Aubade
Case
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
¶ We don’t know what made the Blank-Simkin case newsworthy enough for coverage in this morning’s Times; the case, which seeks to reopen a divorce agreement on grounds of “mutual mistake,” is currently between appeals, and the next decision isn’t expected until later this year. But Peter Lattman’s report leaves us wondering why there’s a case at all. Like Laura Blank, we can’t see why her ex-husband, Paul Weiss partner Steven Simkin, should be allowed to reappropriate a portion of her settlement because he (subsequently) discovered that his account with Bernard Madoff was worthless. Comparing that account to a counterfeit Stradivarius is such a bogus analogy that we can attribute only to latent judicial sexism. ¶ Don’t miss Lawrence Altman’s summary of thirty years of AIDS reporting. “A common attitude was that all diseases were known…”