BOOK REVIEWS
Injunctive Relief: Don’t Bother
Reviewed by Jeremiah Newhall, Esq.
Injunctive Relief is a quick-reference book designed for busy litigators who might only occasionally deal with a request for a pre- liminary injunction or a temporary restrain- ing order (TRO). And if you need to know the black letter law for seeking or opposing preliminary injunctive relief, the book will serve that purpose. It also includes charts of the average time from filing to a ruling on motions for injunctions in all of the federal district courts, though the sample size is too small to be meaningful. Given the limited shelf-life of a reference on case law, it is hard to justify the cost for a reference on so narrow a subject.
Though the book was serviceable, I can-
not recommend it. It repeats too much material from one section to another. The book has three authors, and one wonders if they read each other’s work, given their re- use the same excerpts from the same cas- es again and again. To be fair, much of the repetition is by design: the book is meant as a quick-reference, and the authors assume that the reader has jumped to the section of interest without reading any portion that came before. That makes some sense, but there were still far too many cases that were explained and then re-explained just a few pages or paragraphs later. Reading the book to learn the law is like trying to learn phys- ics from a mathematician with no short-term memory. Every few pages, the conversation starts over. On page 268, we are introduced to the case of Henry Hope X-Ray Products Inc. v. Marron Carrel, Inc., 674 F.2d 1336, 1343 (9th Cir. 1982), and the incorporation
by reference of a secret appendix into a pre- liminary injunction. And then, on page 271, the case is explained again, as though the reader had never heard of the Hope X-Ray case and its secret appendix. The book also provides no analysis of the rules that it recites. It just gives the rule, then summarizes a case or three as exam-
Injunctive Relieve: Temporary Restraining Orders and Preliminary Injunctions
by Kristin L. Stoll-DeBell, Nancy L. Dempsey & Bradford E. Dempsey
American Bar Association; 2009; 440 pp.; $105.00
ples. There are exceptional moments when the book starts to come to life, as when it discusses the Supreme Court’s call for courts deciding intellectual property disputes to return to analyzing the “traditional factors” for injunctive relief in eBay Inc. v. MercEx- change, LLC, 126 S. Ct. 1837 (2006). But for the most part, the book consists of snippets from cases clumped together under various headings. It reads like a research memo or a law school outline, but without the economy of words associated with either one. But the crux of the problem with Injunc-
tive Relief is not its repetition, but that it aims too low. It surveys the standards re- quired for injunctive relief in every state and circuit court, but the laws are too similar; the survey of them is nigh featureless. The book is a landscape painting of a Cartesian plane. The gist of a court’s task in deciding a mo-
tion for a preliminary injunction or TRO lies in balancing the risk of irreparable harm to the movant against harm to the non-movant, with the added counterweights of each par-
1959ers Hold Fifth Reunion Once upon a time, in 1959, there were no more than 400 practicing lawyers in Ver-
mont. The precise number cannot be ascertained because there was no periodic re- licensing and no differentiation between active and inactive licensees. In the same year, 16 candidates for admission to the state bar, all men, took the three-day state bar exam which was given once a year at the Statehouse in Montpelier. By way of contrast, there are now more than 2,200 attorneys resident in Vermont
who are licensed as active and another 700 attorneys who are licensed as inactive with a right to return to active status. Currently upwards of 100 take the Vermont bar exam every year, and the exam is administered twice a year. Perhaps the most significant change in the profession is that the number of licensed women lawyers has climbed from less than ten to more than one-third of the state bar. The 14 candidates who passed the Vermont bar exam in 1959 have had a comradeship which has prompted them to hold a series of reunion dinners. The fifth of these dinners, a convivial gathering, was held in Montpelier on Friday, October 18, 2013. Attending this time were six of the nine survivors and five wives. The six attorneys included Tom Salmon, Steve Martin, Ted Tyler, Andy Field, John Hutton, and Joe Frank. Absent but sending greetings were John Williams of Bennington and Dick Schmidt who lives in Maryland. Roger Bartels left the state years ago and can- not be located.
This class of attorneys admitted to the Vermont bar remains unique in holding periodic reunions. They plan to have a sixth reunion in 2015.
www.vtbar.org THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • WINTER 2014 33
ty’s likelihood of success on the merits and, where apt, the public interest. Every jurisdic- tion considers some combination of those factors, and despite the lip service paid to the tweaks to the judicial tests, they all amount to the same inquiry. Throw a dart at a page of “Injunctive Relief,” and you’ll find a discussion of the movant’s need to show ir- reparable harm and a likelihood of success on the merits.
The books falls short of accomplishing event the one small way in which a book such as this could excel—by providing de- tailed case law and citations for every state. We receive only the barest gloss, usually a single case citation, on the standard for a preliminary injunction or a TRO in each state. Minor variations between the federal circuit courts receive far more attention. A book that spent its time in the weeds of each state’s standard, focusing exclusively on what makes a state’s rules unique, could be both useful and, paradoxically, much short- er than the mile-wide, inch-deep approach taken here.
A final, trivial complaint about the book is
the lack of an ending. The book opens with an introduction, but closes without a conclu- sion. Instead it just ends, without warning or ceremony, like an encyclopedia after “Zyzzy- va.”
Overall, Injunctive Relief succeeds as
a thorough collection of federal case law through 2009 on a narrow topic. But it con- tains too much repetition with too little fo- cus on the variations in state law to be worth its cover price.
____________________ Jeremiah Newhall, Esq., is an associate at the firm of Ellis, Boxer & Blake PLLC, where he represents clients in a variety of civil mat- ters in state and federal court. He is a mem- ber of the bars of Illinois and New Hamp- shire.
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