This piece was originally published on December 23, 2002. According to the Dickens Society of London, there have been more than 3,000 adaptations of Charles Dickens’s works, most of them for the stage, but 156 for the movies and television,…

It’s not news that countless bogus lawsuits are filed in this country every year. What’s less well known is that because of obscure procedural rules, even the most self-evidently absurd lawsuits typically cost blameless defendants plenty of money, time, and…