Here are a couple of live ones: Ira Rennert and Michael Simons.

Both are already endowed with insane riches and honors: Business schools are named after Rennert; he lives in the largest private residence in the world (or close to it). Simons is a much-honored, tenured professor of medicine at Yale.

Yet Rennert’s unbridled greed and bullying and rule-breaking mean he spends his life in courtrooms unsuccessfully defending his nefarious practices. When he loses (and he loses most of the time) he turns around and sues his lawyers for failing to defend the indefensible.

Plus there’s his money for West Bank settlements.

Simons has produced important work in cardiology, and as a named chair at Yale he sits at the absolute pinnacle of the academic world. But after admitting to general sexual harassment of women at Yale, plus a more specific thing —

In addition to the sexual harassment, the university committee found that Dr. Simons had exercised “improper leadership and compromised decision-making” with regard to [a] researcher’s husband, also a cardiologist. Dr. Simons, who is married, began making advances to the researcher, Annarita Di Lorenzo, in February 2010, in a letter, and continued his pursuit despite repeated rebuffs. She left Yale in 2011. Her husband, Dr. Frank Giordano, who remains at Yale, said Dr. Simons froze his professional advancement.

— he lost his named chair. He got to keep most of his other goodies, but he did lose the chair.

Except not really. I mean, he lost one chair, but his cronies at the school found another one sitting around, and so Simons was a named chair again! But then people were outraged that Yale was continuing to confer this very high honor on, uh, this chap, so the cronies removed him from the second chair. (“To lose one chair may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”)

So of course Simons is suing Yale to get this, that, or the other chair – some chair, any chair – back. Because, you know, life without a chair!

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America, my beloved. Lawsuit city. UD madly loves her country, but there’s a lot of … wealth … in it.