Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
The complimentary breakfast provided with membership in the expensive Setai Club & Spa Wall Street used to be really good, according to injury attorney Richard Katz. Then they replaced it with just a cold buffet. The club said it offered Katz a prorated refund of his remaining membership after he complained, but he’s suing for $730,000, including a claim that he was defamed. [Gawker, Above the Law ]
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Cracked has a selection that includes disgraced Pennsylvania judge Michael Joyce (on whom), the pro wrestler on disability, a church with leaders who “have had so many X-rays that I wouldn’t be surprised if they glowed in the dark,” and — eeeeuw! — a couple of deliberately glass-eating restaurant-goers.
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“The Department of Justice has begun an investigation into Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, probing whether Milwaukee’s state-administered voucher system is discriminating against students with disabilities.” [Joy Resmowits, Huffington Post]
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Concerns are mounting about something called the Stop Online Piracy Act, billed as giving authorities the power to close down “rogue” websites devoted to exchange of stolen content. [Timothy Lee, Cato at Liberty]
“Macomb County Probate Court officials can’t explain how a man falsely claiming to be a medical doctor was allowed to decide whether people were mentally competent to handle their own estates and whether jail inmates needed mental health care.” [Detroit News]
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“A Las Vegas lawyer who once ran a courthouse restaurant has pleaded guilty in a scheme to take $3,000 in kickbacks to rig two condo board elections in Nevada.” The takeover of the condo boards, advanced by methods that included stuffing ballot boxes with fake ballots, made it possible to bring in a favored law firm to file construction-defect suits. “Federal prosecutors claim conspirators used straw buyers to buy properties in about a dozen condo communities from 2003 to 2009 and helped them win control of condo boards, AP says.” A wider investigation continues whose targets allegedly include judges. [ABA Journal]
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In discussions of the “ministerial exception,” which limits the scope of employment lawsuits against churches and related groups over some jobs important to their mission, the typical example often given of a job not covered by the exception is janitor. Eve Tushnet wonders why that is (scroll to “custodian of souls”; earlier on the pending Supreme Court case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC).
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Neither Stephen Bainbridge nor Larry Ribstein is particularly impressed by it.
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“U Raise ‘Em/We Cage ‘Em” t-shirts from a California law enforcement union [Radley Balko] From the same source, “NYPD cops demand the right to be corrupt.” And on Friday at Cato at Liberty, I gave my take on Ohio’s vote today on whether to approve a package of laws reining in public employee unionism.
More on Ohio’s S.B. 5, including political post-mortem: Michael Barone, Mark Steyn, Ted Frank, Mickey Kaus, Mytheos Holt. Philip K. Howard points out in the WSJ that the LIRR’s disability epidemic is “hardly unique – 82% of senior California state troopers are ‘disabled’ in their last year before retirement” [WSJ; more on LIRR, Nicole Gelinas] Radley Balko has another revealing police union vignette, this time from an incident in which an off-duty cop led another cop on a high-speed chase. And from Brian Strow [Western Kentucky], “Stop, Drop, and Roll: The Privileged Economic Position of Firefighters” [Library of Economics and Liberty]
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After we passed along a recent report that Beaumont, Texas lawyers had filed 59 lawsuits the day before the state’s new “loser-pays” package of litigation reforms was to take effect, Texas attorney Brooks Schuelke responded on Twitter as follows (re-formatted and edited for clarity), saying that the issue wasn’t the loser-pays provision, but a separate “responsible third party” provision that set a malpractice trap for lawyers that delayed: “The responsible third party provisions allowed a defendant to name a party, and then plaintiff could join them even if the statute of limitations had expired. The law was changed to remove the ability to sue regardless of the statute of limitations. But defendant can’t name a party not disclosed in discovery. The amendment means we have to file suit long before the statute of limitations expires to send discovery asking defendant to name who it might name. So many cases nearing the statute of limitations had to be filed before the effective date of the change or else they could be victim to the amendment.”
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American legislatures since the 1970s have widely employed “one-way” fee provisions — under which courts award fees to prevailing plaintiffs, but not to prevailing defendants — as a way of encouraging plaintiffs and their lawyers to bring a maximum of legal action; especially when the fee shifts are generously calculated, such provisions also put strong pressure on defendants to settle potentially defensible cases rather than take the risk of a big fee award that may exceed the sums in controversy. Now Wisconsin lawmakers are thinking of making the playing field a bit more level by reining in one-way awards, especially those that exceed the underlying dispute; another way of approaching the issue, of course, would be to make the shifts two-way. [Rick Esenberg]
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While a publicity-seeking lawprof has been stirring the pot, it’s by no means clear that any actual Catholic U. students consider it intolerably irksome to pray in a room with a cross. [PJ Media "Tatler", earlier]
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The Texas capital considers letting residents issue parking tickets to other drivers by way of an iPhone app [The Newspaper]
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“The family of a man who was gored to death by a mountain goat in Olympic National Park is suing the Park Service.” [AP, National Parks Traveler, earlier]
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A concocted “multiple personalities” tale wrecked many lives by launching a thousand bogus recovered memories of abuse, not a few of which made it to court. Debbie Nathan (”Satan’s Silence”) has a new book out, “Sybil Exposed,” telling the story. [Laura Miller, Salon (link fixed now)]
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“To recap – plaintiff alleged that she got a rash from a placebo and she attempted to prove her claim with testimony from her artist-husband and a mold-specialist who hadn’t read her medical records or the clinical study at issue.” A Connecticut court was not persuaded and dismissed the action. [Michelle Yeary, Drug and Device Law]
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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.