Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
“The British Chiropractic Association is using the libel laws to try and silence Simon Singh’s discussion of some of the more, uh, unusual claims they make for Chiropractic treatments (such as curing Colic and Asthma).” [Boing Boing, Orac first and second posts, Jack of Kent] And Dave Gorman writes really carefully about the case.
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The magazine picks five TV ad campaigns that are unlikely to get their attorney-perpetrators on anyone’s list as Supreme Court material.
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I’m quoted in Sandra Pedicini’s report on the settlement (with $9 appetizer vouchers) of a lawsuit charging the Olive Garden restaurant chain with “printing the last six digits of customers’ credit-card numbers on receipts. The limit under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act is five.” Under FACTA, lawyers need not show that class members suffered actual damages from the violation; instead, they can claim statutorily prescribed damages, multiplied by the (usually large) number of customers involved. In most such cases, there are no reports of any identity theft because of the breaches: “It’s like reckless driving in which no one had an accident and except for the lawyers, no one even noticed the car speeding,” I’m quoted as saying. ["Olive Garden diners may be eligible for $9 voucher", May 19]
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It’s often been observed that the movement to reform CPSIA brings together people with remarkably diverse cultural, political, and social backgrounds, in a coalition that includes small-town woodcrafters and urban libertarians, homeschooling moms and regulatory economists, back-to-the-land localists and NPR-fan library administrators, and so forth. In her much-awaited article for the June Reason, now online, Katherine Mangu-Ward profiles people in groups like the Handmade Toy Alliance, Etsy, and the craft-fair world, few of whom ever expected to find themselves in a pitched battle against the regulatory state. Further discussion: Reason “Hit and Run“.
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Prestigious honorific? Marketing gimmick? Eric Turkewitz does some digging, and also passes along this tangential but memorable anecdote:
My father likes to tell the story of the first lawyer to lose a million dollar malpractice case in New York. Rather than hurting his reputation, he became the million dollar go-to lawyer for the big cases.
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Not necessarily a line you want on your resume as a lawyer, especially if you practice with the respectable Detroit firm of Miller Canfield.
Coyote has some thoughts on the tendency of market regulation to entrench bigger, more experienced companies at the expense of small:
I hate to admit it, but regulation in my own business (which I neither sought nor supported) has killed off many of my smaller competitors and vastly improved our company’s competitive position. It is no accident that the list of the largest companies in heavily-regulated Europe nearly never change, decade after decade, whereas the American list has always seen substantial turnover.
Or, put differently, CPSIA in its effects as a regulatory enactment is not so atypical as we might like to think.
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“The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail. If it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.” — H.L. Mencken (via Melissa Gomez). The excellent Yale Book of Quotations (Fred Shapiro & Joseph Epstein) says the quote is found in Mencken’s A Little Book in C Major, ch. 4 (1916).
From the Federalist Society, which is among the sponsors of the D.C. event tomorrow, along with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and other groups:
Lawfare is the use of the law and legal institutions to achieve military, political or strategic objectives. In recent years, lawfare has come to include libel litigation aimed at suppressing public dialogue about radical Islam and terrorism. Parties with financial means have been filing lawsuits, in American courts and abroad, against people who speak out against or write critically about radical Islam. Defendants include authors, researchers, journalists, politicians, and human rights advocacy groups.
“Libel Tourism,” is a form of forum shopping, where plaintiffs bring actions against American citizens in foreign jurisdictions that lack the free speech protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution. As a result New York State has passed the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, and the U.S. government is considering the Free Speech Protection Act, both of which operate to nullify said foreign libel judgments.
Our conference will address these fundamental issues: What does freedom of speech truly mean? Is U.S. legislation prohibiting the enforcement of foreign libel judgments necessary? What should be the role of the European Union and the United Nations in addressing these issues?
Some further reading: Brooke Goldstein/Family Security Matters, Aaron Eitan Meyer/New Majority.
Via Daniel Schwartz: in Connecticut, S.B. 114, a bill introduced into the legislature this year by labor committee chair Sen. Edith Prague (D-Norwich) would protect the right of learning-disabled workers not to be fired by their employers “for taking long meal periods and losing track of time”.
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“The Washington state Supreme Court has ruled that a criminally insane man who murdered his mother should not profit from his crime by pocketing a share of the proceeds from a lawsuit related to her death.” [Heller, OnPoint News; Joshua Hoge, Pamela Kissinger]
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According to affidavits in a Texas case, one juror slept during deliberations, another “all but read” a newspaper account about the incident aloud to others, some used “personal feelings” to decide, and one juror “asked to be told how to vote so she could get out of deliberations.” An appeals court sustained the defendant’s conviction anyway; Colin Miller at Evidence Law Blog explains the legal logic, if that is the right word for it.
Their lawyers are locked in a dispute over who gets to use the phrase “aha moment”. [L.A. Times, Omaha World-Herald, Yakima Herald-Republic]
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The Guardian: “In its annual review, the Schoolwear Association reports a surge in schools switching to clip-on ties because of the potential strangulation risks of the older version. More than half of schools choosing new ties are switching to clip-ons.”
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This fall, I had the honor of being elected to the American Law Institute—along with Point of Law blogger Michael Krauss and CL&P blogger Brian Wolfman.
Next week, the ALI has its annual meeting in Washington. Of critical importance is the May 20 vote on amendments and the Final Draft of its Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation—a document that could be of great influence in the way courts think about class actions. Beck and Herrmann have a must-read post detailing the issues involved. And they note that ALI is a nose-counting organization: policy is made by those that show up. If members of your law firm or university are ALI members, please pass along the post to them.
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.