The Chicago law firm of Edelman, Combs, Latturner & Goodwin, LLC has some wonderful news for you:

We are looking for electronically generated credit / debit card receipts which show either (a) the card expiration date or (b) any digits of the credit/ debit card number other than the last five.

In order to protect consumers against identity theft, an amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act with a final effective date of December 4, 2006 requires merchants who accept credit/ debit cards and issue electronic receipts to program their machines to not show either the expiration date or more than the last 5 digits of the credit/ debit card number. The expiration date is important because a thief can use it together with the last four or five digits of the number to reconstruct the entire card number.

It is a violation to show either the expiration date or more than the last 5 digits of the card number. (We have seen some receipts where 4 or 5 other digits are shown, and that is a violation.) It is not necessary that any identity theft have actually occurred. Damages for a willful violation are $100 to $1,000 per receipt. The class representative may be able to obtain some additional compensation.

We have a number of pending cases alleging this violation and are interested in other merchants who are violating the law.

The burgeoning volume of entrepreneurial litigation over insufficiently blinded credit slips is the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal article: see Robin Sidel, “Retailers Whose Slips Show Too Much Attract Lawsuits”, Apr. 28, reprinted Cattle Network, Apr. 28. For more about name partner Daniel Edelman, see Nov. 15, 1999 (infamous BancBoston settlement), Feb. 7, 2000, and Dec. 11, 2006. The Edelman firm’s website has a long listing of notable case involvements which boasts of its role in mortgage escrow class actions, but does not mention BancBoston.

The Chicago class action lawyer, vividly remembered for his role in the notorious BancBoston Mortgage case, among others (Nov. 15, 1999, Feb. 7, 2000; see also Dec. 15, 2004 for his involvement in junk-fax litigation) is now filing suits against lenders who solicit persons with poor credit histories for more loans. The Northwest Indiana Times kindly quotes me on the subject (Joe Carlson, “Lawsuits targeting credit scams”, Nov. 27).

Illinois lawyers have established their state as the new hotbed of junk-fax litigation, according to Chicago Business. “In 2002 in Downstate St. Clair County, a Circuit Court judge ordered Seventeen Motors Inc. to pay $7 million for sending about 33,000 unsolicited faxes.” Cleveland-based Charter One Bank recently “agreed to pay $1.8 million for sending unsolicited faxes to about 70,000 phone numbers.” And “Cook County Circuit Court Judge Patrick McGann alone has since 2002 presided over more than 100 lawsuits, all seeking class action status, filed against senders of junk faxes.” Particularly active in the business: Daniel Edelman and his firm of Edelman Combs Latturner & Goodwin LLC. (Shruti Dat? Singh, “An IL industry: junk-fax law suits”, Chicago Business, Dec. 12). For more on junk-fax litigation, see Mar. 19, 2004, Jul. 19, 2003, etc.

February 15 – County to pay “mountain man” burglar $412,500. Mincho Donchev, an escaped murderer from Bulgaria who lived for ten years in the Cascade Mountains of Washington breaking into vacation cabins, has won a $412,500 settlement of his lawsuit against Snohomish County for excessive force in his arrest. Two years ago, as Donchev resisted officers trying to subdue him, a police dog mangled his foot, causing the eventual loss of two of his toes; he was armed with knives, handguns and a pronged stick during the affair. The sheriff denies that either his deputies or the dog did anything wrong, but Donchev’s Seattle attorney, Mark Shepherd, said his client had “been horribly, grotesquely disfigured on his foot, and that foot will never function properly again”; the settlement money, he said, would help ease his client’s re-entry into society when he’s released from prison this August. Some local residents may have other ideas for where the money ought to go. “Every time he broke into our place he cleaned out every bit of our food in the cabinet and the refrigerator — pop, any kind of meat we had,” said Bob Gardner, whose vacation cabin was burglarized three times. (”‘Mountain-Man’ Thief Wins $412K for K-9 Bite”, AP/APB News, Feb. 4).

February 15 – Bill introduced to curb opportunistic ADA filings. Florida GOP Representatives Mark Foley and Clay Shaw have now introduced legislation “designed to block plaintiffs’ lawyers from using the Americans with Disabilities Act as a mill for grinding out legal fees,” reports the Miami Daily Business Review. As previously reported (see our January 26-27 commentary), more than 600 South Florida businesses have been hit with charges that their facilities are out of compliance with the ADA; most of the complaints can be traced to a small network of activists linked to lawyers who obtain legal fees typically in the thousands of dollars from defendants eager to settle. The new bill would require that businesses be given notice of an ADA problem and an opportunity to correct it before suit could be filed. According to a press release issued by the Congressmen, a group calling itself Citizens Concerned about Disability Access appears to consist mainly of “the two lawyers initiating the suits, and a neighbor and her disabled daughter who reportedly live across the street from one of the lawyers.” Some of its complaints are premised on the notion that the disabled daughter encountered barriers while trying to patronize the businesses, which included a pawn shop, a liquor store and a swimming-pool-supply store — the latter an especially curious subject of concern since the disabled daughter “has no swimming pool.” Last month U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno declined Rep. Foley’s request that the Justice Department investigate the matter. (Dan Christiansen, “Congressmen Rein In ‘Rogue’ Disabled Access Suits”, Miami Daily Business Review, Feb. 8).

February 15 – Britons debate false-rape-claim damages. In Newcastle upon Tyne, England, a four-man, eight-woman jury has ordered Lynn Walker to pay $630,000 (£400,000) in damages to co-worker Martin Garfoot, after concluding she had falsely accused him of raping her in a storeroom. Ms. Walker had waited nine months after the supposed incident to raise the claim and had sought neither police nor doctors’ help; video camera records from the days after the claimed attack showed her “at ease and untroubled” as she worked with the accused. Mr. Garfoot, 46, managed a branch of Boots, the drugstore concern; both Ms. Walker and Mr. Garfoot’s wife Janice are pharmacists. Feminist groups expressed outrage, but Mr. Garfoot’s barrister, Edward Garnier, Q.C., said: “She should not be able to simply walk away and hide in her tent after she has been found to be an out-and-out liar. Mr. Garfoot has spent the last few years wearing a cloak of shame. She twisted and twisted and twisted the knife in Mr. Garfoot.” (Nigel Bunyan, “Woman must pay £400,000 to man she said raped her”, Daily Telegraph (London), Feb. 8; Mark Blacklock, “Rape Claim Woman Lied”, Daily Express (London), Feb. 8).

February 14 – Bill Clinton among friendly crowd. The President hit Texas last week for a fund-raising tour of which the highlight was a $25,000-a-couple dinner hosted by trial lawyer husband-and-wife Fred Baron and Lisa Blue at their “palatial” (eleven bathrooms, six wet bars) Dallas home. The event raised an estimated $500,000 for the Democratic National Committee. The Reuters report describes Baron only as a “Democratic activist” but not as a trial lawyer, and none of the papers appear to pick up on his rather salient role as president-elect of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Needless to say, none of the reporters are so rude as to mention the controversies over the coaching of testimony in Baron’s asbestos claims practice, either. Maybe host and guest-of-honor shared tips about their respective successes with creative witness preparation.

The February 11 Dallas Morning News does report that at the Baron event “the president had plenty of lawyers to chat with. He was seated at the head table with trial lawyer Trevor Pearlman, and law partners/life partners Debbie and Frank Branson, as well as his lawyerly hosts.” (”Clinton Says Senate Doing ‘Slow Walk’ on Nominees, Reuters/Excite, Feb. 9; Madeline Baro Diaz, “Clinton arrives in South Texas to discuss border issues, raise money”, AP/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Feb. 10; Todd J. Gillman, “In Texas, Clinton blasts GOP”, Dallas Morning News, Feb. 10; Alan Peppard, “Backing Bill all the way”, Dallas Morning News, Feb. 11 (fee-based archive)).

