Kings of Tort

NORTHSIDE SUN - ‘Kings of Tort’ chronicles a sordid chapter

‘Kings of Tort’ chronicles a sordid chapter

In late November of 2007 Alan Lange was running his business in Jackson and, on the side, operating a “blog” – short for weblog, an online journal or an interactive site where readers can post comments – called YallPolitics, which followed political stories in Mississippi. When personnel of the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI executed a search warrant on Scruggs’ law office on the Square in Oxford on the morning of November 27, and later that afternoon obtained grand jury indictments of Scruggs, his son, Zach, his law partner, Sidney Backstrom, Tim Balducci, and former State Auditor Steve Patterson, a new – albeit small— cottage industry sprang into existence: blogs devoted to following developments in “the Scruggs case.” On the West Coast, David Rossmiller was operating Insurance Coverage Blog, a site concerning itself with arcane matters of insurance law. When the Scruggs indictment broke, Rossmiller began blogging all Scruggs all the time. In Florida, a leftish lawyer with Mississippi connections, Jan Goodrich, switched her homey blog, which had featured recipes and gardening advice, to mostly covering the Scruggs case. But YallPolitics, being in Mississippi and at the center of the action, became the go-to site for breaking news in the Scruggs case.

Now, after most of the shoes presumably have dropped, Lange and Dawson have come together to produce an authoritative account of the takedown of the King of Torts, appropriately titled Kings of Tort.