons Inc., the Supreme Court held that the First Sale doctrine trumped a notice forbidding selling a book outside of a particular territory or region (Kirtsaeng imported textbooks from Thailand, where they were much cheaper than in the US, and resold them at a profit in the US).
So what relevance if any does standing have in criminal trials? E.g., are there any examples of criminal cases/charges dismissed for lack of standing, by which I mean that the court decided the government lacked standing? Let's restrict the discussion to federal proceedings, for the sake of not making this too broad. Almost none. Conceptually, this is because a violation of a sovereign's criminal laws is an injury-in-fact to a legally protected interest of a sovereign in not having its own criminal laws violated. The violation of the law itself is the injury. Where standing type considerations apply they are usually described as jurisdiction. A sovereign, be it a state or the federal government can enforce its own criminal laws, but not another sovereign's criminal laws except by extradition. For example, a state prosecutor can't enforce a federal immigration crime in state court, nor can a state prosecutor file federal or state charges in a federal court. Likewise, a federal prosecutor can't bring federal or state charges in a state court, and a federal prosecutor can't bring state criminal charges (unless adopted by reference as part of federal law) in federal court. Criminal justice in Indian territory which is handled by the federal courts by federal prosecutors in felony cases, are a special case conceptualized either as a &quot;contract service&quot; relationship or as evidence that Indian tribes are not fully sovereign. The extraterritorial application of criminal laws is likewise usually considered a question of jurisdiction rather than standing. Sometimes the federal government passes a law incorporating some state criminal laws by reference as federal criminal laws in federally controlled territory, but that is an issue of substantive law, not standing. A handful of states allow private criminal prosecutions for select minor offenses, rather than being exclusively brought by the government (mostly on the East Coast). In those cases, standing is an issue, just as it is in civil cases. Only victims can bring private criminal prosecutions, where they are allowed, and only in cases where they are the victim.
This case did not find that Two Live Crew's version was fair use. Rather it held that it could be fair use, contrary to the lower court ruling that its commercial nature precluded a fair use defense based on parody. The court remanded the case to be considered in light of its holding. The two parties settled without getting a final decision on fair use. It was never really contested that this work was parody. The issue was whether the commercial nature rendered it unfair. The Supreme Court told the lower courts to assess the taking under the full four-factor fair use analysis and that commercial use doesn't automatically make a parody unfair. One source of confusion is that you seem to be conflating parody and fair use. Parody is just one purpose (along with criticism, education, and others) that has been generally held to swing the balance in favour of fair use. Last, the "five word plagiarism rule" is not a legal standard.