It “carries costs for air safety,” declares the headline of a USA Today editorial: “Payouts could chill crews from acting on reasonable suspicions.” Earlier here.
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Posts tagged as:
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Continental Airlines says nine pilots got “paper” divorces from their spouses and then remarried after securing lump-sum distributions from the carrier’s retirement plan. Federal regulators have in the past indicated that plan administrators should disallow sham transactions intended to qualify for tax-favored retirement benefits. Two pilots have now countered with charges that the airline invaded their privacy when it investigated whether their divorces were really what they seemed. [Houston Chronicle and followup]
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Evil HR Lady has more thoughts on the United Airlines incident, along with some kind words for this website.
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There is a horrifying tale on Consumerist about a family that missed a flight to visit their dying mother in the hospital because a ticket agent refused to help them because it was time for her break. What the story doesn’t tell you, and what none of the commenters seem to realize, is that it’s the trial lawyers that put United Airlines in that situation. Oregon labor laws California labor laws require workers to be permitted to take breaks; plaintiffs’ attorneys have made a multi-million-dollar cottage industry out of class action lawsuits against employers where customer service was permitted to take priority and workers occasionally didn’t take their breaks. (In California, the penalty for failing to provide a ten-minute break is an hour of pay.) To avoid this, the employer has to enforce the break period stringently, because they can potentially be held liable even if the employee voluntarily avoids the break.
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Yale student Jesse Maiman says US Airways lost his XBox videogame console and he thinks $1 million would make a fair exchange. [Cincinnati Enquirer]
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- “Illinois trial lawyers take a swing at youth baseball” [Curt Mercadente, Illinois Civil Justice League]
- Luzerne County, Pa. scandal: “Court Filing Says Former Judge Met With Felons Twice a Month” [Legal Intelligencer]
- You’d think Obama could find some person without major-league trial lawyer connections for the cabinet seat on health, but you’d be wrong [Wood, PoL, on Kathleen Sebelius, and earlier on Tom Daschle]
- Remember the many times when town officials do or say something arguably racist and the U.S. Department of Justice opens an investigation? Doesn’t seem to happen with the Detroit City Council [Nolan Finley, Detroit News]
- Copyright enforcement doesn’t scale and that’s another reason its future looks bleak [David Post @ Volokh]
- Thought it wasn’t going to happen? “Some Passengers Mull Lawsuits Over Life-Saving US Airways Crash-Landing” [ABA Journal, WSJ law blog, earlier here and here]
- Sex shop that suddenly appeared in genteel Old Town Alexandria, near D.C. is sort of the zoning equivalent of a spite fence [WaPo]
- Claim of British researchers: lawyers’ IQ-point edge over general public has declined over last decade [The Lawyer]
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The client-chasing has begun on Continental Flight 3407, ably chronicled by Eric Turkewitz.
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- Irvine, California class-action lawyer Sandeep Baweja: sorry, I bet the class’s $2.7M wage/hour settlement on the stock market and lost it [ABA Journal, WageLaw]
- Litigant alleges his iPod playlist is worth $1 trillion; also, another kicked-by-exotic-dancer lawsuit [Lowering the Bar]
- Lawyers representing victims of Long Island’s “Agape” Ponzi scheme would do well to be modest [Scott Greenfield]
- More on that litigation filed by Dallas developer H. Walker Royall against author Carla Main, who wrote a book critical of eminent domain abuse; her publisher, Encounter Books (which is also publishing a book of mine); a reviewer, and his newspaper; and even eminent scholar Richard Epstein, for giving a blurb [Real Clear Politics, Somin @ Volokh, Sullum/Reason "Hit and Run", earlier]
- “OMG, there’s mercury in the high-fructose corn syrup!” scare doesn’t sound very scare-worthy [Coyote]
- Another reason we (sometimes) go too far in search of safety: “Availability Bias and Water Landings” [Cernovich]
- Supreme Court mulls whether to grant certiorari on Bilski (business methods patent) case [SCOTUS Blog]
- Trial judge lops $32 million off that $55 million verdict against San Diego Gas & Electric for helicopter crash into unlit utility tower [CalBizLit]
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- Free class-action swag if you bought department store cosmetics between 1994 and 2003; not that they’re giving away the very best stuff or anything [Tompkins/Poynter, California Civil Justice, WSJ Law Blog, settlement site] We’ve been covering the story for quite some time;
- Law school “can be a financial disaster” for unwary students [Law and More] Law schools not immune from economic downturn [Above the Law]
- Bruce Bawer on Dutch prosecution of Islam-criticizer Geert Wilders [City Journal]
- More on possible passenger suits after the miracle Hudson-landing USAir Flight #1549 [USA Today, earlier] Update: NY Post, NY Mag.
- Bad news for patients and other living things: Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen somehow got named to a key FDA panel during the late Bush administration [Point of Law, Postrel, Bernstein/Volokh, Hooper & Henderson/Forbes]
- “Friends weren’t really trying to reach me!” class action against Reunion.com encounters another setback [Spam Notes]
- Stand and deliver it back: “Minnesota: $2.6 Million in Red Light Camera Tickets Refunded” [The Newspaper]
- Gary, Indiana’s is the last standing of what were once thirty “gun sales = nuisance” suits filed by cities; now Indiana high court says it can go to trial [Point of Law]
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Ken at Popehat thinks the Los Angeles Times, and Keith Olbermann, have gotten this recent story rather badly wrong. P.S. Much further discussion at Scott Greenfield’s.
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Asks Dan Slater at the WSJ Law Blog.
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A Twitter user found this “AttorneyOne” promotion site for “Hudson Plane Crash”, which Patrick @ Popehat (aka SSFC) mentions funnily. On closer examination, however, one finds that this site was not thrown up in response to USAir #1549’s dramatic landing in the Hudson River. Its URL contains the words “Summit” and “Ohio”, meaning that it was aimed at plane crashes connected with this community in northeastern Ohio. Indeed, it was a website prearranged just to be sitting there should a plane crash take place connected with the town of Hudson, Ohio. A bit of URL-tinkering confirms that one can generate a similar AttorneyOne page hawking attorneys’ services for a hypothetical plane crash in Chillicothe, Ohio. So don’t compare this sort of thing to online ambulance chasing. It’s more like camping out online and waiting for the accident to come to you.
Hope that clears things up.
P.S. Considerably more on the topic from Eric Turkewitz here and here (congratulations, Jonathan C. Reiter) and from Robert Ambrogi. And while I originally credited this Twitter user with stumbling across the find, it appears it was first found by Greg Lambert of Three Geeks and a Law Blog and passed on from there.
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Such is the contention of Yoichi and Ayisha Shimamoto, who are suing UAL “for ‘negligently’ overserving alcohol during a flight from Osaka, Japan, to San Francisco, saying the carrier’s drinks fueled the domestic violence involving the two shortly after their plane landed.” (Julie Johnsson, “Couple accuse United Airlines of overserving husband, causing him to beat wife”, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 17).
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Joe Sharkey, a well-known travel columnist for the New York Times, was aboard an Embraer business jet in Brazil that collided with another plane but managed to land safely although all 157 aboard the other plane died. Sharkey later discussed the episode on one of his blogs, and was quite critical of Brazilian air traffic control and some others involved in the affair. Now, according to an Oct. 16 press release, the widow of one of those who died on the other plane is suing Sharkey for having “launched personal attacks against Brazil’s President, air traffic controllers and other notorious individuals and, repeatedly and piercingly, started offending Brazilians indiscriminately”. “Only amends will restore the widow’s dignity,” states Rosane Gutjhar’s lawyer, Oscar Fleischfresser, who may have one of the best lawyer surnames ever (Fleischfresser = carnivore)(Aero-News.net, Oct. 21; JREF Forum; O Estado de Sao Paolo/ATC Brasil). In a presumably unrelated sidelight, a federal court this summer turned down an attempt by Brazilian survivors to file injury claims for the crash in the U.S., ruling that they should instead be heard in Brazil, where the awards are likely to be much lower.
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Declining to hear an appeal by airlines: “Obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one on flights within Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Thursday.” (Reuters, Nov. 20; CBC). We’ve covered the issue for years, including, e.g., here, here, here (U.S.), here, and here. More thoughts: Scott Greenfield, Ann Althouse.
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The flight attendant sought a whopping $405K for the alleged assault. This demand seemed unreasonable based on the description of the injuries, even if they occurred as alleged (“Jury says no assault, agrees with Osteen’s wife”, MSNBC, Aug. 14, earlier).
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We express no opinion as to exactly how badly Victoria Osteen, wife of a celebrated evangelical minister, may have behaved on that Continental Airlines flight in 2005; “The Federal Aviation Administration fined [her] $3,000 for interfering with a crew member.” Readers keep writing in, however, to call our attention to the financial demands that flight attendant Sharon Brown is making in her lawsuit, which just went to trial. It seems Brown wants compensation not only for such things as hemorrhoids and damage to her religious faith but also, by way of punishment, “10 percent of Victoria Osteen’s net worth”. Wouldn’t we all! (”Joel Osteen’s Wife on Trial in Flight Attendant Assault”, AP/FoxNews.com, Aug. 7).
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- Another compilation of the hundred best law blogs, with a familiar name among the nine “general” picks, so thanks for that ["Criminal Justice Degrees Guide" via ABA Journal]
- Europe has a transnational association of personal injury lawyers, funded by the EU, but with no wheeler-dealer, masters-of-the-universe vibe in evidence [PoL]
- Delta wasn’t liable in Kentucky Comair crash, but some plaintiffs sued it anyway in what their lawyer describes as an “abundance of caution” — that’s a diplomatic way to put it [Aero-News Net; link fixed now]
- U.K.: Mom told she’d need to pass criminal record check before being allowed to take her own son to school [Telegraph]
- Regular coverage of the litigious exploits of delusional inmate Jonathan Lee Riches, if you’ve got the stomach for them [Dreadnaught blog]
- Federal Circuit reverses $85 million infringement verdict won by Raymond Niro, blasted by critics as original “patent troll” [AmLaw Daily]
- “Determined to defeat lawsuits over addiction, the casino industry is funding research at a Harvard-affiliated lab.” [Salon]
- Hired through nepotism by in-laws, then fired after divorce, sues on grounds of “marital status discrimination” [eight years ago on Overlawyered]
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