Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for June, 2003

Guest blogger opening(s)

Among the advantages of our new Movable Type system is to make it relatively easy to bring in co-conspirators and guest bloggers to add signed content of their own on a temporary or continuing basis. For examples of how this can work as an ongoing matter, see The Volokh Conspiracy (currently 13 members), Asymmetrical Information (a Movable Type two-member blog) and Max Power (four contributors).

Of more immediate interest, this feature allows for short-term guest blogging perfect for times when, for example, our regular editor heads off on vacation (as is about to happen momentarily). Would you make a good guest host(s) during his absence? Realistically, we’re most likely to experiment along these lines with volunteers who 1) are already personally known to our editor; 2) have already written about or worked on the kinds of issues we cover; and 3) have some rudimentary familiarity with blogging. (Maybe two of the three…) If this sounds fun to you, email editor – [at] – [our domain name].

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More on Weiss Ratings study

Sydney Smith, writing for TechCentralStation.com, throws more doubt on that odd Weiss Ratings study of a couple of weeks ago which so impressed Time (see “Juggling the Stats”, Jun. 4-5) and U.S. News, and which purported to find no connection between curbs on medical liability payouts and trends in malpractice insurance costs (“Bad Medicine”, Jun. 26). See Christopher H. Schmitt, “A medical mistake”, U.S. News, Jun. 30; Charles E. Boyle, “Weiss Ratings Drops a Bomb on the Med-Mal Debate”, Insurance Journal, Jun. 20.

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More on the litigious valedictorian

At the Weekly Standard, writer Jonathan Last has much more on the saga of Blair Hornstine of Moorestown, N.J., who sued for the valedictorianship of her graduating class. It isn’t pretty, even aside from the plagiarism scandal (Jonathan V. Last, “First in Her Class”, Weekly Standard, Jul. 7-Jul. 14)(Harvard Crimson coverage). Plus: Joanne Jacobs has more (Jun. 29) including a link to a website by Adam Tow entitled The Blair Hornstine Project, with illuminating reader comments, and commentary by Kimberly Swygert (Jun. 28), with yet more reader comments. Update Jul. 12: Harvard withdraws offer.

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Font darkness

Thanks again to readers who wrote in on the question of how to make the font darker. The most elegant solution was the “stylesheet switching” reader option suggested by Plogs.net, but since we aren’t confident of our technical capability to implement that option smoothly, we’re falling back on what everyone else suggested, which is just to darken the font for everyone by adjusting the “blogbody” color value in Cascading Style Sheets.

Speaking of light and darkness, Virginia Postrel has a wonderful article newly online at D Monthly (“Spaces: Technocrats and Glowing Panties”, not dated; via her Dynamist blog) on how Texas regulations prescribing fluorescent rather than incandescent lighting in new commercial buildings, billed as “cost-free” by environmentalist and technocratic advocates, are in fact anything but cost-free as an aesthetic and commercial matter.

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U.K. prosecutor: top cops didn’t warn that roofs are dangerous

Workplace health and safety dept.: “A High Court judge criticised the Health and Safety Executive yesterday for wasting public time and money in prosecuting the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and his predecessor for failing to warn officers about the danger of climbing on roofs.” Following separate incidents in which one police officer died and another was injured after falling through roofs while on duty, top police brass faced criminal charges of failure to warn, which ended most recently in acquittal on some charges and a hung jury on others after “?1 million in lawyers’ fees and a further ?2 million in investigations”. “Had the HSE succeeded, the Met had planned to instruct its officers not to climb above head height. ‘It would have been a veritable burglars’ charter, a victory for criminals and would have encouraged suspects to use roofs to escape,’ said one senior officer.” (Sue Clough, “Safety case against Met police chiefs a ‘waste’ of public’s ?3m”, Daily Telegraph (U.K.), Jun. 28; “‘We fall off horses. Do they want us to use Shetland ponies?'”. Jun. 28). See also Dec. 22-25, 2000 (“risk aversion” in British armed forces).

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“Flood of Fees Draining Enron Funds”

Fees in the Enron bankruptcy, which include accountants’ and advisers’ as well as lawyers’ fees, total $496 million through May, the richest in history (see Dec. 27-29, 2002). “Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, whose state is a major creditor, complains that attorneys in the case are ‘lining their pockets. There is a lot of money sloshing around, and the participants are taking it away from the people who really deserve it,’ he said in an interview. John W. Toothman, president of the Devil’s Advocate, a Northern Virginia company that scrutinizes legal fees, and co-author of a textbook on fees, calls it a ‘feeding frenzy.’ Enron ‘has turned its pockets inside out, and everybody who can get in line gets a piece. The lawyers have been first in line.'” (Peter Behr, Washington Post, Jun. 28).

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FBI probing Jefferson County verdicts

News from the most litigation-famed county in Mississippi (see May 7; May 4-6, 2001): “The FBI is investigating huge jury verdicts in Jefferson County and several of the trial lawyers who have been involved with them, according to sources close to the investigation.” Last year, when a local resident interviewed by CBS Minutes suggested that jurors profit “under the table” from some of the huge verdicts, Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association official David Baria called for a criminal investigation; now that he’s got one, however, he’s not so happy about it, calling the FBI probe “a concerted effort to demonize lawyers and judges” as well as politically motivated. (Jerry Mitchell, “Verdicts, lawyers under FBI scrutiny”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Jun. 22).

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