Daniel Fisher at Forbes explains:
…The rise of the “confidential witness” can be traced to the Public Securities Litigation Reform Act and subsequent Supreme Court rulings, under which class-action lawyers are required to do more than just point out the obvious, that a stock price fell. They need to state “particularized facts” giving a strong inference that somebody in management, not just a faceless corporate entity, did something he or she knew was fraudulent.
To get over this hurdle, class-action lawyers frequently call upon nameless “confidential witnesses” who apparently are willing to speak with plaintiff lawyers but live in fear of their identities being revealed to anyone else.
Funny thing is, the testimony of these confidential witnesses on eventually reaching the light of day keeps not backing up the propositions the lawyers said it did. The newest embarrassment afflicts Robbins Geller, a successor law firm to Bill Lerach’s Coughlin Stoia. More: ABA Journal; City of Livonia Employees Retirement System v. Boeing.
Tagged as:
Coughlin Stoia,
Milberg Weiss,
securities litigation
- “Cleveland Browns lawyer letter is apparently real” [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
- “Headlines of the Apocalypse: ‘Lady Gaga eyes legal action over breast milk ice cream.’” [@vsalus re: Breitbart via @EdDriscoll]
- Chesley discipline prospects in Kentucky fen-phen scandal: “King of Torts Dethroned” [Laura Simons, Abnormal Use]
- Busy construction-defect lawyers vex Fresno builders [Bee, Business Journal]
- “NHTSA Postpones Back-Up Camera Requirement Rule” [The Truth About Cars, earlier]
- Lawyers in Italy call strike to protest law requiring mediation of commercial disputes [WSJ Law Blog]
- NYT’s Mark Bittman has a magical touch with food (alas) [Patrick at Popehat]
- Beasley Allen lawyers sluiced $850K to Alabama GOP judicial contender [Birmingham News via PoL]
Tagged as:
Alabama,
construction defect,
Italy,
New York Times,
NHTSA,
Stan Chesley,
wayward Republicans
A Manhattan couple were sued by their downstairs neighbors for allegedly allowing too much noise that might have been better muffled with carpets. They approached a well-known local reporter who did a segment in his “Shame! Shame! Shame!” consumer series critical of the suit. The plaintiffs proceeded to file a new $52 million suit against their upstairs neighbor for intentional infliction of emotional distress, which a judge has now dismissed. And now the defendant wife and her husband have sued the condo board for removing her from the board, apparently in reaction to the publicity. [TVSpy]
Tagged as:
libel slander and defamation,
NYC,
real estate
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Northwestern law professor John McGinnis favorably reviews my new book:
American law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. In ‘Schools for Misrule,’ Walter Olson offers a fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions. One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society.
Prof. McGinnis deftly conveys my theme about how embracing the cause of reformist legal critique helped serve law schools’ quest for academic respectability within the university, and he is particularly complimentary about the book’s discussion of law school clinics (”superbly describe[d]“). He is perfectly fair in observing that the book makes no attempt to evaluate some important recent developments such as the burgeoning of interest in empirical legal studies, even as I do devote considerable attention to other academic enthusiasms (like the ill-fated movement for race reparations) that he and I agree led to practical dead ends.
Most of Schools for Misrule is by intention backward-looking, an assessment of wrong turns and misguided enthusiasms that have led legal academia astray up to now. As Prof. McGinnis and I agree, things have been changing of late, sometimes in favorable ways. And that I hope provides much fodder for discussion as more observers join the debate.
P.S. Prof. Bainbridge has some kind things to say today as well. And I’ve got a general reaction roundup at Cato at Liberty, including those obsessively watched Amazon sales rankings, which are almost as bad a distraction for the author world as the U.S. News rankings are for the legal-academic. Yet more: Paul Caron/TaxProf, Instapundit, Above the Law, Kent Scheidegger/Crime and Consequences, Smallest Minority, Estate of Denial, Jeff Hadden/Detroit News, Memeorandum.
Tagged as:
law schools,
Schools for Misrule
Last week the New York Times ran a chilling investigative account of what goes on at New York group homes for the developmentally disabled, where employees in hundreds of cases appear to have abused or mistreated residents with impunity. Per the Times:
…in 25 percent of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the state employees were transferred to other homes. The state initiated termination proceedings in 129 of the [399] cases reviewed but succeeded in just 30 of them, in large part because the workers’ union, the Civil Service Employees Association, aggressively resisted firings in almost every case.
Revelations like this should be front and center in the unfolding debate over public employee unionization, but often aren’t. [h/t: James Sherk, NRO "Corner"]
Tagged as:
labor unions,
New York,
public employment
A novel lawsuit theory that obtained more-than-respectful coverage in the New York Times did not succeed in convincing the Oklahoma courts, notes Russell Jackson. “The Court of Civil Appeals’ decision in Doyle is a strong demonstration that trying to use civil legal duties to make the US a Nanny State is simply wrongheaded.”
Tagged as:
cellphones,
New York Times,
Oklahoma
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is voicing citizen discontent about federal low-flow plumbing mandates, a mandate intended to force conservation of a resource that in many parts of the country is not even particularly scarce [Atlantic Wire, Nick Gillespie]
Related: Where is the market failure with incandescent light bulbs? [Thomas Firey, Cato at Liberty]
Tagged as:
environment
“[B]efore founding partner Henry ‘Hank’ Adorno was suspended for his handling of a $7 million class action settlement[, the] Florida law firm was once the nation’s largest certified minority-owned firm.” [ABA Journal] Our earlier coverage of the Miami fire-fee scandal (“A case of unchecked avarice coupled with a total absence of shame,” wrote one judge) is here, here, here, here, and here.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
Florida
“Though blogger John (Johnny Northside) Hoff told the truth when he linked ex-community leader Jerry Moore to a high-profile mortgage fraud, the scathing blog post that got Moore fired justifies $60,000 in damages, a Hennepin County jury decided Friday.” Moore, who was fired by the University of Minnesota after the post appeared, sued on a theory of “tortious interference” with his employment. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
libel slander and defamation,
Minnesota
I spoke about my new book before a luncheon crowd yesterday at my former institute in New York City — several distinguished law professors were in attendance — and Jim Copland interviewed me afterward. We talked about how this book grew out of my earlier work, why international rights are such a coming area in law schools, and much more. The resulting audio podcast runs just over 10 minutes; you may need to turn the volume up higher than normal to hear it properly. You can and should buy Schools for Misrule itself here (Amazon commission as well as regular royalty benefits me).
On the radio front, I was a guest on Jason Lewis’s nationally syndicated (Minneapolis-based) show on Monday, and will be a guest today at 11 Eastern on Ron Smith’s show on WBAL Baltimore (audio).
Tagged as:
live in person,
Manhattan Institute,
on TV and radio,
Schools for Misrule
