Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
We earlier linked the story of Brian Aitken, a man convicted under New Jersey’s tough gun control laws of transporting his own firearms at a time when he said he was between household moves. Some readers felt the reporting on the case had not drawn out as many of the details as they wished, and Radley Balko has now moved to fill the gap with a column at Reason delving further into the story (more).
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Providing another artificial legal reason for employers to prohibit social-media “fraternization” between managers and the employees they supervise. [Molly DiBianca, Delaware Employment Law Blog]
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The Federal Circuit appears to be cracking down on a notorious symbol of forum-shopping, according to Richard Samp at Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse.
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A lawyer sued on behalf of two girls named Zoe Renault, but a French judge ruled the claim out of bounds absent proof that “the car name would cause the girls “certain, direct and current harm.” [USA Today]
I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty on one of the worst measures under consideration in the lame-duck Congress.
P.S. So extreme is the bill, notes Carter Wood, that even the Boston Globe is editorially critical.
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Politico reports on a lawsuit that doesn’t much impress Ann Althouse.
Sacrificing not only passenger convenience, but also important elements of emergency response and crime prevention, to the Government That Knows Best: “Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said using a cell phone while driving is so dangerous that devices may soon be installed in cars to forcibly stop drivers — and potentially anyone else in the vehicle — from using them.” [Daily Caller] Post-furor update: DOT “currently has no plans” to do this.
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A new Department of Education Title IX settlement casts a shadow on their fundraising efforts, reports the College Sports Council: “When they talk about ‘adverse’ effects, what they really mean is that boys sports have an easier time raising money from boosters than girls sports.”
A British town replaces an outdoor fireworks show with indoor images of fireworks on a projector screen, prompting critics to warn of a “cotton-wool culture” of child overprotection [Free-Range Kids]
That includes $14 million in payouts to defense lawyers, many of whom have close ties to local politicians, and $25 million to claimants, a figure that “dwarfs what area municipalities and larger cities including Camden and Trenton have paid, and nearly equals payouts in Newark, where the population is eight times larger than Atlantic City.” The casino town’s population is 35,000. [Press of Atlantic City]
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Waterbury, Ct.: “A driver who’s serving a manslaughter sentence for striking and killing a 14-year-old boy is suing the victim’s parents, blaming them for their son’s death because they allowed him to ride his bike in the street without a helmet.” The hand-penned countersuit comes in response to the parents’ suit; it’s unlikely to help the inmate’s case that prosecutors say he was driving 83 in a 45 mph zone, a claim he denies, or that he had a history of drunk driving convictions. [Hartford Courant]
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I’m delighted to announce that bound galleys of my forthcoming book on legal academia, Schools for Misrule, arrived last week from Encounter Books. Both Encounter and the Cato Institute have a limited number of these available for potential reviewers or others who may write about the book and its themes. (Or inquire about an advance PDF copy if you’re in this position.) And I’m further delighted to report that some blush-makingly favorable blurbs have already come in from well-known public figures and opinion makers who’ve had an advance look at the contents. I’ll share some of them in the weeks ahead.
Even before getting a copy of the book, law-blogger extraordinaire and leading corporate law scholar Prof. Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA did a wonderful post (thanks!) in which he called Overlawyered “one of the great voices in tort reform” and added, “I’ve preordered a copy from Amazon and am really looking forward to reading what I am sure will be an important critique of my chosen profession.” You can pre-order too.
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In today’s Washington Times: my take on the growing aggressiveness of “public health” officialdom in pushing scare campaigns about everyday consumption risks, including Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial new campaigns against sweetened drinks and (even more misleadingly) salty foods, as well as the FDA’s proposal to put corpse photos on cigarette packs. It begins:
The Puritans held that reminders of mortality had an edifying effect on the living, which is why they sometimes would illustrate even literature for young children with drawings of death’s-heads and skeletons. Something of the same spirit seems to animate our ever-advancing movement for mandatory public health. The Food and Drug Administration has just floated the idea of requiring cigarette packs to carry rotating pictures that would include corpses – yes, actual corpses – as well as close-ups of grotesque medical disorders that can afflict smokers.
New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s superactivist Health Department has begun public ad campaigns about the health risks of everyday foods, including a controversial YouTube video portraying soda drinkers as pouring globs of shimmery yellow fat into their open mouths and – just out – an ad showing an innocent-looking can of chicken-with-rice soup as bursting with dangerous salt. Whether or not you live in New York, you’re likely to be seeing more of this sort of thing because the mayor’s crew tends to set the pace for activist public-health efforts nationwide; the Obama administration, for example, picked Bloomberg lieutenant Thomas R. Frieden to head the influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why should government use our own tax dollars to propagandize and hector us about the risks of salted snacks, chocolate milk or the other temptations of today’s supermarket aisle? The Bloomberg-Obama camp seems to feel that government dietary advice is superior to other sources of information we might draw on because (1) it’s more objective, independent and pure of motive and (2) it can draw on better science.
Whole thing here, and more on Bloomberg’s anti-soup crusade at the New York Post, Reason, and ACSH. More: My Food My Choice.
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The little-known dangers of snails as a menu item: it seems the interior can be under pressure and squirt hot garlic butter. [Marin County, Calif. Independent Journal]
More: Legal Blog Watch (citing “no less robust a source than Overlawyered”); Cal Biz Lit (with proposed “Danger: Snails May Explode” warning)
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Yes, it’s an informative piece, and yes, it does explore some of the drawbacks and abuses, particularly for clients whose lawsuits are being financed by banks, hedge funds or other investors. But the Times (with its reporting partner, the Center for Public Integrity) also buys in to what David Oliver correctly identifies as a big, central fallacy when it claims that the influx of money into plaintiff’s cases “is helping to ensure that cases are decided by merit rather than resources.” So when an outside investor makes it possible for, say, a patent troll to launch mass royalty demands on behalf of marginal patents, or a mass tort firm to roll out scientifically dubious toxic-injury claims, or an Indian tribe to assert 200-year-old land claims against nearby farmers for casino-seeking leverage, it means that cases are now suddenly being resolved on a basis that more closely tracks the merits? Check your premises, please. More: Dan Fisher/Forbes and Ted Frank/PoL, and earlier on Counsel Financial.
P.S. Good round table at New York Times “Room for Debate”, check out in particular the Paul Rubin and Richard Epstein contributions; Kenneth Anderson/Volokh (”insurable interest”).
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Among its other proposals, it’s calling for medical malpractice reform to “pay lawyers less and reduce defensive medicine.” [Reuters]
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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.