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Wayne Fournerat didn’t appreciate being called “amazingly inept,” it seems.

The now-disbarred Oklahoma attorney was briefly mentioned in a 2006 article on criminal defense that ran in the Wisconsin Law Review, a journal edited by students at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

The rather lengthy article, by University of Missouri law professor Rodney Uphoff, mentions Fournerat eight times (all on a single page) in the course of 104 pages.

Entitled “Convicting the Innocent: Aberration or Systemic Problem?,” Uphoff’s piece finds fault in Fournerat’s representation of a motel manager accused of persuading a maintenance man to commit murder. The man was later granted a retrial due to inadequate representation and acquitted.

Fournerat sued Uphoff, the Law Review, two former editors, a lawyer who represented the manager in the retrial and was a source for the article, the UW Board of Regents and former Gov. Jim Doyle himself.

His case, largely a defamation suit, accused the Law Review of implying that he took $50,000 for the case “under false pretenses.” The article makes no claim that Fournerat was scamming the manager, only that he was grossly unprepared for the trial and failed to introduce a videotape into evidence that could have won the case for his client. (Fournerat also claimed in the trial that a prosecution witness was fictitious; the person, it turned out, truly existed.)

Fournerat (who, although disbarred, represented himself) lost at U.S. District Court in Oklahoma, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado ruled against him on Tuesday. The opinion says he either has no legal standing to sue the defendants or no case against them.

It adds, in a kicker of a footnote, “Any arguments we have not specifically addressed also lack legal merit.”

Ouch.

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