February 14 – U.S. foreign policy, hijacked by lawsuits. Trial lawyers’ freelance pile-on of WWII-recrimination suits is undercutting America’s effort to maintain a coherent foreign policy, most recently in Japan, where U.S. Ambassador Thomas S. Foley has joined the Japanese government in rejecting an attempt to claim compensation in U.S. courts for maltreated American prisoners in World War II. “The peace treaty put aside all claims against Japan,” Foley pointed out. The continuing claims are generating dismay and an anti-American backlash among Japanese (as also among citizens of various European nations). By this point, however, the American litigation system has grown so vigorous in its assertiveness that mere treaties may not be very effective at reining it in. (Doug Struck and Kathryn Tolbert, “US envoy, Japan reject WWII veterans’ lawsuits”, Boston Globe (originally Washington Post), Jan. 19, link now dead; Richard Pyle, “Ex-POWs want Japanese firms to pay for ’slave labor’”, AP/Seattle Times, Sept. 15, 1999; “Anger as court rejects Allied POWs’ compensation suit”, CNN, Nov. 26, 1998) (see Sept. 20, Aug. 25, Feb. 5-6 commentaries).

February 14 – Improvements to our gun-litigation page. We’ve been continuing to add links to our subpage on firearms lawsuits. Included are the useful news-links page on gun issues maintained by the Colorado Shooting Sports Association, the special page on gun controversies at Jurist: The Law Professor’s Network, a bunch of choicely worded letters to the editor from the Detroit Free Press last summer responding to the NAACP’s suit, and Robert Levy’s Jan. 30 opinion piece for the National Law Journal, “Blackmail of gun makers“. In response to a suggestion from an attorney reader who protested, “We’re not all against gun rights, you know”, we’re also pleased to add a link to the Lawyers’ Second Amendment Society.

February 12-13 – AOL upgrade’s sharp elbows. America Online’s new 5.0 upgrade, like many other pieces of software, asks whether you want to make it your “default” program for the purpose; if you say yes, it alters your settings in ways that make it easier to use AOL but harder to use other Internet service providers you may have installed. Some users have found that the AOL “default” setting makes it remarkably difficult indeed to use rival ISPs, and some ISPs report spending hours helping frustrated customers trying to use their service after having installed AOL 5.0 over it.

Enter class-action lawyers, who’ve filed two distinct lawsuits: one on behalf of the roughly 8 million AOL customers who’ve already installed the new version, and the other on behalf of rival ISPs. The suit on behalf of individual users rather arbitrarily demands up to $1,000 for each user, and CNN rose to the bait by describing the suit in its headline as being for $8 billion — even though AOL claims that more than 90 percent of its users do not have accounts with other ISPs, which means they’re unlikely to have run into difficulties (at least if they’re not trying to connect over a LAN or corporate system). AOL says other ISPs’ software does the same thing as its does, and contends that the upgrade gives users a smoother Net experience which has reduced reports of technical problems overall. According to USA Today, one of the suits invokes a federal anti-hacking law which provides both criminal and civil penalties for anyone “who alters the programs or use of a computer used in interstate commerce,” quoting “Lloyd Gathings, a Birmingham, Ala., lawyer involved in the case.”

SOURCES: Brian McWilliams, “AOL Sued Over Networking Bugs in AOL 5.0″, InternetNews.com, Feb. 2 (& see same site, Oct. 6, 1999, Oct. 12, 1999, and Feb. 8, 2000, all links now dead); “AOL Sued over 5.0 Install”, Reuters/ZDNet, Feb. 2; Slashdot, Feb. 2 (bonus: thread includes link to this site); “Disgruntled AOL 5.0 users seek up to $8 billion in damages”, CNN.com, Feb. 2; “AOL sued over latest software”, USA Today, Feb. 2; Brooke A. Masters, “AOL Rivals File Suit Over Its New Software”, Washington Post, Feb. 8; Donna DeMarco, “AOL 5.0 problems boot up users’ ire”, Washington Times, Feb. 9, link now dead; Peter H. Lewis, “Takeover Artist”, New York Times, Feb. 10. The inevitable website by lawyers organizing the suits is called www.classactionversion5.com.

February 12-13 – Blue-ribbon excuse syndromes. Former Chicago City Treasurer Miriam Santos, once a rising star of the Democratic Party, has “blamed her now-overturned conviction on extortion charges on pre-menstrual syndrome….’I am human and probably the first woman to go to jail for PMSing,’” she told a news conference. (”Former treasurer blames PMS for crime”, UPI/Virtual New York, Feb. 7). A lawyer for New York City’s Dr. Allan Zarkin, charged with carving his initials into a sedated patient’s belly after delivering her baby by Caesarean section, says his client “has a “frontal lobe disorder” called Pick’s disease, an Alzheimer-like disease that causes personality and behavior changes and dementia.” (”Doctor charged in carving incident”, Reuters/Excite, Feb. 10; “Report: Woman Settles with Doctor”, Feb. 12). Vancouver Metis Indian Deanna Emard, convicted of stabbing her common-law husband to death, has gotten off without jail time because Canadian law now recognizes Indians’ cultural oppression as a mitigating factor in sentencing. (Neal Hall, “Metis woman avoids jail term for killing husband”, Vancouver Sun/National Post, Jan. 20). And in a recent U.S. News column, John Leo nominates 1999’s top ten claims of victimization, including several discussed previously in this space as well as additional contenders such as James Moore, a landscape gardener from upstate New York who raped and strangled a 14-year-old girl in 1962 and asked a judge last year for release from his life-without-parole sentence, arguing that exposure to insecticides made him do it. (”The top ten victims”, Jan. 31).

February 12-13 – The nutty professor. How does University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galanter retain his position as the favorite academic of America’s trial lawyers? In part by his willingness to dispense to reporters quotes like the following: “Some who have studied the issue say that what Bush has called ‘the litigation explosion in Texas’ was nonexistent. ‘There is really no evidence that frivolous or totally unfounded lawsuits pose a significant problem,’ said [Galanter].” (George Lardner Jr., “‘Tort Reform’: Mixed Verdict”, Washington Post, Feb. 10). (tell the Post what you think).

February 10-11 – Antitrust obstacles to hacker defense. This week’s hacker attacks on Yahoo, E-Trade and other sites are likely to encourage proposals to establish surveillance of the Net by federal law enforcers, but a better reaction, according to MIT network manager Jeff Schiller, would be to roll back existing regulations that make it hard for operators to coordinate network security. “There needs to be a way network operators can [work together] in a way that’s immune from Sherman antitrust,” he said. “We had a situation at IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) where we couldn’t have two people in the same room together by themselves since they were representatives of big competitors.” (Declan McCullagh, “Was Yahoo Smurfed or Trinooed?”, Wired News, Feb. 8) (second page of story).

February 10-11 – ADA vs. freedom of expression on the Web. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicated that a wide range of Internet activity may be subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act and its requirement that “reasonable accommodation” be provided to handicapped users (see Dec. 21 commentary). At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday (Wednesday), panelists explained that a wide range of common page construction techniques currently cause websites to be “inaccessible”, including the use of undescribed visual and audio elements, image maps that lack text for hotspots, link text that does not make sense when read out of context (example: “click here”), graphs and charts that are not summarized, nondescriptive frames titles, and much more. The editor of this site, unlike several of the other witnesses, found it alarming that federal law should presume to enforce such rules on private web publishers. We’ll try to provide a fuller report on the hearing at a later point; in the mean time, we’ve posted our editor’s prepared statement.

February 10-11 – “Not-a-Lawyer”. Fast Company nominates it as among “Job Titles of the Future”, and it’s the official description on Rory Holland’s business card. Mr. Holland works for Canadian law firm Russell & DuMoulin in Vancouver, helping clients “figure out what role lawyers should play in their companies”. (Erika Germer, Fast Company, March).

February 10-11 – Gun litigation roundup. Free-Market.Net’s J.D. Tuccille has assembled a link-rich “Spotlight on Anti-Gun Lawsuits” feature (Jan. 6). At a gun industry trade show last month in Las Vegas, members vowed greater activism in fending off attacks on their business, including the formation of a legal defense fund under the auspices of the National Shooting Sports Federation to respond to courtroom bullying. (Melanie Eversley, “Gun dealers take aim at rash of anti-gun suits”, Knight-Ridder/Spokane Spokesman-Review, Jan. 19). And in a Cato Institute Daily Commentary, David Kopel counters some myths about the supposed “gun show loophole”. One Congresswoman has charged that 70 percent of guns used in crimes come from gun shows, but National Institute of Justice figures indicate the figure is 2 percent, Kopel says. Handgun Control, Inc. “claims that ‘25-50 percent of the vendors at most gun shows are unlicensed dealers.’ That statistic is true only if one counts vendors who aren’t selling guns (e.g., vendors who are selling books, clothing or accessories) as ‘unlicensed dealers.’” (David Kopel, “The Facts About Gun Shows”, Cato Daily Commentary, Jan. 10).

