Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
I’m happy to announce that today I sent the manuscript of my next book, tentatively titled Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, off to Encounter Books. If you’ve noticed that posting has been light in recent weeks, that’s why. Did you know that you can pre-order the book on Amazon?
Posting will remain light for a little while longer because I plan to get an early start on enjoying the long holiday weekend.
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First came the character assassination aimed at Judge Martin Feldman, then came the death threats [Jeff Crouere, BayouBuzz via Wood/PoL, earlier]
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By reader acclaim: “Two sets of parents are suing the Greater Toronto Hockey League, one of its clubs and four coaches for $25,000 each because their sons were cut by the Avalanche Minor Sports Club midget junior A team during tryouts in April.” One father claims the defendants’ conduct “destroyed the dignity” of his son and caused him to suffer “irreparable psychological damage.” [Toronto Star]
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She’s not expected to sympathize with them, for reasons Ted outlines at Point of Law.
So puzzling and inexplicable that health insurance rates keep rising. [NYT]
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Thrown with help from a class action law firm [Peter Beller, Forbes]
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Study after study finds no health effects to worry about, but the city by the Bay wants warnings anyway. [Bruce Nye, Ted Frank/PoL]
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The most curious element is not the alleged fight over a Scrabble game, but Sonya Glover’s allegation that she was retaliated against by being made to “perform heavy manual tasks normally assigned to males.” Isn’t there some sort of potential discrimination suit if tasks are normally assigned to males and a female employee is not asked to perform them? [NYDN]
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By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upholds a policy at the University of California’s Hastings Law that gives short shrift to the principle of freedom of association. [Roger Pilon, Cato at Liberty] More: Eugene Volokh thinks the Court made the right call in the case, while Richard Epstein thinks it didn’t.
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Two lawsuits filed last month claim that writers improperly based fictional characters on the complainants. [Matthew Heller, OnPoint News] A much noted case last November, in which a Georgia jury awarded $100,000 to a woman who said she had been wrongly used as the basis in part for a character in the novel “The Red Hat Club”, may have encouraged the filing of such suits.
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“We were forced to try a case against the most innocent guy of all.” — medical malpractice lawyer Daniel Buttafuoco last month, explaining why a Queens, N.Y. jury ruled against his suit blaming a surgeon for a transplant patient’s death. [NYDN via Tuteur ("Parse those sentences and you will come face to face with what is wrong with the malpractice system in this country.")]
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“Public interest” lawyers suing the embattled California town of Colfax over alleged Clean Water Act violations want an award of interim fees lest it go bankrupt and become unable to pay. [California Civil Justice Blog]
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“Experts who told L’Aquila city officials there was no risk of an earthquake six days before last year’s catastrophic quake are under investigation for gross negligent manslaughter, prosecutors said Tuesday.” [La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno via Megan Sever, Earth Magazine]
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Sounds like a parody but isn’t; I explain at Cato at Liberty.
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“While there is no reason to believe that the United States has become the Barbary Coast for those perpetrating frauds on foreign securities markets,” wrote Justice Scalia for the Court, “some fear that it has become the Shangri-La of class-action litigators for lawyers representing those allegedly cheated in foreign securities markets.” [Mauro/NLJ] And hurray for the presumption against extraterritoriality [Ku/Opinio Juris]
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Get your copy today! My new book tackles the question of why so many bad ideas come from the law schools. "Cutting-edge commentary, hard-hitting, witty, astute." -- Publisher's Weekly. "Excellent... A fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions" -- Wall Street Journal.
Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.