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Vol. 3, Iss. 7
April 23, 2014


Alice In Wonderland Provides Proof That The Legal System Makes No Sense


Last month, Justice Don Willett dissented from the Texas Supreme Court’s denial of a petition for review in El-Ali v. State. The case involved the Texas civil forfeiture statute. In doing so, Justice Willett observed that “[a] generation ago in America, asset forfeiture was limited to wresting ill-gotten gains from violent criminals. Today, it has a distinctive ‘Alice in Wonderland’ flavor, victimizing innocent citizens who’ve done nothing wrong.”

Alice in Wonderland is considered one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. It has become the proverbial analogy to something that doesn’t make sense. It even has a dictionary entry, meaning “suitable to a world of fantasy or illusion,” according to the folks at Merriam-Webster.

It turns out that Justice Willett isn’t the only one to see Alice in Wonderland as an appropriate way to describe something in the legal system as suitable to a world of fantasy or illusion. In fact, this has been going on as far back as 1929. And there have been about 700 more cases since then where a court saw something as sufficiently out of whack to warrant an analogy to Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole. Needless to say, that speaks volumes about the system.

Here are some examples where a court or party in a case needed to resort to Alice in Wonderland to make a point about something just not making sense.

The first time was Tall Timber Lumber Co. v. C.I.R., 16 B.T.A. 300 (Board of Tax Appeals 1929) (“Invested capital is a statutory creation, the nature of which is at times so confusing that a Senator of the United States recently, while speaking to the Senate, compared the statute to ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’”).

Here are a few more good examples of judicial opinions – these involving insurance coverage -- that engaged in Alice in Wonderlanding:

SR Intern. Business Ins. Co. Ltd. v. World Trade Center Properties, LLC, 445 F. Supp. 2d 320 (S.D.N.Y. 2006) (“When the Insurers focus on broad principles and not on the actual words at hand, these broad principles become the grin on the Cheshire cat: When the Insurers are all done, the cat-the text of the Travelers policy-disappears, and all that is left is the grin. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 67 (Grosset & Dunlap 1972) (1865). That is no way to read an insurance policy, or indeed any other document.”).

Continental Western Ins. Co. v. Pimentel & Sons Guitar Makers, Inc., 2006 WL 6335399 (D.N.M. 2006) (“When faced with this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ area of the law, Continental chose not to define the terms, ‘trademark’ and ‘other intellectual property rights,’ in its policy. Now, Continental argues that the terms trademark and trade name ‘clearly’ apply to the claims at hand.”).

Hartford Ins. Co. of the Midwest v. Minagorri, 675 So. 2d 142 (Fla. Ct. App. 1996) (“By contrast, the tortfeasor in the present case had coverage that was lower than Minagorri’s limits. Although Hartford’s argument engages in the Alice-in-Wonderland practice of departing from the usual meaning of words, it does not take a leap through the looking-glass for this Court to conclude that the tortfeasor who injured Minagorri was ‘uninsured’ to the extent those injuries exceeded the policy limits.”).

Taylor Morrison Services, Inc. v. HDI-Gerling America Ins. Co., 746 S.E.2d 587 (Ga. 2013) (“Humpty Dumpty used a word to mean ‘just what [he chose] it to mean—neither more nor less,’ and [insurers], too, are free to be unorthodox, but when they seek to use a term in an unusual way, they need to clearly signify the unusual sense in which the word is used. Cf. Lopez v. Gonzales, 549 U.S. 47, 54–55(II), 127 S.Ct. 625, 166 L.Ed.2d 462 (2006) (citing L. Carroll, ALICE IN WONDERLAND and Through the Looking Glass at 198 (Messner 1982)).”).

 
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