February 10-11 – Orange, soured. After representing bankrupt Orange County, Calif. and other public entities seeking to recoup investment damages, the L. A.-based law firm of Hennigan, Mercer & Bennett petitioned for an extra $48.7 million on top of its standard fee. In November U.S. District Judge Gary Taylor of Santa Ana issued an order allowing a mere $3 million of that request. What really stung was the judge’s language: he called the firm’s arguments for the enhanced fee “flawed”, “cynical”, and even “unethical” and “dishonorable”. The firm had already been accorded fees of $26.3 million based on hourly charges of up to $445 an hour for its work on the cases, but then placed a lien on the county’s recovery in quest of an additional $48.7 million as a “lodestar” multiplier to reward it for having achieved good results in the face of difficulty. “If lawyers in cases like these are paid only their straight hourly rates, they have less reason to maximize results for clients,” the firm said in a court filing, which prompted the judge to ask at oral argument: “Do you really believe that?” The judge’s subsequent fee opinion asserted that attorneys are obliged to do their best for clients whether or not the fee arrangement partakes of a contingency element: “anything less would be unethical and dishonorable.” Now there’s a revolutionary idea! A legal ethics expert says the judge is being “idealistic”. (Gail Diane Cox, “Firm Smacked by Judge Over Orange Bankruptcy”, Cal Law/The Recorder, Nov. 17).

February 8-9 – Litigious varsity. “High school sports should be a healthy, fun lesson in fair play, not a prep course for law school.” But parents and educators are running to court to get referees’ calls reversed, says a Boston Globe editorial. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association reports that eight lawsuits arose in the last year alone from high school games. After a brawl during a recent hockey game between Melrose and Stoneham, several players were handed a two-game suspension, but a mother went to court and got a restraining order letting her son back on the ice, claiming he hadn’t been involved. In a case in Springfield, officials didn’t clear the legal paperwork allowing them to eject an offending player until the next game was about to begin and the National Anthem was playing, the player suited up and ready. (”Spoiled sports” (editorial), Boston Globe, Jan. 17, link now dead). And in Brunswick, Ohio, a father sued the coach of the Brunswick Cobras boy’s baseball team for leading the team to such a poor record. “Charles Settles, whose son, Kevin, was the catcher on the 16-year-old-and-under team,” went to small claims court asking $2,000, “the estimated value of a seven-day Florida trip the team could have made had it not lost every game — most by a 10-run ‘mercy’ rule.” A magistrate dismissed the action. (Stephen Hudak, “Losing season prompts dad to sue son’s coach”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 9).

February 8-9 – From the dog’s point of view. A week ago we reported on dogbitelaw.com, a lawyer’s website that encourages persons bitten by dogs to sue the animals’ owners (see February 1 commentary). Now, for balance, here’s an excerpt from a Washington Times interview last week with Boston attorney Steven Wise, who heads an animal-rights group called the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. “Over the last 15 years, I have represented probably 150 owners of dogs who have been ordered executed or banished from their towns. People may have complained they bit someone or they bark excessively.

“Most people who have companion animals consider them family members. They come to me and say one of my family members has been ordered executed. We’ve managed to save the lives of every single one except for two people who didn’t stay with us.

“We try to convince judges to say it’s a good and safe thing for dogs to live with their families. We bring in an animal behaviorist and try to help the judge understand what happened from a dog’s point of view.”

The judges who hear these cases aren’t the only ones giving more consideration to the dog’s point of view; last week Harvard Law School kicked off its first-ever class in animal-rights law, with Mr. Wise as instructor. (”Animal rights lawyer unleashes profession”, Washington Times, Feb. 3, link now dead).

February 8-9 – Emails that ended 20 Times careers. MSNBC has posted this Wall Street Journal account of the New York Times’s mass firing of 23 employees, all but one of them in the company’s Norfolk, Va. outpost, found to have forwarded offensive e-mails, including sexually oriented images, blonde jokes and Ebonics jokes. One of the fired employees, former database security manager Carla Belgrave, “who is black, says she found the Ebonics jokes funny. ‘I don’t speak that way,’ she shrugs. ‘Who’s to tell me what I should be offended by?’”.

“Why are the Times and other companies so concerned about e-mail? One reason is their liability in harassment suits. One or two explicit e-mail messages typically aren’t enough by themselves to prove that a workplace environment was hostile. But such e-mail can bolster other damaging evidence. At a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., e-mail containing such jokes as ‘25 reasons beer is better than women’ were used along with other evidence in a sexual-harassment claim that was settled in 1995 for $2.2 million.” (Ann Cairns, “That bawdy e-mail was good for a laugh — until the ax fell”, MSNBC (highlights from WSJ.com), Feb. 4, link now dead). Also see Lisa Fried, “Employers Crack Down on Personal Internet Use”, New York Law Journal, Jan. 3; Christine A. Amalfe and Kerrie R. Heslin, “Courts start to rule on online harassment”, National Law Journal, Jan. 24).

February 8-9 – Court insists on summoning nine-year-old girl as juror. Her Brooklyn parents have been trying to explain for the past year that she’s too young to serve, but the paperwork grinds on as judicial officials insist that fourth-grader Alyson Fuchs report for her civic duty. Her mom, who thinks Alyson may have gotten on prospective-juror lists because she has college savings in a mutual fund, is giving up and bringing her in to the courthouse, which she’s eager to see anyway. (Bridget Harrison, “A Jury of Peers?”, Fox News/New York Post, Feb. 6) (via Reason Express)

February 7 – Mobile Register probes class-action biz. Alabama cases have figured prominently in complaints of class-action abuse and the Mobile Register deserves some sort of prize for the thorough investigation of the topic it published over the holidays in a five-day report written by Eddie Curran. The series contains too much good material to summarize in a single installment, so we’ll start with one chunk for now and come back for more later. (Impatient readers can find the entire series here: “On behalf of all others”, Mobile Register, Dec. 26-30).

The series includes a thorough airing of the famous BancBoston case of the mid-1990s, filed in Mobile, in which locally based lawyer John Sharbrough teamed up with the Chicago class-action firm of Daniel Edelman to accuse the large lender of retaining excessively high escrows for mortgage borrowers nationwide, one of many similar class actions filed at the time against mortgage lenders over escrow practices. Pressured by a rules change from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, BancBoston and other lenders agreed to reduce the escrows, thus allowing consumers earlier recoupment of money which they’d eventually have gotten back anyway. In the case of BancBoston, the repayments that were accelerated were estimated in the lawsuit at about $42 million, but the actual sum seems to have been lower.

For achieving this result, the class-action lawyers asked for more than $14 million, all of it deducted directly from consumer accounts; Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Braxton Kittrell wound up granting them more than $8.5 million of that request. Thus consumers around the country were billed what was often $100, $150 and more in exchange for benefits that included the refund of a few dollars interest (in no case more than $8.76) and the chance to use their funds somewhat earlier than would otherwise be the case — mere weeks or months earlier in the case of many who were near refinancing or selling their homes at the time.

How’d the lawyers pull it off? They hired as expert witness a local accountant who testified that the real economic benefit to a consumer of getting back a lump of money earlier than otherwise is equal to the total sum at issue — after all, once he had it in hand he could invest it and double his money! The lawyers could then claim fees equal to a third of this notional benefit. The witness also assumed that the bank would otherwise have held surplus escrows for twenty years before refunding them, though in fact most loans get paid off through refinances or home sales within a few years and many of the mortgages were of 15-year duration. Boston U. law professor Susan Koniak, who’s co-authored a law review article on the case, describes the resulting enrichment of lawyers as “so outrageous, it’s not even a close call”. When a Maine real estate broker and class member named Dexter Kamilewicz stepped forward to challenge it, however, Chicago lawyer Edelman countersued Kamilewicz personally for $25 million, cowing him into silence (see Nov. 15 commentary).

Prominent class-action lawyer Elizabeth Cabraser, who was not involved in the case, defended the current state of the system, telling the Register that the BancBoston case is “like urban folklore“, that it “did happen, but it continues to be brought out as an example of class action abuse when in fact there’s never been another case like it,” in her words. “There’s never going to be another BancBoston case, and there doesn’t need to be legislation to prevent that from recurring. It won’t. It was freak in every sense.”

But is that so? The Register had no trouble finding escrow cases against other mortgage lenders that led to outcomes very similar to those in BancBoston, but were given less publicity. In these cases, too, consumers found themselves docked hundreds of dollars for little evident benefit and complained in heated letters to the court. In truth, “the BancBoston case was not alone…some other Alabama judges — such as Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Sally Greenhaw and Choctaw County Circuit Court Judge Harold Crow — approved similar settlements for the same lawyers, but avoided public scorn.” In a case against Colonial Mortgage, class lawyers asked judge to award them 40 percent of the escrow sums — an even higher share than in the BancBoston case. (”You win, you pay”, Dec. 29; “Bottom of the class”, Dec. 30; “Colonial customers rage at lawyer, judge”, Dec. 29).

February 7 – New subpage on Overlawyered.com: disabled-rights law. In which we pull together our reports on how students with clever parents get extra time on the SATs, the risk if you’re a merchant of not admitting an emotional-support dog to your shop, courthouses that hear handicap accommodation lawsuits but fail to comply with the law themselves, disability suits for boozing student athletes who don’t want to be thrown off the team, and other dispatches from the front lines of the Americans with Disabilities Act and related statutes. Incidentally, this Wednesday our editor is going to be a witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the ADA’s application to the Internet. See our Dec. 21 commentary for a preview of his likely comments about the ominous implications of letting website publishers get sued on the grounds that their content isn’t sufficiently “accessible” to all users.

February 5-6 – Don’t blame us, we didn’t say it: “‘If criminals can rehabilitate themselves, then why can’t lawyers?’ — East Lansing attorney Steven A. Mitchell, quoted in Michigan Lawyers Weekly on a proposal to permanently disbar lawyers for misconduct.” The Detroit News ran the above item under the heading: “But I Repeat Myself”. (Editorial roundup, Jan. 22).

February 5-6 – Weekend reading: columnist-fest. More well-stated cases from the in-box:

* Laura Pulfer of the Cincinnati Enquirer, who admits to an occasional weakness for shopping sprees at outlet stores, receives a notice in the mail saying she’s a member of the plaintiff class in a class action against Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation. “I am allowing myself to get a little bit excited. This is a defendant with deep, deep pockets. And Mr. Lauren apparently has done something terrible, something really bad, something actionable, something expensive to me.” However, the prospective settlement merely promises a discount if she goes back for another splurge at the store (”Lawsuit just an invitation to go shopping”, Feb. 3). Bonus: the same columnist comments on animal-rights law (”Does your dog need services of a lawyer?”, Nov. 7) and on warning labels (”It’s impossible to outlaw sheer stupidity”, Feb. 18, 1999) (NPR Morning Edition version, Real Audio).

* “There’s scarcely an issue in international affairs this year more likely to induce a feeling of moral superiority in Americans than that of the dormant Jewish accounts in Swiss banks.” Yet the recently issued Volcker report reveals that the actual sums in such accounts fall “staggeringly short” of what had been alleged by American class-action lawyers. More remarkable yet, the United States was at least as important as Switzerland as a destination for money escaping Nazi rule, yet somehow escapes scrutiny though it did little after the war to compensate heirs of dormant accounts (Alexander Cockburn, “Forget About the Swiss; What About US Banks?”, NewsMax, Dec. 29).

* Good general brief overview by CBS News legal correspondent Andrew Cohen on why this country is so litigious and what might be done — he even mentions loser-pays. (”Americans going nuts for lawsuits”, USA Today, undated). It leads with this grabber: “The Girl Scouts now take customers to small claims court when cookie payments are not made on time.” We hope he’s just referring to one overzealous troop somewhere.

February 5-6 – 200,000 pages served on Overlawyered.com. Thanks for your support!

February 4 – Special assignments for special cases? Federal judges at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. have now voted to require incoming cases to be assigned randomly among their number. Eyebrows were raised last year when it was revealed that chief judge Norma Holloway Johnson had used special procedures to bypass random selection and assign six Clinton Administration scandal cases to judges appointed by the Clinton Administration. Included were five fund-raising prosecutions, including that of presidential friend Charlie Trie, plus the tax evasion case of Webster Hubbell. In a letter to the editor of a newspaper, Judge Johnson said that she made the assignments to “move the docket as expeditiously as possible” and that politics was “never a factor.” (”U.S. judges end controversial rule that let Clinton appointees get Democrats’ cases”, AP/Dallas Morning News, Feb. 3).

February 4 – Jeff MacNelly. The premier editorial cartoonist of his generation is currently keeping to a reduced but regular output schedule while battling health challenges. His website allows you to send him a get-well message and browse an archive of his cartoons back to the middle of last year, including great panels on Microsoft, health care, tobacco, tobacco (again) and many more. Then there’s his oil painting of lawyers….

February 4 – Taco Bell bites back. In 1997 customer Dwonne N. Carter charged that she had been insulted because of her race by an employee at a Taco Bell in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Plenty of press coverage resulted, and the restaurant’s business fell off sharply. But Carter’s story in her discrimination lawsuit kept changing, and she turned out to have previously filed and then recanted charges of rape and abduction in another case. Taco Bell countersued for defamation and last month a jury found in the company’s favor, awarding it a token $1,060 in damages. The tapes from the restaurant’s surveillance camera proved particularly helpful. (Gretchen Schuldt, “Customer defamed Taco Bell, jury decides”, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jan. 14).

February 4 – Green cards gather moss. Linus Torvalds, Finland-born architect of Linux and perhaps the world’s most admired programmer, has been in this country three years. He’s still waiting for his green card. Thousands of engineers and other highly skilled immigrants in Silicon Valley are in the same predicament, as delays stretch on seemingly endlessly in the processing of applications for permanent residency. The average wait for final green card processing has jumped from 21 months a year and a half ago to 33 months. Holders of H-1B visas can stay at most six years, which is not always long enough to make it through the queue. “Real lives are being destroyed,” says immigration attorney Peter Larrabee, and an Immigration and Naturalization Service official privately calls the situation “a mess”. At least no one can accuse us of discriminating unduly in favor of the talented. (Ken McLaughlin, “Workers left in limbo by INS”, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 30, link now dead; Wired News, Feb. 1).

February 3 – Reason Online “Featured Site”. Overlawyered.com has just been awarded this honor, bestowed approximately weekly by the lively website associated with the magazine of “free minds and free markets”. While you’re visiting the site, now would be a good time to catch up with our editor’s February column, which examines the class-action lawyers’ assault on the high-tech business, taking off from the Toshiba laptop settlement and the private actions against Microsoft that tagged along in the wake of Judge Jackson’s findings of fact. (main page/archive; Walter Olson, “Gold Bugs”, Reason, February).

February 3 – Tobacco: Connecticut AG has “no idea” whether lawyers he hired are overcharging. Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, is much feared by that state’s business community for his relentless and headline-grabbing pace of suit-filing; he’s known for “demonizing his foes”. One group of business people in the state, however, will “do extraordinarily well” from his tenure: the “tiny group of private lawyers” whom he hired to represent the state in the tobacco litigation. Queried about how much money these lawyers are getting from the deal, Blumenthal says, “I have no idea.” He says he’s sure it’s “substantially less” than the generous 25 percent contingency he agreed to bestow on them, which if followed through would have given them $900 million (the firms agreed not to insist on that full amount). It happens that the four lucky law firms he picked to do the work include his own former firm, Silver, Golub & Teitell of Stamford. (Thomas Scheffey, “Jedi Blumenthal”, Connecticut Law Tribune, Dec. 1) (see February 16 update: fees to total $65 million, more details on lucky firms).

February 3 – Another pro bono triumph. Beat cop Jim Gratz says he was acting on his own initiative when, imitating a practice used by some other Bay Area police departments, he asked some of the hardest-core drinkers who slept in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park if he could snap their pictures. Then he had flyers printed up and handed them to owners of nearby liquor stores, asking them not to sell to these people. “Someone had to do something to try and save their lives…I have nothing against booze, but plainly it was killing them,” he says. Well, the homeless-advocacy lawyers were on his case like a duck on a June bug, and soon the city agreed to settle the resulting litigation by paying each of the ten people approximately $960, which they spent on…well, what do you think they spent it on? All are still on the street, Gratz says, and one was admitted to Laguna Honda Hospital nearly paralyzed with alcohol poisoning. (Scott Ostler, “Trying to Help Just Doesn’t Pay”, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 6).

February 2 – “Children’s rights” fee grab. In 1995, following front-page scandals about child neglect in New York City, a private group called Children’s Rights Inc. filed suit seeking court oversight of the city’s child welfare system. The case ended in a settlement in December 1998. Now Children’s Rights Inc. is asking a court to award it $9.1 million in legal fees for its work on the case, to be paid from — where else? — taxpayer funds. City child welfare commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is particularly steamed about the fee demand because he says the city offered to settle the case in May 1997 on terms substantially the same as those eventually reached. Children’s Rights Inc. spurned that offer and insisted on battling for a further year and a half, during which time the group ran up what it says are $6 million in billable hours. Scoppetta says $9 million would be enough to hire 230 child welfare caseworkers, put 1,059 children in Head Start for a year or support 1,200 kids in foster care, if it isn’t handed to lawyers instead. (”Children’s rights is wrong” (editorial), New York Daily News, Feb. 1; “Children’s Advocacy Pays” (editorial), New York Post, Feb. 1; past Post coverage).

February 2 – Cookies, dunked. Privacy advocates have been aghast at the recent disclosure that Internet ad-placement firm DoubleClick is planning to combine cookie use with access to clients’ site-registration data in ways that will enable it to detect the actual identity of many users who currently enjoy the customary expectation of anonymity as they browse its clients’ sites. Already a California lawyer has jumped in to sue the company; his named client does not claim to have suffered any damages, but he says he wants to “put DoubleClick’s policies under a microscope.” Of course his client could just have gone to DoubleClick’s site and selected the “opt out” feature, which the company says will bail you out of its cookie-mongering for the life of your browser or until you delete your cookie file, whichever comes first. To repeat: if a privacy solution that simple happens to appeal to you, just press here and follow the “opt out” link. But that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as suing, would it? (”DoubleClick defends data gathering as suit pends”, FindLaw/Reuters, Jan. 28; “Privacy group eyes DoubleClick”, Reuters/Wired News, Feb. 1). Update May 9, 2001: federal court dismisses one such suit.

February 2 – Cuomo menaces gun makers: “death by a thousand cuts”. Settlement talks have broken down between firearms makers and activist litigators who continue to seek restrictions on gun sales that go beyond anything they can persuade democratically elected legislatures to enact. On Monday HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo warned gun companies that unless they cooperate they’ll suffer “death by a thousand cuts” from lawsuits filed by 28 localities (and vocally backed by his own department). Could the Cabinet secretary be invoking the cost-infliction threat of litigation to bully an opponent? Naah — that would be unethical. (Bill McAllister, “Gun industry rejects settlement effort”, Denver Post, Feb. 1).

February 1 – Welcome Humorix (and Slashdot) visitors. Humorix, complete with penguin-graphic adornment, consists of parody and humor articles geared to aficionados of the Linux open-source operating system. Last week it ran a piece by Dave Finton and James Baughn about the DVD-copying-code litigation (see Dec. 31 commentary) which pointed to this site by way of providing an embedded link for the phrase “overachieving lawyers”. Then yesterday a discussion of the piece in turn made it onto Slashdot. Jeepers, do a lot of people ever read Slashdot: next thing we knew we were beating, by far, this site’s previous daily traffic record (assisted by some other publicity). (”Corporate Media Conglomerate HOWTO”, Jan. 26.)

February 1 – Give us Syracuse. Trial began last week in upstate New York on Cayuga Indian land claims, the first such Indian case to make it to a jury for damages. Lawyers for the tribe, backed by the U.S. Department of Justice, say they’re owed at least $335 million in market value and rental fees for lands in the Finger Lakes region bought from them in 1795 and 1807 in deals which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985 voided as having lacked the federal government’s go-ahead as required by law. Waiting in the wings: similar (often larger) claims by the Oneidas, Mohawks, Senecas and Onondagas. Wrangling over the Onondaga claim promises to be especially lively because the large tract of land under dispute includes the city of Syracuse, New York’s fifth largest. “It’s in total violation,” says the Onondaga chief, referring to the 160,000-population community. (James Odato, “Land’s value at heart of Cayuga claim case”, Albany Times-Union, Jan. 25; David L. Shaw, “Damages trial focuses on cash”, Syracuse Online, Jan. 24; “Claim comes down to numbers”, Syracuse Online, Jan. 25; Matthew Purdy, “Tribal Justice? They’d Settle for Syracuse”, New York Times, Jan. 30; see our Oct. 5-6, Oct. 27 commentaries) (via Empire Page) (see update, Feb. 19-21).

February 1 – Down, attorney! Down! Here’s a site for you if you’re a mailman tired of having your leg chewed on, or just want to convince the neighbors to send that ill-tempered yapper of theirs to the glue factory: dogbitelaw.com. “Attorney Kenneth Phillips is available by e-mail at no charge. He will respond to your questions about dog bites,” explains the promotional copy. Lots of links, too, such as one to the website of a canine forensics specialist to testify in your lawsuit: dogexpert.com. (via The Recorder/Cal Law).

February 1 – Career advice: become a lawsuit entrepreneur. Columnist Jim Pinkerton tells the public-administration class of ‘00 they’re wasting their time thinking about civil service, when the real action in government today is in privately managed policy-through-lawsuits. “Why plow through discrimination cases in a back room at the EEOC, when you can join hands with Jesse Jackson and sue the pants off of some big company in a civil rights class action? Why work at the FDA and worry about drug approvals, when you can work at a law firm and share in billions after the drug is withdrawn and the suits are settled? Why lobby for gun control, when you can sue and put the gun makers out of business?” Why tinker with health care regulation when you can just file suit against HMOs and make yourself a player at the negotiation table overnight? Yes, it’s a parody, but just barely. (James Pinkerton, “Being a Bureaupreneur”, GovExec.com (Government Executive magazine), January).

November 15 – Class-action coupon-clippers. Hard-hitting page-one Washington Post dissection of class-action abuse, specifically the “coupon settlements” by which lawyers claim large but notional face-value benefits for the represented class, which can serve as a predicate for high fees even if few consumers ever take advantage of the benefits. “The record in one case, against ITT Financial Corp., showed that consumers redeemed only two of 96,754 coupons issued, a redemption rate of 0.002 percent.” Settlement-confidentiality rules often make it impossible to learn how many coupons were redeemed. Groups like Public Citizen and Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, normally closely aligned with plaintiffs’-side interests, are crusading against the coupon abuses, fearing they’ll erode public support for the class action device and “sour the public” on the whole system.

The piece includes a profile of Chicago lawyer Daniel Edelman, who’s won millions in fees in about thirty consumer lawsuits, and is variously called by consumerist critics “the Darth Vader of class action settlements” and “the poster child for how to rip off consumers under the guise of helping them”: “I can think of no plague worse than to have a court impose the likes of Daniel Edelman…on absent and unsuspecting members of a class,” said one judge in a lawsuit against Citibank. Edelman was among the plaintiff’s lawyers in the famed BancBoston Mortgage case, whose outcome was described by federal judge Milton Shadur (who was not involved in it) as “appalling” and “astonishing”: “The principal real-money beneficiaries of the settlement,” Judge Shadur wrote, “turned out to be the class counsel themselves.” The consumer who originally objected to that settlement, Dexter Kamilewicz of Maine, “chose not to comment for this article, noting that Edelman’s firm had countersued him for $25 million. That case is settled, but he said he feared landing in court yet again.” (For more on lawsuits filed by class action lawyers against their critics, see Nov. 4 commentary). (Joe Stephens, “Coupons Create Cash for Lawyers”, Washington Post, Nov. 14, link now dead)

November 15 – Link your way to liability? Daniel Curzon-Brown, a professor of English, has sued TeacherReview.com, a student-run “course critique” site that provides a forum for anonymous praise and criticism of faculty at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and San Francisco State University. “Free speech is great, but this is not about free speech,” said Brown’s lawyer, Geoffrey Kors, saying his client had been falsely labeled racist and mentally ill, among other damaging charges. (”Other teachers were called ‘womanizers,’ ‘reportedly homicidal’ and ‘drugged out.’”) In one of the suit’s more ambitious angles, the lawyers have joined CCSF as a defendant on the grounds that it “allow[ed] one of its student clubs to provide a link to the review site on a college-hosted Web page” which “helped to create the appearance of official backing for the site”. (”Teacher sues over ‘racist’ Web review”, Reuters/ZDNet, Oct. 21 — full story). Update Oct. 10, 2000: Curzon-Brown agrees to drop suit.

