All legal posts: April 2008 Archives
An important case recently came out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, an en banc panel reconsideration of an earlier appellate ruling that found the website Roommates.com potentially in violation of the Fair Housing Act, the act that generally forbids housing to be denied people based on "race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin."
Some, like Eugene Volokh see this decision as a fairly minor occasion. Others, like Eric Goldman and Susan Crawford, on the other hand, see it as a significant piece of jurisprudence related not to the Fair Housing Act, per se, but to 47 USC 230, a 1996 statute that provides fairly broad immunity for Internet sites for the content others put on it.
It's been announced that a third season of Kingdom, the English show centered around fictional solicitor Peter Kingdom I earlier reported liking so much, has been commissioned for development later this year. However, while I still consider it a thoroughly enjoyable show, after watching the second season I've become aware of some cracks in its veneer, cracks which I hope will be patched before the next season is shot.
What tends to make so much English television, Kingdom included, better than many American shows is its greater reluctance to rely on clichés, instead providing truer settings and letting the drama and characters develop more naturally. American entertainment is often so contrived -- with artificial conflict, stereotypical personalities, stories that play to every public misconception, etc. -- that it's particularly refreshing to watch something from England that avoids such pitfalls.
But if Kingdom showed any weaknesses last season, it was in its weakening fortitude in resisting these predictable tropes. In some instances they snuck in connected to dramatic elements, like with the gratuitous introduction of boorish American military types in Episode 3 (an episode also plagued with cartoonish renderings of its own usually warm and rounded main characters), or the all-too-convenient plot device of a cataclysmic flood in the season finale.
But where I want to particularly focus is on its occasional, yet increasingly frequent, unfortunate and unnecessary over-simplifications of the law, a tendency which does a deep disservice to its characters, stories, and production generally.
