Nothing Is Written in Stone

Book excerpt: Over the last twenty years Jonathan Lee Riches has cultivated an air of mystery. Having originally been incarcerated for wire fraud in 2003 he became infamous, both inside the prison and on the internet, for filing thousands of frivolous lawsuits. These suits, often directed at celebrities and corporations, ought to instead be seen as attacks on language and the fabric of social reality itself argue Dr. Mark Dyal and Stephen Sigl. Nothing is Written in Stone: A Jonathan Lee Riches Companion gathers together some of his most notable suits as well as two essays by the aforementioned Dr. Dyal and Mr.Sigl, as well as a brief autobiography by Jonathan Lee Riches himself.For any serious jailhouse lawyer, the gold standard remains Clarence Earl Gideon, the Florida drifter whose handwritten appeal of his felony theft conviction prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee the legal rights of prisoners in 1963. While some inmates have perverted Gideon's legacy with tiresomely self-interested claims, Riches perverted it in a more interesting way: As his jailhouse-law oeuvre became more baroque, it seemed he was using his court filings for a kind of social commentary verging on performance art. -Michael Brick, The New Republic (July 11, 2013)The IDEA of Lawsuits as Pranks, raising issues of Social and Individual JUSTICE, is complexly illuminated in this exhaustively detailed book, suitable for reading on an around-the-world-by oxcart voyage around the world.-V. Vale, author of RE/Search PRANKS Book Riches' huge list of bizarre legal claims -which target such familiar parties as George W. Bush, Brad Pitt, Weird Al Yankovic and Harrison Ford, as well as more surprising defendants that include Hannibal Lector, the planet Pluto, the '13 Tribes of Israel' and 'various Buddhist monks' -are both compelling and, frankly, bewildering. From within the confines of the US prison system, his imagination and, perhaps, paranoia run wild, gradually constructing a surreal universe where presidents time travel to 1066 to change the course of history, O.J. Simpson carries out hits on behalf of Steve Jobs and the US military illegally sells Jonathan Lee Riches mugs on college campuses.-Dayal Patterson, founder of Cult Never Dies Publishing, author of Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult