Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
Today is the last day for class members to object in the Classmates.com class action settlement —$117 thousand for the class, $1.05 million for the attorneys. For more details on how to file, see my post at the Center for Class Action Fairness (which is not affiliated with Overlawyered).
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Because ambulances are not the end of it. [Turkewitz]
“A state lawmaker tells WMWV-FM that the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort has told other businesses with ‘Mount Washington’ in their name to stop using it or face a legal challenge.” The hotel says it has challenged only three lodging businesses and does not intend to go after other local businesses named after the mountain. [AP, WMUR, Boston Globe]
P.S. Commenter Mannie: “It gets better. The IOC routinely harasses businesses on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for using the name ‘Olympic.’”
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Must reading in last week’s New York Times Magazine: Douglas McCollam explores the scramble over compensation after the BP TransOcean gulf oil spill, profiling Texas trial lawyer Tony Buzbee, who’s among those leading resistance to the Ken Feinberg administered-compensation-fund way of handling claims. It offers a much broader and better-informed perspective on wider litigation trends than is usual in such stories.
A disciplinary committee said it lacked probable cause to charge a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer from Jacksonville, though it described his billing standards as “not consistent with the high standards of our profession.” [ABA Journal, Florida Times-Union]
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I’ve got a post up at Cato at Liberty on the Freddie-Mac-versus-IRS litigation that Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil calls the “stupidest lawsuit ever.”
P.S. And welcome Mickey Kaus readers (”Stupidest lawsuit ever? Tough category”).
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The venerable British newspaper — at least someone there in charge of selecting pictures and captions — seems to have fallen for an old bit of fiction about an insurance customer who supposedly tried to collect on the loss of his cigars via fire, as an example of “odd American lawsuits.” One wonders why papers fall back on hoary email legends when they could have readily found hundreds upon hundreds of genuine examples of odd American lawsuits right here.
Incidentally, the reader who makes it through the underlying opinion piece (by Neil Rose) does eventually learn that the cigar fable is one of a class of stories “most of [which] are apocryphal or didn’t get anywhere, such as the case against the dry cleaners.” This is not really up to snuff as a way of warning readers off the cigar tale, and it’s grossly misleading as a description of the Roy Pearson dry-cleaners pants suit, which Pearson kept going for years at a very real and serious cost to his targets, the Chung family. Much of the point of the Neil Rose article seems to be to assure British readers that the American way of litigation may be safely emulated, since its costs are not really so bad. If that’s the argument, shouldn’t the piece convey a fairer picture of those costs?
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Accurate science, or Science For Your Own Good? [Michael Siegel]
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A father in Sterling Heights, Michigan, says his fifth-grade daughter “was racially harassed by a fifth-grade teacher’s reading aloud from a book about slavery.” [WFTV, Volokh]
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…better check whether your church is licensed as a commercial 
food-preparation facility [Density Duck in comments:]
…Our local church had to shut down its Feed-The-Hungry operation (where a bunch of retired housewives cooked simple meals and froze them to give to the local soup kitchen.) The reason is that the church kitchen wasn’t certified as a commercial food-preparation facility, as one of the lawyers in the congregation helpfully pointed out to the lady in charge of the program.
We’ve covered the issue periodically before.
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Sounds promising, from Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton in January (via Glenn Reynolds):
Virtually all American judges are former lawyers, a shared background that results in the lawyer-judge bias. This book argues that these lawyer-judges instinctively favor the legal profession in their decisions and that this bias has far-reaching and deleterious effects on American law.
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“An Ohio public school teacher accused of burning the mark of a cross on students’ arms said Friday he dropped a lawsuit over his firing because it would have interfered with a public airing of his complaint in a different venue.” [AP via Ed Brayton, earlier]
“Top House Ethics Lawyer to Step Down” [BLT headline]
Pretty much confirming all the other numbers out there. It’s a bit too late for me to work it into Schools for Misrule — the text of which is ready to go to the printer any day now — but it’s not as if there’s much real dispute anyway about the leftward leanings of the contemporary American law lectern. [TaxProf; James Phillips and Douglas Spencer, "Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring"]
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“Eat a bagel, lose your baby” [Jacob Sullum, Reason] For more on the problematic legal status of the classic bagel and European-bread enhancement, see Michael Pollan’s classic 1997 Harper’s article.
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Alas, court challenges have generally failed in the past despite the many seeming constitutional and legal infirmities of 1998’s Great Tobacco Robbery — its taxation-escaping-normal-constraints-on-taxation, its bald imposition of retroactive liability, its state-sponsored cartelization of the cigarette trade, its odoriferous self-dealing and counsel-contract coziness, and so forth. Doubly unfortunately, the courts have adopted an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the Compacts Clause, which on its face you might think would bar states from entering deals with each other of this sort without Congressional approval. Christine Hall of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which filed the new certiorari petition, wonders what the Founders would have thought: “It’s hard to believe they would’ve written the Compact Clause for no reason.” [Open Market]
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