I enjoyed the running joke of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the great Dickens novel Bleak House, back when I first read it.

Little did I know that one day I and the magazine that I love would effectively be caught up in a version of that interminable case, courtesy of a litigious climate scientist with zero regard for the First Amendment. //

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a lawsuit over an inheritance that ran on for generations, eventually accumulating so many legal fees that it wiped out the estate in question, making all the litigation pointless. //

This is a little like Mann v. National Review, which has droned on for seven years with little or no action, except the litigation emphatically has a point. Michael Mann is the climate scientist famous for his “hockey stick” graph of climate change over the ages, whose purpose in suing us is clear enough — to bleed us of time and, most importantly, resources, in order to punish us for having the temerity to harshly criticize his work.