November 15 – Are they kidding, or not-kidding? We’ve read over both these opinion pieces carefully, and here are our tentative conclusions. We think Nancy Giuriati, writing in the Chicago Tribune’s “Voice of the People”, probably is kidding when she suggests overeating be addressed as a public health problem through lawsuits against food companies along the lines of the anti-smoking crusade. (”Treat Eaters Like Smokers”, Nov. 9). On the other hand, we think Ted Allen, writing in the Legal Times of Washington, probably isn’t kidding when he suggests fans file class-action suits against hard-luck sports teams like the Boston Red Sox and New Orleans Saints. (”Sue da Bums?”, Nov. 1). It could be, however, that we’ve got things upside down — that Mr. Allen is kidding, while Ms. Giuriati isn’t. If you think you can help us out, or wish to call our attention to other who-knows-whether-they’re-joking proposals for the further extension of litigation (entries from law reviews especially welcome!), send your emails to AreTheyKidding -at -overlawyered - dot - com. Update Apr. 11, 2002: Ms. Giuriati writes in to say she wasn’t kidding.

November 15 – Gimme an “S”, “U”, “E”. Latest lawsuit over not making the high school cheerleading squad filed by Merissa D. Brindisi and her father, Richard, who claim it was arbitrary and unfair for Solon, Ohio, school officials to have used teacher evaluations as one factor in deciding who got on the squad. Another suit by an unsuccessful cheerleader contender was filed last month in nearby Lorain County, but was dismissed. (Mark Gillispie, “Solon ex-cheerleader, father file suit”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 10 — full story.)

November 13-14 – Fins circle in water. Hoping to piggyback on Judge Jackson’s Microsoft findings of fact and attracted by the treble damages provided by antitrust law, “veterans from the cigarette wars are plotting to sue the company in a wave of private litigation. If the onslaught unfolds as expected, teams of lawyers will turn Microsoft into the next Philip Morris, tangling the company in courts across the country.” David Segal, “New Legal Guns Train on Microsoft”, Washington Post, Nov. 12 — link now dead). Same day, same paper, same byline: another profile of emerging trial lawyer strategy of mounting assault on their targets’ stock price in order to force them to the negotiating table (see “Deal with us or we’ll tank your stock“, Oct. 21). The announcement of a major trial lawyer offensive against HMOs destroyed $12 billion of value in a single day as the market reacted. “Most of the companies have yet to recover.” (David Segal, “Lawyers pool resources, leverage settlements”, Washington Post, Nov. 12, link now dead).

On Friday the stock of big New Orleans-based engineering and construction company, McDermott International Inc., important in the offshore oil business, fell by 35.5 percent following a 26.7 percent drop the previous day to hit a 10-year low. The company disclosed lower earnings and “said in its earnings statement that the settlement of asbestos claims was using up a growing amount of the cash flow of its Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) subsidiary”, one of the nation’s best known makers of power plants. “This unquantifiable asbestos liability puts a whole new spin on things. [McDermott] becomes an asbestos liability valuation play rather than an earnings recovery play,” said analyst Arvind Sanger of brokerage firm Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, who added that he thought the market had overreacted to the uncertainty. (”Asbestos Claim Worries Hurt McDermott”, FindLaw/Reuters, Nov. 12, link now dead)

November 13-14 – Update: ADA youth soccer case. Bang! Ouch! As reported here a week ago, parents insisted that 9-year-old Ryan Taylor, who suffers from cerebral palsy, be allowed onto soccer team despite administrators’ fears of injuries from his metal walker. Now they’ve filed suit under federal Americans with Disabilities Act (see “After Casey Martin, the deluge“, Nov. 5-7). (”Parents Sue Over Son’s Soccer Ban”, AP/FindLaw, Nov. 12, link now dead).

November 13-14 – Risks of harm. “One woman manager whom I spoke to, an architect who has worked in construction for a number of years, put it this way: ‘When a woman comes to me with a complaint, I want first of all to make sure that no harm comes to the woman. But I want to make sure that no harm comes to the man, too. Because if a charge of sexual harassment goes into his folder, he may never get another promotion in his entire life.’ [emphasis in original] — from the forthcoming book What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: Or a Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment, by Joan Kennedy Taylor (see yesterday’s entry).

November 12 – Turning the tables. Automaker DaimlerChrysler has sued plaintiff’s attorneys and a individual named client who it says cost it millions of dollars and harmed its reputation by naming it in what is says was a meritless suit. In June, the locally based law firm of Greitzer & Locks and Maryland attorney William Askinazi filed a class-action suit in Philadelphia against DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General Motors and GM’s subsidiary Saturn alleging that the companies’ seat design was defective and unsafe. Similar suits were filed in other states, and lawyers were quoted in one story as claiming the aggregate value of their claims could amount to $5 billion. But DaimlerChrysler and Ford say they were dropped from the Philadelphia case after the named plaintiff, Brian Lipscomb, was shown never to have owned cars manufactured by either automaker.

The German-U.S. company has been on something of a mission recently to fight what it sees as abusive litigation. It recently secured dismissal of an Illinois class action over allegedly excessive engine noise and in 1996 unsuccessfully sought fees after securing dismissal of a Seattle class action that turned out to have been filed without client permission. It succeeded last year in winning an $850,000 judgment against two lawyers in St. Louis who it alleged had taken confidential documents while working for one of its outside law firms and then used that information to file class-action suits against the automaker. “Class-action lawsuits should be used to resolve legitimate claims and not serve as a rigged lottery for trial lawyers,” said Lew Goldfarb, DaimlerChrysler vice president and associate general counsel, in a statement this week. “For too long, trial lawyers have been exploiting class actions, turning these lawsuits into a form of legalized blackmail. They launch frivolous cases because they believe that just the threat of massive class actions filed in many states can coerce a company into settlement. It’s time they started paying for some of the costs of abusing our legal system.” “DaimlerChrysler sues lawyers over lawsuit”, Reuters/Findlaw, Nov. 10, link now dead; “Automakers sued for allegedly defective seats”, Detroit News, Jun. 26)

November 12 – Suppression of conversation vs. improvement of conversation. “Another difficulty in dealing with sexual harassment as a legal problem is that almost all people accused of harassment, from the one whose joke is misunderstood to the hard-core opportunistic harasser…don’t believe they are hurting anyone. [emphasis in original] And we know from our experiences with alcohol and drug prohibition that people whose behavior is regulated and who don’t believe they are hurting anyone else overwhelmingly evade and resent the regulations….If you tell people that the way in which they relate to each other naturally is against the law, their immediate reaction is to think the law intrusive. If, by contrast, you tell people that they may have misunderstood each other but that they can learn to communicate more clearly, you are offering them a new skill without blaming half of them in advance.” — from What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: Or a Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment, by Joan Kennedy Taylor, a book to be published this month by New York University Press and the Cato Institute.

November 11 – We didn’t mean those preferences! At Boalt Hall, the law school of U.C. Berkeley, it’s de rigueur to consider race, gender and various other official preferences as entirely constitutional as a way of balancing out past collective hardship. However, there’s one form of official preference you’d better not speak well of lest you risk ostracism: veterans’ preference. “If you, despite your well-intentioned, fine-toothed combing of the Constitution, just can’t find a legal rule that says that veterans’ preferences are impermissible gender discrimination, then that is sexism. If you think that these veterans’ preferences are acceptable as a matter of policy — for the liberals who are willing to concede that there is a difference between constitutional permissibility and policy advisability — then that is extreme sexism.” — contributor Heather McCormick in The Diversity Hoax: Law Students Report from Berkeley, edited by David Wienir and Marc Berley (Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition, 1999).

