If law schools were viewed in the same light as for-profit vocational training schools, there’d probably be a big movement to shut them down:
Many law schools all but explicitly promise that, within a few months of graduation, practically all their graduates will obtain jobs as lawyers, by trumpeting employment figures of 95 percent, 97 percent, and even 99.8 percent. The truth is that less than half will.
Schools use a variety of shabby dodges to undercount jobless graduates while straining to count others as employed, all of which serves little public purpose beyond “the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else.” [law professor Paul Campos at the University of Colorado, in the new issue of New Republic] When I spoke recently at Colorado on Schools for Misrule, Prof. Campos was kind enough to be the commenter, and I agreed with pretty much everything he had to say then and afterward.
P.S.: More generally from Alex Eichler, Atlantic Wire. And law school “merit scholarships” aren’t always quite as attractive as they seem.
Tagged as:
law schools,
Schools for Misrule
According to the Colorado Civil Justice League, the decision by the state’s high court last fall in Volunteers of America v. Gardenswartz prohibits juries from learning the amounts actually paid, as opposed to “billed,” for medical services whose reimbursement is demanded in accident cases. The distinction is important because those who cover medical bills in practice (e.g., health insurers with their bulk buying clout) often pay much lower sums than the “rack rates” that hospitals and others officially charge (more on HB 1106, which would restore the evidence of paid as well as billed amounts).
P.S. As Jack Leyhane notes, the Colorado controversy is related to, though not identical with, the longstanding controversy over the “collateral source” rule, which provides that payments by third parties to a plaintiff over an injury will not reduce or offset the liability of a tortfeasor. “It is the lien or subrogation rights of third parties — [which] vary widely from state to state — that make sweeping generalities about the collateral source rule difficult to formulate.”
Tagged as:
Colorado,
medical
The director of Orange County, N.C. emergency services had terminated the squad following complaints of unprofessionalism from other emergency responders, and it proceeded to sue. “The lawsuit, filed in federal court, claimed to be a class-action lawsuit for all the citizens of Orange County and those who transit through Orange County, but U.S. District Judge William J. Osteen Jr. wrote in his opinion that the rescue squad lacked standing to bring a class action lawsuit.” [Herald-Sun; background, Daily Tar Heel]
Tagged as:
class actions,
emergency services,
North Carolina
Just for fun — or maybe that’s the wrong word — this website allows you to noodle around to estimate how much money is flying out the window as lawyers quibble at your meeting or phone call.
Tagged as:
attorneys' fees
David Kopel of the Independence Institute interviews my Cato Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro on Cato’s active amicus-filing program, ObamaCare challenges, “Libertarian ConLaw 101,” and more. You can listen here.
Tagged as:
Cato Institute,
on TV and radio,
Supreme Court
Ted Frank’s class action settlement reform group, the Center for Class Action Fairness, has announced “multiple victories” in ongoing cases arising from settlements by Apple, Classmates.com, Toyota, HP, and gasoline retailers. Among the topics addressed in objection: exaggeration of benefits supposedly provided for the class, excessive attorney fees, and diversion of proceeds to groups unrelated to the class. Details here.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
cy pres,
Ted Frank
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, the police union has filed a grievance with the state collective bargaining board over a drug arrest made by police chief Dan Duffy in March, “because the chief is not a member of the collective bargaining unit and was ‘off duty’ when the March 20 arrest was made. ‘I think it’s absurd. I’m not going to turn my head on crime that takes place,’ Chief Duffy said. ‘I took the same oath (as a police officer) that everyone else took.’” [Times-Tribune via Taranto]
Tagged as:
labor unions,
Pennsylvania,
police
An inmate convicted of murder in 2002 has made it to the appeals court level with a suit against the California Corrections Department’s policy that “sexual reassignment surgery is not a covered benefit.” [KCBS]
Tagged as:
California,
prisoners
Local governments are often open to “amending” speeding tickets, but in a manner that reflects their financial self-interest — and also pays dividends for the prosperity of the local bar. [Mike Sykuta, TotM]
Tagged as:
lawyers,
traffic laws
- Study of how class action lawyers interact with their named clients [Stephen Meili via Trask]
- California releases numbers on how bounty-hunting lawyers did in 2010 under Prop 65 environmental-warning law [Cal Biz Lit]
- According to the tale, lender errors in foreclosure gave Florida borrower home free and clear. Actual story may be more complicated than that [Funnell]
- The very long discovery arm of the Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, courts [Drug & Device Law, more]
- UK law firm “could face big bill” after sending thousands of file-sharing demand letters [ABA Journal]
- Goodbye to men’s track at U. of Delaware, and the women’s team is suffering too, as often happens with Title IX [Saving Sports]
- OSHA’s proposed “illness and injury prevention program” (I2P2) termed a “Super Rule” with potentially widespread economic impact [Kirsanow, NRO]
Tagged as:
class actions,
discovery,
forum shopping,
mortgages,
OSHA,
Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia,
Prop 65,
RIAA and file sharing,
Title IX
Last week I was a guest on one of talk radio’s enduring institutions, the Jim Bohannon show on Westwood One, to discuss my new book Schools for Misrule. I always have a great time on Jim’s show and this was no exception; you can listen here. Also last week, I joined the African American Conservatives show on BlogTalkRadio, and you can hear the results here. And Bernard Chapin (Chapin’s Inferno), who is among other things a contributor to Pajamas Media, liked the book and gave it a video review on his YouTube channel.
I’ll be in Dallas over the next day or two to speak with leaders of conservative/libertarian legal groups at the Heritage Foundation’s annual get-together (invitation event).
Tagged as:
on TV and radio,
Schools for Misrule
“A defense lawyer’s fleeting reference to the ‘uniquely iconic’ McDonald’s coffee case was enough for the Utah Supreme Court to order a new trial in a pedestrian accident lawsuit and allow the plaintiff to seek a larger damages award.” [Matthew Heller/OnPoint News; Jodie Hill/Downtown Lawyer] And Abnormal Use is out with a new interview of Ted Frank, who has written frequently on the hot-coffee case for this site, and who says:
The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.
I, too, gave a lot of thought to writing up the long controversy over the Liebeck case in my latest book, precisely because academic sources, and not just trial-lawyer publicists, persistently spread distortions and misconceptions about the case. Eventually it seemed like too wide a digression from the book’s main themes — but someone still needs to write up that story.
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Ted Frank
Comment of the day
by Walter Olson on April 26, 2011
By Scott Jacobs, on a guest post by Aaron Worthing (regarding class actions over Apple device location tracking) at Patterico:
How, indeed?
Tagged as: accolades, Apple, class action settlements, open threads and commenter posts
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