William Gee suing over new attorney ad regulations
You’ve seen the commercials. Oil company fat cats plan to withhold payment
in a personal injury case until suddenly discovering that the plaintiff has
hired maritime defense attorney William Gee. Gee’s name is punctuated with an
alarming sound effect and the oil executives quickly decide they’d better
settle this one. Actor Robert Vaughan then appears instructing anyone who’s
been injured offshore to call Gee’s Hurtline. These ads would be prohibited
under new regulations on attorney advertising by the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board. That’s prompted Gee, New Orleans attorney Morris Bart and the nonprofit Public Citizen to file suit against the board to halt the rules from taking effect. The suit alleges the regulations
violate First and 14th amendment rights, noting they would ban “a
wide range of common advertising practices, such as the use of testimonials,
actors, re-enactments and dramatizations, that are neither misleading nor
otherwise harmful to consumers and whose prohibition would be unthinkable in
any other field of commerce."
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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