November 11 – Microsoft roundup. Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institute, author of Law and Disorder in Cyberspace, argues in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that a breakup of the company would in fact be less destructive of value than seemingly more modest remedies that might require the company to prenegotiate its future business relationships or even its software revisions with competitors’ lawyers: “Complex remedial decrees invariably kick off endless rounds of follow-up bickering. Costs mount quickly. Private lawsuits follow. And antitrust law awards triple damages.” (”Breaking Up Isn’t hard to Do”, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10 — requires online subscription). “Two branches of the federal government, which is a case study in institutional sclerosis, are lecturing Microsoft on the virtues and modalities of innovation,” notes George Will (”Risks of Restraining”, Washington Post, Nov. 9, link now dead). “The dynamism of technology long ago rendered the entire case moot,” argues a Detroit News editorial. “…It is doubtful, for example, that America Online would have paid $10 billion for Netscape if Microsoft’s Bill Gates had indeed rendered the Navigator [browser] worthless.” (”Microsoft: Punishing Success”, Nov. 9). Declan McCullagh at Wired News finds it surprising that the judge was so dismissive of the prospects of Linux, the open-source competitor to Windows (”Judge Jackson: Linux Won’t Last”, Nov. 8).

November 11 – Accommodating theft. In New Jersey, the Office of Attorney Ethics is seeking the disbarment of Tenafly lawyer Charles Meaden, who was arrested in 1996 for trying to buy $5,600 worth of golf clubs with a stolen credit card number. Mr. Meaden’s attorney, Linda Wong, argues that her client suffered from bipolar illness and was in a manic state at the time of the theft due to a change in his medication. “The panel has to send a signal to the public that disabilities can be accommodated.” The ethics body counters that Mr. Meaden’s use of the stolen number showed considerable planning, and added that he’d applied for guns four times in the two years before the arrest, each time denying that he’d been treated for psychiatric conditions. His lawyer’s response? Mr. Meaden, she said, was relying on his doctor’s assurance that depression was “not a psychiatric condition”, besides which “it was understandable that Meaden did not disclose his psychiatric history because the mentally ill face discrimination.” (Wendy Davis, “The Case of the Stolen Credit Card: Mental Illness or Well-Planned Heist?”, New Jersey Law Journal, Oct. 21 — full story)

November 10 – $625,000 an hour asked for time on stopped elevator. Nicholas White, 34, a production manager at Business Week, has filed suit asking $25 million from the owners of Rockefeller Center over an incident last month in which he got stuck on an elevator late one Friday and remained there, pushing buttons and banging on the door, for 40 hours before any building employees noticed. He had only a pack of Life Savers and three cigarettes to see him through the ordeal. “When he had to go to the bathroom, he would pry open the doors a little,” a friend of his told the New York Post. White’s lawyer, Kenneth P. Nolan, said last week that his client was “still in a state of shock” and “has not gone back to work”. (”Floor, please”, Fox News/Reuters, Oct. 21 (link now dead); “Man Trapped in Elevator Wants $25M”, AP/Washington Post, Nov. 3, link now dead; “Man, trapped in New York elevator 40 hours, sues”, Reuters/San Jose Mercury News, Nov. 4, (link now dead; Philip Delves Broughton, “Editor sues for $25-million after 40-hour elevator terror”, National Post (Canada) (originally Daily Telegraph, London), Nov. 6, link now dead)

November 10 – Annals of zero tolerance: more nail clippers cases. The Marshall Elementary School in Granite City, Ill. has suspended second-grader Derek Moss for three days after a custodian found him with a nail clipper. Earlier this fall in Cahokia, Ill., 7-year-old second-grader Lamont Agnew drew a 10-day suspension for possession of the same contraband. (Robert Kelly, “Another nail clippers incident reported”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 2 (link now dead)) Earlier this year Pensacola, Fla. administrators recommended the expulsion of 15-year-old sophomore Tawana Dawson for possession of a clipper with a two-inch attached blade; she’d lent it to a classmate to trim her nails. (”School calls nail clipper a weapon”, AP/APB News, June 7). In recent California cases, a 12-year-old Corona boy was expelled over a nail clipper, a decision later reversed; a Mission Viejo 10-year-old was suspended over a three-inch cap-gun toy on her key chain, and a Buena Park 5-year-old was transferred to another school after he brought into school a disposable shaver he’d found at a bus stop. (Oblivion.net)

November 10 – Welcome Progressive Review and Cal-NRA visitors. Haunted-house story is here; gun lawsuits vs. national security story, here.

November 10 – “The Dutch Boy isn’t Joe Camel.” The companies recently sued by Rhode Island “voluntarily stopped marketing lead-based paint for interior use in the 1950s — a generation before the federal government decided to ban interior lead paint in 1978,” writes Judy Pendell of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy (with which our editor is affiliated). You’d think withdrawing your product before you were obliged to would count as socially responsible, but no good deed escapes punishment. Nor, it seems, does any incorporated bystander with deep pockets: “Many of the defendants acquired their companies long after they had stopped making lead paint…If you can sue an industry that essentially shut itself down almost a half century ago, who’s next?” (”Trial lawyers’ next target: the paint industry”, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18 — now online at the Manhattan Institute site, which boasts a growing collection of online reports on legal issues (link now dead)).

November 10 – Correction: the difference one letter makes. On Sept. 2 we ran an item about the role of charitable and social-service groups in efforts to take down the gun industry, and included the YMCA on the list of such groups. That was off base: it’s the YWCA that’s a participant in the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, not its male counterpart. The mistake is one the anti-gun coalition itself unleashed on the world when it erroneously listed the YMCA on its list of supporting organizations. The Capital Research Center took the claim at face value in its report on anti-gun philanthropy, whence it made its way to our summary. Patrick Reilly of the Capital Research Center tells us he’s spoken with the coalition, which acknowledges its mistake and says it’s replaced the “M” version with the correct “W”. In the mean time, the poor YMCA has gotten calls from outraged supporters of the Second Amendment. Send those outraged calls to the YWCA instead.

November 9 – Gun jihad menaces national security. Colt Manufacturing is an important current, as well as historic, defense resource to this country: “We are one of the two suppliers of the M16 rifle and the sole supplier of the M4 carbine to the United States military, as well as many of our allies.” Yet the courtroom assault masterminded by American trial lawyers and carried out by their friends at city hall is quickly running the enterprise into the ground: legal defense costs are “astronomical”, financing and insurance are drying up, and managers have scant time to do anything but respond to legal demands.

“In connection with these lawsuits, Colt has been served with extraordinarily expansive and burdensome discovery requests seeking virtually every document in Colt’s possession related to the design, manufacture and marketing of firearms — military and otherwise. In our defense, waves of lawyers have descended on Colt and other legitimate gun manufacturers, scouring every corner and aspect of our business in an effort to respond to these unreasonable requests.”

If the municipal firearms litigation “forces us out of business, it also will leave the military without an experienced base to turn to during a time of crisis. In the opinion of the Department of Defense, it would take two to five years and significant government investment to return any of today’s weapon systems to their current level of operational reliability should we lose this present capability.”

“We are uneasy and troubled by the fact that we and other companies in the future may be driven out of business by a wave of lawsuits, even if the courts eventually find out that the plaintiff’s cases have no merit.” — Lt. Gen. William M. Keys U.S.M.C. (ret.), chief executive officer of the New Colt’s Holding Company, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Nov. 2. (full testimony) (overall hearings page).

November 9 – Hold your e-tongue. Though employees may still fondly imagine their screen banter to be somehow entitled to privacy, “e-mails not only are subject to discovery, but also can kill you in a courtroom,” explain two lawyers with Miami’s Becker & Poliakoff. The problem for companies that get sued is that “people who are normally careful of what they say in writing seem to feel that e-mail doesn’t count, and…say things in e-mails they would never say in person or by telephone.” All of which leads up to the following rather startling advice: “Businesses should have an e-mail policy. Consider such rules as ‘No e-mail may contain derogatory information about individuals or the competition.’” (Mark Grossman and Luis Konski, “Digital Discovery: Decoding Your Adversary”, Legal Times (Wash., D.C.), Oct. 20 — full column).

