Anna Nichole Smith has had her case taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
For me this raises two issues. First, as I get older it becomes clearer to me that older men can do inexplicable things like falling madly in love with a woman their granddaughter's age. That is the substance of what brought the Anna case to the high court… her aged husband Howard Marshall, madly in love with her, gave her a lot of his money and promised more; after he died his son contested the promise. Howard was 87 and Anna 25 when they started getting together.
I have talked to many friends and get a wide variety of explanations. Some women point out that women can behave the same way. Many people offer the view that finding someone to take care of you is a reason for such erratic behavior. My two cents is that security is not the issue, getting attention is not the issue, validating masculinity is not the issue… to me, the prospect of sensual pleasure and the intoxicating access to human vitality are worth giving up half of everything when death is around the corner.
You can send me...
You can send me your own view of what is going on with older men.
The second issue is what the court has to deal with, which is a probate
court in Texas versus a bankruptcy court in California. This is the
substance. It bears on the Blackberry case, too, where a Virginia jury
found patent infringement by Blackberry while, a few years later, the
Patent Office found the opposite.
My interest in this concerns class actions. I wrote, more than twenty years ago, about the need to have specialized class action courts. Learning how to deal with class actions is a slow learning process and having a specialized court system allows for learning.
Personal story. I lost close to one hundred thousand dollars because of the arbitrary behavior of PayPal. When PayPal settled a class action lawsuit I was notified to send in a claim. After a few years the lawyers have announced that the claims total tens of millions of dollars more than the previously agreed upon settlement amount.
The absence of a specialized class action court is what makes such an absurdity possible. The suit should never have been settled until the magnitude of the claims had be accurately assessed.
Back to the Supremes: this decision is going to be important because
specialized courts and divergent jurisdictions can only be settled at
the Supreme Court level. Let us hope the decision is wise. Let us
further hope, if the decision is good, that someday a special class
action court can be created.
Thanks to Anna and Howard and Howard’s passionate behavior for getting this subject to the Supreme Court.
Footnote: a few years ago a ring of Rom women (Gypsies) were arrested in San Francisco for the practice of marrying very old men and then taking them to a restaurant in West Portal where they were fed meals that cumulatively killed the men; then getting the inheritance. This propensity of old men to go bananas over younger women seems to be widely appreciated in the Rom commercial world.