Elie Mystal at Above the Law thinks a Decorah, Iowa “Trial Lawyers for Justice” plaintiff’s firm might want to consider including an “equal opportunity employer” tagline in its hiring announcement. Update: Firm defends its position.
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From the monthly archives:
August 2009
Apparently plaintiff TechRadium asserts patent rights over emergency notification systems, and Twitter came into its cross-hairs because, among its many, many other uses, it permits municipalities and other users to warn affected persons of emergencies. [Elefant, Legal Blog Watch; earlier]
Following an outcry from various sectors of the farm community, the U.S. Senate may have slowed or even broken the momentum toward federally sponsored numbering and tagging of farmyard animals. 
The upper house embraced “an amendment sponsored by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., that slashes funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Identification System by one-half in the 2010 agriculture appropriations bill.” [AgWeek, Drovers] NAIS, or the National Animal Identification System, has been promoted on (among other grounds) improving “traceability” of food safety problems. Earlier coverage here, here, etc.
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- Tiananmen Square events echo today in acrimonious defamation suit against filmmakers [Boston Globe]
- Andrew Ferguson disrespectful toward David Kessler’s nanniferous book on obesity policy [Weekly Standard]
- “Yes, People Dislike The RIAA Because Of Its Actions” [TechDirt]
- The big difference race makes in medical school admissions [Discriminations, Mark Perry/Carpe Diem]
- Texting, workplace flirtation and sexual harassment law [Forbes/MSNBC]
- After real estate firm grabs and uses online pic, photographer finds satisfaction through small claims court [West Seattle Blog h/t @VBalasubramani]
- Virginia: latest case seeking to open emotional-distress damages for death of pets gets help from former White House counsel Lanny Davis [WaPo, earlier]
- Brazil police allege that host of true-crime TV series ordered killings to ensure good footage for the show [AP]
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Personal injury law attorney/blogger John Hochfelder, who’s also guestblogging this week at my other website Point of Law, has this story from Gardiner, New York. More: Coyote, Right-Thinking from the Left Coast.
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Connecticut Post: “Attorneys representing the Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa and other firms being sued by a woman raped in their parking garage in 2006 withdrew special defenses Monday that claimed the woman was negligent and careless and that she and her children failed to ‘mitigate their damages.’” [via Christopher Fountain and followup] More: John Bratt, Baltimore Injury Law (with kind words for this site).
Stiff sentences for the two lawyers most closely identified with the Kentucky fen-phen settlement scandal. [Louisville Courier-Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader, Bloomberg, ABA Journal]. More: Howard Erichson, Mass Tort Lit Blog.
- Liability protection for doctors, premised on “best-practices” medicine: a proposal to address the federalism difficulties [Bernstein/MacCourt, MI Center for Medical Progress, PoL]
- Fraud in immigration law victimizes both U.S. and aspiring immigrants [NYT]
- Paralyzed while tackling opponent, high school footballer now suing Barre, Vt. school system [Barre-Montpelier Times Argus]
- Memo to Sen. Edwards: voters forgave Grover Cleveland the paternity, but they do mind lies [Mickey Kaus]
- Issue in New Orleans case: defamatory to call tour guides “thugs”? [Times-Picayune]
- No more Lux et Veritas: Yale press
wimps out on Mohammed cartoons [NYT, Moynihan/Reason "Hit and Run", Steyn/NRO "Corner", Hitchens] - More on NYC woman’s “wasted-tuition” suit against college [Mark Gimein, NY Mag via Genova, earlier]
- Do we really want to let CPSIA’s drafters within a mile of redesigning our health care system? [Inoculated]
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The L.A. Times reports (via PoL and Bainbridge) that just in case Golden State government were not dysfunctional enough otherwise, you-know-who has gotten involved:
Lawyers are being drafted in droves to unravel spending plans passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor. The goal of these litigators is to get back money their clients lost in the budget process. They are having considerable success, winning one lawsuit after another, costing the state billions of dollars and throwing California’s budget process into further tumult.
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Critics including the Securities and Exchange Commission dispute whether receivers really deserve $27 million for their work through May in cleaning up after the collapse of Texas businessman R. Allen Stanford’s empire. [AP/USA Today; earlier]
Alzada Knickerbocker’s bookshop in Davis Sacramento, California, the Avid Reader, was hit with a complaint from a serial ADA filer. She went on camera to explain what happened for the Sick of Lawsuits video series. More on ADA serial filers here. And the Desert Sun in southern California profiles the activities of San Diego resident Roy Gash, who “is or was the plaintiff in more than 200 ADA lawsuits,” and his lawyer Theodore Pinnock, whose San Diego firm Pinnock and Wakefield “has filed about 2,000 such suits.”
