- Four California lawyers accused in what prosecutors say is giant insurance fraud ring employing staged or “paper” car wrecks, Mark Geragos is defending [Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Glendale News-Press via ABA Journal]
- “Civil Gideon law could overwhelm civil courts”, Ted is interviewed again [Legal NewsLine, earlier]
- “Is that a popularly-elected state judge in your pocket?” [What About Clients?, earlier]
- Audit Integrity, sued by Hertz over financial risk assessment, takes case to SEC [Felix Salmon, earlier]
- OSHA nominee David Michaels, SKAPP and the right to bear arms, continued [David Kopel/America's First Freedom, earlier and more]
- NJ case raises knotty questions of press liability for reporting allegations in lawsuits [WSJ Law Blog]
- Washtenaw Jail Diary, which made splash on Twitter earlier this year, now reprinting at Ann Arbor Chronicle (earlier);
- “Not every country bubblewraps its kids” [Free-Range Kids on Germany] Background checks for senior-center pen pals and more school overprotectiveness [same]
Tagged as:
child protection,
civil gideon,
crash faking,
David Michaels,
insurance fraud,
judicial elections,
libel slander and defamation
“Madoff’s Accountant Acknowledges Guilt, Casts Himself as Victim” [NLJ]
Tagged as:
Bernard Madoff
“A jury has awarded about $41,000 in damages to a homeless man who was shot by an Oregon State University fraternity member in 2006.” The Association of Alpha Beta Chapter of Alpha Gamma Rho had expelled the member after his arrest for the .22 caliber rifle shooting, but witnesses said members had been known to fire BB-gun shots from the fraternity’s windows in the past. A lawyer unsuccessfully sought punitive damages on the theory that the fraternity had tolerated “animosity against the homeless”. [AP/OregonLive]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
guns,
Oregon
When you hear a judge praised for his literary skill in writing opinions, remember the fate of Carrie Buck [Terry Teachout]
Tagged as:
judges
Tampa: “When medical malpractice lawyer Michael J. Trentalange asked St. Joseph’s Hospital for every ‘adverse incident’ report made since the hospital opened in 1934, the hospital pushed back hard. In July, the hospital sued him, and Trentalange sued right back, the Web site Health News Florida reported.” (AP/Sarasota Herald Tribune via White Coat).
Tagged as:
discovery,
Florida,
hospitals,
medical malpractice
[Bumped Monday a.m. for readers who missed it over the weekend]
The piece appears in the business section of Saturday’s Times, and it’s a perfectly good one as far as it goes. It starts off with a wooden toy maker in Ogunquit, Maine, who estimates that it would cost him $30,000 to secure testing for the 80 items he makes, using such materials as maple, walnut oil and local beeswax. It touches on the strains between large and small manufacturers, 
as well as the thrift-store and vintage-book angles. Overall, it’s really not a bad piece of its sort.
Aside from its timing, that is. The Times has now gotten around to covering some of the harm done by this law ten months after the Washington Post and other media had begun reporting the basic outlines of the story; nine and a half months after a furor had built to national proportions, prompting both members of Congress and the CPSC to hurry out supposed clarifications; nine months after hundreds of bloggers were on the case, the law’s effects on thrift stores were making headlines from coast to coast, and the Times’s continuing failure to report on the law’s effects had commentators noting its “weird blind spot” on the issue; eight and a half months after a deeply clueless Times editorial assailed critics of the law who 
“foment needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises like libraries, resale shops and handmade toy businesses”; seven and a half months after protests by minibike dealers began drawing wide national coverage; seven months after critics rallied on Capitol Hill, and the Washington Post joined in reporting on the law’s dire effects on vintage (pre-1985) kids’ books; and so on to the present.
Okay, so the Times was — well, not a day late and a dollar short, but more like 300 days late and many billions of dollars in overlooked costs short. Still, let’s be grateful: the paper’s news side has now implicitly rebuked the editorial side’s fantastic, ideologically blinkered dismissal of “needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises”. And the Times’s belated acknowledgment of the story can serve as permission for other sectors of the media dependent on Times coverage — including some magazines and network news departments — to acknowledge at last the legitimacy of the story and begin according serious attention to the continuing CPSIA calamity. When they do, they will find much to catch up on. (& welcome Handmade Toy Alliance, Chris Fountain readers)
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
Tagged as:
CPSIA,
CPSIA and toys,
Maine,
New York Times
- Worst, most dangerous legal trend of the moment: trial lawyers continue big Capitol Hill push to overturn Supreme Court’s valuable Iqbal and Twombly decisions on lawsuit procedure [Point of Law and more, Thomas Dupree/WLF, Beck & Herrmann and more, earlier]
- Lawyers rush to courthouse to beat deadline for new Oklahoma limits on liability suits [Tulsa World]
- Spokesman for Attorney General Jerry Brown admits he’s taped reporter conversations without their consent, seeming violation of California law [SF Chronicle]
- UK: motorist could face prosecution for splashing kids by driving through puddle, at what she says was kids’ request [BoingBoing]
- “Is the pay czar unconstitutional?” [Bainbridge on McConnell, WSJ; Ribstein on link to PCAOB case]
- More “deceptively named fruity cereal” suits in California [Lowering the Bar ("I still think this is like claiming emotional distress because you just learned 'The Hobbit' isn't a true story,") Ken at Popehat ("Froot of the Poisonous Tree of Litigiousness"), earlier here, here, here, here, etc.]
- A city of stool pigeons: Chicago to pay those who inform on tax cheats [NBC Chicago]
- Ill-fated stint as pole dancer leads to lawsuit against Arizona bar [Above the Law]
Tagged as:
advertising,
California,
Chicago,
Jerry Brown,
Oklahoma,
pleading,
strippers and exotic dancers,
United Kingdom,
whistleblowers
