Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
In Los Angeles, a woman “who wants to remain anonymous” has sued Match.com saying that a man she met on the service raped her on their second date and that it has a legal responsibility to screen participants more carefully. The man in the case, who is awaiting trial, has implied through a lawyer that contact was consensual. [NBC Los Angeles via TortsProf, Amy Alkon]
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The Bay Area town of Larkspur plans to forbid most apartment and condominium tenants from smoking in their own units. [Marin Independent Journal; related]
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The distinguished panel includes Lester Brickman and Myriam Gilles (Cardozo), Richard Epstein (NYU), Jim Copland and Ted Frank (Manhattan Institute), R. Matthew Cairns (Gallagher, Callahan & Gartrell and the 2011 president of the Defense Research Institute), Russell Jackson (Skadden), and Andrew Trask (McGuire Woods). You can follow the discussion here.
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Ohio: “A family with an extensive history of legal action against a number of school districts and municipalities has filed a $1 million civil lawsuit against Middletown City Schools. Orlando Bethel — who refers to himself as a fire and brimstone preacher in court documents, and his wife, Glynis — filed the action Friday in Cincinnati federal court after one of their three children, Zoe, wore a T-shirt at the high school proclaiming ‘god hates (expletive)’ and ‘repent or burn in hell.’” [Dayton Daily News]
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A House of Commons select committee “identified the principal cause as ‘a rapid growth in the number of personal injury claims management firms, which are using direct cold-call marketing techniques to encourage people to make claims who otherwise would not have done so’”. [Philip Johnston, Telegraph]
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The site generally promised to pay nothing to its bloggers, and has lived up to that promise. [Romenesko/Washington Post, Radley Balko, Atlantic Wire, Coyote (FLSA is a more unreasonable law than you may assume), Max Kennerly ("unjust enrichment" theories not going anywhere), Volokh (next: suits on behalf of unpaid commenters), Lawrence Cunningham ("close to zero" chance of suit prevailing); & followup (with Jack Shafer's views)]
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In its bimonthly Policy Report, the Cato Institute (where I’m a senior fellow) summarizes some of the themes of Schools for Misrule. You can buy the book here; and if you’ve already read it, do consider giving it a rating or review at Amazon or your favorite book-related site.
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It probably isn’t accomplishing much: “Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.” [The Economist; & note comments that take issue with the above assertion, and also point out the uses of such footers in pre-trial discovery]
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Another twist on the assertion that state laws against wiretapping and unauthorized recording make it unlawful to record the cops: police in the town of Weare, N.H. charged a man with wiretapping after he placed a cellphone call during a traffic stop “because the officer’s voice could be heard in the background of his phone call.” [Lowering the Bar]
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A new Massachusetts law that went into effect last year allows neighbors and other unrelated complainants to seek restraining orders against each other, a legal remedy formerly confined mostly to use between family members. But there’s been a surge of filings seeking the new “harassment prevention orders,” and according to the clerk of the Boston municipal court, the law has wound up empowering “every kook in the world” to “file a harassment order against their neighbor or landlord or someone who just annoys them.” Among cases: “One man took his neighbor to Malden District Court for allegedly blowing leaves on his property, and a woman in Boston Municipal Court insisted that actor Chuck Norris used high frequency radio transmissions to harass her at home.” [Boston Globe]
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Be prepared to submit to fingerprinting.
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Few American critics of the legal profession have made as big an impression as Fred Rodell, perhaps best known as the author of Woe Unto You, Lawyers (1939, and reprinted since then) and of the funny and still much-read attack on the stylistic failings of law scholarship, “Goodbye to Law Reviews” (Virginia Law Review, 1936, published when he was just 29). Rodell went on to teach at Yale Law where he was one of the school’s best-liked teachers, noted especially for his course on persuasive legal writing, which trained many leading legal journalists; as Charles Alan Wright notes in his obituary appreciation, Rodell was never admitted to the bar and never practiced law.
Now the reform organization HALT has put up a site dedicated to Rodell and his work. Even if, like me, you find much to disagree with in his conclusions, you may be glad you discovered his writing.
Thanks to Australian journalist Evan Whitton for the tip.
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I’m scheduled to be a guest on two of the nation’s leading radio programs, both California-based: Dennis Prager’s today (Tuesday) (broadcast times vary; find a station), and Ronn Owens at San Francisco’s KGO AM 810 tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11 a.m. Pacific. Tune in and listen!
P.S. Both shows were a pleasure; host Prager generously singled out the book as “so devastating” and “mandatory reading,” and said it was “difficult to overstate the importance of this book.”
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Told in cartoon panels [xkcd via Coyote]
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It doesn’t count as a “healthier choice” unless you actually let people choose. [Amy Alkon] And: Are we surprised that federal tax money is bankrolling the Boston mayor’s demonize-sweet-drinks kick? Not really, given that the federal government has been dishing out money to Michael Bloomberg’s administration in New York for similar purposes.
P.S.: “To encourage healthful eating, [a Chicago public] school doesn’t allow kids to bring lunches or certain snacks from home.” [Chicago Tribune]
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.