Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

October 4 roundup

  • Mass torts specialists vs. vendor: “Prominent Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Ordered to Pay Up After Losing Breach of Contract Trial” [Above the Law]
  • “You’ll have to get it on the street” — NYC’s thriving black market in pesticides [NYT, more]
  • Benjamin Barton on his new book, “The Lawyer-Judge Bias” [Truth on the Market, earlier here, etc.]
  • Medicare will not press “secondary payer” liability clawback claims below $300 [Miller and Zois, PoL, NLJ]
  • Class action roundup: “Sleeper” Supreme Court case raises question of whether class action certification requires consumer harm [Fisher/Forbes] Important Easterbrook opinion in Aqua Dots case puts curbs on class certification [PoL, Fisher/Forbes, Beck] Frey, Mortenson et al.: “The non-fiction class action” [Trask, OUP blog; earlier here, etc.]
  • Free speech roundup: Canada proposal could criminalize linking to alleged hate speech [Hosting Industry Watch] More on Canadian denouncers of speechcrime [Ken at Popehat] You don’t say: “$60,000 Ruling Against Truthful Blogger Tests Limits of the First Amendment” [Citizen Media Law] What happens when a defamation plaintiff asks a court for a takedown order? [same] Argentina: subpoenas step up pressure on reporters, editors who report on economy [NYT via Walter Russell Mead]
  • Should the law punish energy companies whose operations kill birds? Depends on whose osprey is being gored [Perry]

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2 Comments

  • In court, the defendants argued that they shouldn’t have to pay because the contract was never valid to begin with. Among other things, they argued that it included a success fee for Cataphora, which is illegal for non-attorneys to receive. They also claimed the clause stating that the original fee was nonrefundable had been added at the last minute without proper notification.

    So are we supposed to believe that these defendants didn’t know that they were supposed to read the contract before they signed it? You would think that they would come up with a better defense than that. If makes they look like incompetent fools.

  • […] litigants in U.S. defamation cases have occasionally argued otherwise. On Canada, see also proposals to criminalize links to so-called hate […]