P.S. Thanks to commenter B.P. for correction: the suit was against the store’s Sacramento, not Davis, branch.
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On Friday several key provisions of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 took effect [CPSC release]. The permissible amount of lead in products dropped from 600 parts per million to 300 ppm, ensuring that more zippers, rocks, brass bicycle parts and other harmless items will fail; the new tracking-label mandate went into effect for newly manufactured kids’ goods; and penalties went way up, from a maximum of $8,000 per violation to $100,000 per violation and $15 million overall.
The Associated Press has good coverage. It talks to, among others, Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products, a producer of teaching aids such as globes, maps and animal models based in Fort Collins, Colo. who says he has had no safety recalls or lead problems in his fifteen years of business, but says new testing mandates will cost $2,000 per product item, not counting the costs of tracking labels. The AP story even runs on the New York Times website, thus eroding that paper’s impressive record of shielding its readers from information on the law’s consequences. The WSJ news side quotes new CPSC chairman Inez Tenenbaum as saying the law will be enforced “vigorously”, following similar language in an interview last month (”Tenenbaum said the industry has had adequate time to prepare for the new requirements;” more).
The Washington Times’ editorial gives generous credit to this website for sounding the alarm:
For a year, the Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson has been compiling horror stories about the Consumer Product Safety and Improvement Act at his Overlawyered blog. Those stories — about what Mr. Olson describes as an “absolutist, not to say fanatical” law — seem to be endless. Yet an out-of-touch Congress continues to ignore the horrible fruits of its handiwork.
The Wall Street Journal editorializes:
Eight bills have since been introduced in the House to remedy the problems [with CPSIA], only to stall in the ideological quicksand of Mr. Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee. He has so far failed even to hold hearings.
Greco Woodcrafting has a small toymaker’s perspective.
Deputy Headmistress is irritated by certain blog commenters whose reaction on learning of this law is, “Nobody will enforce it, there has to be a way around it, if you don’t find a way around it you’re too dumb to be in business, it doesn’t mean what it says, they’ll have to take care of it, obviously this wasn’t what the law was for so don’t worry about it, this is just scare-mongering, try this loophole, that other loophole should work…” She also wonders in what sense the law’s consequences should count as truly “unintended”.
Some more background coverage, previously unlinked: Andrew Langer (Institute for Liberty), Roll Call; H. Sterling Burnett and Michael Hand, “Getting the Lead Out Kills Small Businesses, Doesn’t Save Children”, National Center for Policy Analysis #665; Jennifer Upton, Louisville Courier-Journal and Kentucky Kids Consignment Sales. And Hugh Hewitt’s audio interview (auto-play) with Rick Woldenberg comes highly recommended; some print excerpts here [NAM "ShopFloor"].
Public domain image: Grandma’s Graphics, Ruth Mary Hallock.
The controversial OSHA nominee and left-leaning public health advocate also seems to have strong views on firearms issues. That’s by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers. In addition, OSHA has authority to regulate the working conditions of various job categories associated with firearms use (security guards, hunting guides, etc.) and could in that capacity do much to bring grief to Second Amendment values.
Senators have put nominations on hold for less. It will be interesting to see whether they take an interest in Michaels’ views on gun restrictions and their place in OSHA’s agenda (& welcome Instapundit, Point of Law, Snowflakes in Hell, CEI “Open Market”, NRA-ILA readers). More: David Codrea/Examiner, Carter Wood/ShopFloor.
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Robert Kahn, Courthouse News on a Maryland case: “A family demands $10 million from Honda, claiming a side window shattered and injured them when a tornado picked up their Honda Odyssey. …They say Honda should use laminated glass, as it does for windshields,” instead of tempered glass. For why the choice between laminated and conventional glass in side windows exposes automakers to a choice between one type of lawsuit and another, see our May 13, 2005 post. The plaintiff husband is also suing his wife, who was driving the vehicle. More: Fark.
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Two performers have fallen flat in an effort to get a Connecticut federal court to reinstate their suit. Daniel Schwartz has more; earlier here and here.
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“Smokers banned by Welsh council from adopting or fostering children“. At some cost, it should be noted: “critics have pointed out there are already not enough foster parents in Wales”.
It’s New York City’s fault, say the survivors of Mitchell Wiener in a new lawsuit over Gotham’s allegedly inadequate response to the H1N1 virus [WCBS]. More: Katie Drummond, True/Slant; Michael Falino, WatchBlog.
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