From How Appealing:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has today issued its ruling in Geoffrey Fieger v. Michigan Supreme Court: Today’s ruling begins:
After a panel of judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed a $15 million judgment initially entered in favor of his client, and while the case was pending before the court, attorney Geoffrey Nels Fieger made vulgar comments about the judges on a radio show he hosted.
The majority on a divided three-judge panel reached the following holding:
We vacate the judgment of the district court and remand with instructions to dismiss the complaint for lack of jurisdiction. We hold that Fieger and Steinberg lack standing because they have failed to demonstrate actual present harm or a significant possibility of future harm based on a single, stipulated reprimand; they have not articulated, with any degree of specificity, their intended speech and conduct; and they have not sufficiently established a threat of future sanction under the narrow construction of the challenged provisions applied by the Michigan Supreme Court. For these same reasons, we also hold that the district court abused its discretion in entering declaratory relief.
In the decision under review, the district court had ruled that the courtesy and civility provisions of the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution because the rules are overly broad and vague and enjoined their enforcement. Back on September 5, 2007, I had this post about the district court’s ruling that the Sixth Circuit has set aside today. Senior Circuit Judge Gilbert S. Merritt dissented from today’s ruling and would have held that Fieger had standing.
Turtle Talk 