Obit: Brent Shearer 1951 – 2050

15 August 2050 – Agence France Presse – Nice, France -- Brent Shearer, the American writer, died yesterday in Cap Blabo, France after a brief, but deadly illness.

Shearer was known for being the first married man to successfully collect alimony from his unmarried, ex-mistress. The case, which took a circuitous, seven-year route through the court system, was decided in his favor in 2011.

Shearer said at the time, “The main thing I did right was to wait until she took that job at the hedge fund to file.” This filing date was, of course, before the backlash of ’09 against the sovereign wealth funds and other hedge fund-related market manipulators.

Also in Shearer’s favor was the fact that despite having been moved to write dozens of poems about his lover, one Heike Stumbrucker, he was never successful in his 13-year campaign to be admitted to Grace Schulman’s master class in poetry at New York’s 92nd St. Y.

In an interview with the New York Times, immediately after the verdict was announced in 2011, Shearer said, “The aesthetic angle was the icing on the cake for our argument. I’m not surprised that the jury found her liable for a financial settlement, because for a professional writer like myself to not, at the least, profit from a love affair by gaining marketable aesthetic product was a strong argument that my rights had been trampled upon by the defendant.”

Legal scholars said the significance of Shearer’s victory was that it opened up the playing field of American jurisprudence to legal solutions for nearly all areas of personal and sexual relationships. Sexual contact, in and of itself, became actionable in the wake of Shearer v. Strumbrucker in ways that strict constructionalists of the 20th Century could never have foreseen, said Some Legal Scholar.
It was a 4-to-3 decision by New York State Supreme Court. The minority members of the seven-judge panel wrote a dissenting opinion that said Shearer was lucky to have gotten in Strumbucker's pants in the first place.

However, the majority of four judges ruled that Strumbucker was obliged to pay $10 million damages for mental pain and suffering despite the fact that she was much better looking, smarter in general terms and in a decision that Shearer had his own lawyers appeal, despite the fact that the jury awarded him $10 million, was a better writer even though she abandoned that trade long ago.

Shearer had invested $5 million in pursing that aspect of the case. His 13th appeal of the “who was the better writer” secondary judgment has been voided by his death.