Back in May, The Palmolives (Palmolive Building Investors, LLC, DK Palmolive Building Investors Participants, LLC, Tax Matters Partner, Docket No. 23444-14, filed 5/27/20) stiped out. The Palmolives gave up the $33 million façade easement, got to keep the basis split among façade, retail and condos (which is good news for us lawyers who represent condo developers), and walked on the chops.

OK, so this is old news. And I’d made an unspoken resolve not to chew my cabbage twicet while Dawson’s Creek submerged The Glasshouse that Vic Built.

Y’all will recollect I gave the Palmolives’ trusty attorneys a Taishoff “good try, hors classe” in my blogpost “Judge on a Tear,” 6/7/19. And while I didn’t say so then, I fully expected a trip to 7 Cir, even though The Palmolives’ try for a Section 7482 interlocutory appeal had already cratered (see my blogpost “What’s It Worth?” 11/14/17).

After all, there followed five (count ’em, five) stipulations of fact with exhibits, and four (count ’em, four) volumes of trial transcript through this past January. Check out the docket search.*

After all that, why fold without getting a decision and taking the appeal? The trial was paid for. Bar the interest and the legal fees and disbursements, it couldn’t get worse.

Maybe the retirement of Judge Posner, 7 Cir’s true original and a primordial judicial rebel, in September 2017 is the answer. His famous statement on his retirement sums up why dictionary chaws and slavish adherence are so much flubdubbery: “I pay very little attention to legal rules, statutes, constitutional provisions. A case is just a dispute. The first thing you do is ask yourself—forget about the law—what is a sensible resolution of this dispute? The next thing was to see if a recent Supreme Court precedent or some other legal obstacle stood in the way of ruling in favor of that sensible resolution. And the answer is that’s actually rarely the case. When you have a Supreme Court case or something similar, they’re often extremely easy to get around.”

Ya gotta love the dude, whether or not you agree with him. And that would have been an opinion I would have loved to blog.

Edited to add, 9/8/21: Of course the Genius Baristas sealed the stip-out, even though it had been online for all to see under the previous system.

*Docket Search Palmolive