In 1987, eighth grader Gavin McDonald failed to win first place in a Ventura County, Calif., spelling bee.

So he sued.

A rival at another school had spelled horsy H-O-R-S-E-Y, and in the ensuing confusion the officials there had agreed to allow two students to advance to the county finals. McDonald alleged that this was unfair.

Justice Arthur Gilbert of the California Court of Appeal asked, “When should an attorney say ‘no’ to a client? Answer: When asked to file a lawsuit like this one.”

He dismissed the suit. “Our decision at least keeps plaintiff’s bucket of water from being added to the tidal wave of litigation that has engulfed our courts.”

Unlikely names of actual court cases, compiled by Rodney Jones and Gerald Uelmen in Supreme Folly (1990):

• Sand v. Beach, 200 N.E. 821 (N.Y. 1936)
• Plough v. Fields, 422 F. 2d 824 (9th Cir. 1970)
• In re Worms, 252 Cal. App. 2d 130 (1967)
• People v. Slutts, 259 Cal. 2d 886 (1968)
• People v. Bimbo, 145 N.E. 651 (1924)
• People v. Takencareof, 174 Cal. Rptr. 112 (1981)
• State v. Gopher, 633 P. 2d 1195 (Montana 1981)
• People v. Justice, 167 Cal. App. 2d 616 (1959)
• Coffin v. Bloodworth, 28 Cal. App. 2d 522 (1938)
• Pain v. Municipal Court, 237 Cal. App. 2d 151 (1968)
• Anger v. Municipal Court, 237 Cal. App. 2d 69 (1965)
• Easter Seal Society for Crippled Children v. Playboy Enterprises (6th Cir. 1987) 815 F. 2d 323
• King v. The Queen, 1 A.C. 304 (1969)
• Silver v. Gold, 259 Cal. Rptr. 185 (1989)

In 1985, 61-year-old Oreste Lodi came up with a novel way to raid his own trust fund: He sued himself. In a suit filed in the Shasta County (Calif.) Superior Court, Lodi named himself as defendant, failed to answer the complaint, then asked that a default judgment be entered against himself.

When a judge threw out the case, he appealed to the Third Appellate District, filing briefs on both sides. Unfortunately, the appeals court called Lodi’s case “a slam-dunk frivolous complaint.”

“This result cannot be unfair to Mr. Lodi,” it noted. “Although it is true that, as plaintiff and appellant, he loses, it is equally true that, as defendant and respondent, he wins! It is hard to imagine a more evenhanded application of justice.”

The newspaper man, indeed, is a dangerous person to fool with. He is extremely ingenious in his methods of retaliation. Here is another story in point. One Bennett was city editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer somewhere in the sixties. It was Bennett’s plan, if news were scarce, to make small children–offspring of the brain only–fall from the Newport ferry-boat into the Ohio River, where they would infallibly have been drowned but for the gallant rescue of some by-stander, usually a personal friend of Bennett’s. One of these friends, Kellum by name, grew very weary after he had figured several times as a savior of drowning innocents, and requested that Bennett should desist. So, in next day’s Enquirer, Kellum read that a beautiful little girl, child of a prominent citizen in Newport, had fallen into the river, and that Mr. Kellum, who was standing near and could have rescued her, refused to render the slightest assistance. A few minutes later the maddest man in Cincinnati arrived in the Enquirer office, threatening the direst vengeance on Bennett. But Bennett calmly pulled off his coat, and said, ‘See here, Kellum, you are a good enough fellow in your way, but I can’t stand any interference with my department. If I make any statement in the Enquirer you mustn’t come round here contradicting it. That isn’t journalism.’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

A most interesting problem …, some years ago, engaged the attention of the courts of Georgia. A man named Simpson, standing in South Carolina, fired a pistol with felonious intent at a person who was in a boat, on water embraced within the territorial limits of Georgia. The bullets went wide of the person at whom they were aimed and splashed in the water. It was held by the courts that the defendant was guilty of an assault with intent to murder in Georgia, ‘because,’ said the judge, ‘the balls did strike the water of the river in close proximity to him (the prosecuting witness) within this State, and it is therefore certain that they took effect in Georgia.’

For the purposes of the case the judge held further that the defendant, when he fired the shots, was constructively in the State of Georgia. This holding was upon a theory of the law that where one puts in force an agency for the commission of crime, he, in legal contemplation, accompanies the same to the places where it becomes effectual.

— “Historic Legal Puzzles,” The Green Bag: A Useless but Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, August 1899