November 9 – “Banks’ good deeds won’t go unpunished”. Good Steve Chapman column on ill-advised laws adopted in San Francisco and Santa Monica, and under consideration for U.S. military bases, that forbid banks from charging a fee for non-customers’ ATM withdrawals; currently banks put automatic machines “in all sorts of relatively low-traffic, out-of-the-way places”, a trend likely to halt abruptly if the business becomes a legislated money-loser. (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 7 — full column).

November 8 – Microsoft ruling: guest editorials. Venture capitalist Jay Freidrichs of Cypress Growth Fund: “My gut is, this is not positive for the industry. The less government involvement, the better.” Peter Ausnit of San Francisco brokerage Volpe Brown Whelan & Co. is alarmed that the ruling could “open up Microsoft to thousands of lawsuits from every belly-up software firm in the world….Are they going to be set upon like the cigarette industry?” George Zachary, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures: “a scary reminder that if you make it to the top, someone will try to pull you down.” Venture capitalist Tim Draper: “Silicon Valley should be furious with the way our government is treating successful companies…Any would-be entrepreneur is getting a message from Washington that says: ‘Become successful but not too successful, or we’ll ruin your life.’” (David Streitfeld, “Glee, Gloom in Silicon Valley”, Washington Post, Nov. 6 (link now dead); Duncan Martell, “Silicon Valley Cheers Microsoft Ruling”, Yahoo/Reuters, Nov. 6 (link now dead)). Plus: Virginia Postrel, “What Really Scares Microsoft”, New York Times, Nov. 8; George Priest, “Judge Jackson’s Findings of Fact: A Feeble Case”, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 8 (requires online subscription).

November 8 – Ohio tobacco-settlement booty. A private firm with close links to prominent Columbus lobbyists has been angling for the contract to handle Ohio’s anti-tobacco ad campaign, financed from its share of the state’s settlement loot. It just so happens the next CEO of this firm is State Rep. E.J. Thomas, a key player in the divvying up of the tobacco spoils as chair of the House Finance-Appropriations Committee. “Does Mr. Thomas really believe nobody would have questioned his neutrality while voting to award tobacco contracts when he has been holding hands with one of the parties playing to win the jackpot?” editorializes the Toledo Blade. (”The smoking cigarette”, Oct. 24 — link now dead).

November 8 – Who loves trust-and-estates lawyers? Well, auction houses, for one, since these attorneys control so much asset-disposition business. And so a lot of buttering-up goes on: “At one of the largest annual gatherings of trust and estate lawyers in the U.S., held each year in Miami, Christie’s brings down hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels so that the lawyers, or their spouses, can try them on. ‘I am not that easily swayed,’ says Carol Harrington, an estate lawyer from the Chicago law firm McDermott Will & Emery, who deals regularly with the auction houses. ‘But what woman doesn’t like having $40,000 in jewels around her neck?’” (Daniel Costello, “An Art Collection to Die For”, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24).

November 8 – “Police storm raucous party to find members of anti-noise squad”. Moral of this report from southwest England: if you’re hoping to keep your job on the town noise-abatement committee, don’t hire three bands and throw a bash late into the night at city hall; after annoyed neighbors called in to report loud whoops and shrieks, police descended on the venue only to find the mayor and local dignitaries in attendance. (AP/CNN, Oct. 26, link now dead).

November 5-7 – “Scared out of business”. Boston Globe reports on decline of a Halloween tradition, the community haunted house, under pressure from building and safety codes (No emergency sprinklers! Combustible material! And children present, no less!) “In the future, the only option will be to drive to a big, slick venue and pay your $23.50 for a corporatized event that has nothing to do with community,” said Douglas Smith, an illustrator who used to help design the haunted house at Hyde Community Center in Newton Highlands, which has lately been discontinued along with two other haunted houses in Newton. “Only they have the resources. Only they can build to these codes.” “I’m very disappointed,” said 10-year-old David Olesky, who had been looking foward to the outing. “They can make rules, but they can’t drain all the fun out of everything. It’s unfair.” Now “the skull’s mouth, the body parts, and dozens of eyeballs remain packed in boxes” at the community center. “Within a few years, I imagine all amateur haunted houses will get shut down,” Smith told the Globe’s Marcella Bombardieri. “Society is getting so concerned about liability that there’s no way to have fun.” (Oct. 29 — link now dead).

November 5-7 – Public by 2-1 margin disapproves of tobacco suits. New ABC News poll of 1,010 adults finds that by a 60-to-34 percent margin public doesn’t believe tobacco companies should have to pay damages for smoking-related illnesses. But not one of the fifty state attorneys general held back from filing such a suit — an indication these AGs are taking their policy cues from something other than their states’ electorates. As for trial lawyers, they know the luck of the draw will eventually assure them a certain number or juries and judges around the country willing to go along with the 34 percent view. That’s enough to cash in no matter what the majority may think. (ABC News.com, “Cigarette Makers Absolved: Six in 10 Reject Liability for Tobacco Companies”, Nov. 3).

November 5-7 – AOL sued for failure to accommodate blind users. Yes, AOL is big, but the legal theories being advanced under the Americans with Disabilities Act have the potential to redefine all sorts of websites, including publishing and opinion sites, as “public accommodations”. If you’re looking for a way to slow down the growth of the Web, try menacing page designers with liability unless they set aside their to-do list of other site improvements in favor of trooping off to seminars on how to fix nonaccommodative coding choices. (”Blind Group Sues AOL Over Internet Access”, Excite/Reuters, Nov. 5; case settled August 2000)..

November 5-7 – More details on Toshiba. Last Saturday’s L.A. Times, not in our hands before, adds a number of salient details to the story covered in this space November 3. Number of laptops involved: 5.5 million. The company agreed to settle “even though no consumer ever complained of losing data as a result of the glitch”. Company officials “said they had been unable to re-create the problem in the lab, except when trying to save something to a disk while simultaneously doing one or two other intensive tasks, such as playing a game or watching a video.” However, Toshiba was tipped toward settling when it heard that NEC Corp. considered the glitch a genuine one and learned moreover that there’d been an earlier advisory from NEC, thus opening up scenarios in which lawyers could argue that warnings had been callously ignored etc. The coupons will be much more valuable than the usual style of settlement coupons because owners “will be able to sell their coupons or use multiple coupons toward a single purchase.” But the public goodwill fund that will bulk out the rest of the $1 billion settlement if claims fall short may consist of donations of older hardware to charitable groups, a notoriously soft accounting category (Joseph Menn, “Toshiba OKs Settlement of $1 Billion Over Laptops”, Oct. 30, link now dead). Jodi Kantor, Slate “Today’s Papers”, also Oct. 30, reports: “The company’s credit rating was immediately downgraded, and its share price slipped 9%.” (Toshiba site)

November 5-7 – After Casey Martin, the deluge. Latest handicap-accommodation demand from the playing field: family of 9-year-old Ryan Taylor, who’s afflicted with cerebral palsy, asks for his right to play soccer in a metal walker. David Dalton, volunteer president of the Lawton [Okla.] Optimist Soccer Association league, says the walker is hazardous and a violation of the game rules. In addition, the league could get sued if another player smashed into it while trying to contest Taylor’s control of the ball, if any were so unsporting as to try that. However, “in 1996 a federal court in California ruled that a youth baseball league violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by excluding an 11-year-old with cerebral palsy who used crutches” and Houston disability-rights lawyer Wendy Wilkinson is rattling the saber, saying the ruling “definitely applies to this situation”. (Danny M. Boyd, “Disabled boy is barred from playing soccer with a walker”, AP/Fox News, Nov. 3, link now dead).

November 5-7 – “Land of the free…or the lawyers?” Nice editorial in Investors Business Daily on the deepening litigation crisis: “No industry or company is safe.” It even quotes our editor (Oct. 21, link now dead).

November 5-7 – Toffee maker sued for tooth irritation. Spreading across the Atlantic?, cont’d: Former Miss Scotland Eileen Catterson, a runway fashion model for ten years, has sued the makers of Irn-Bru toffee bars saying the sticky confection has left her with discolored teeth and sore gums. She is demanding £5,000 damages in Paisley Sheriff Court, which itself sounds like a fashion establishment. (Gillian Harris, “Model sues sweets firm over teeth”, The Times (London), Oct. 28).

November 4 – Criticizing lawyers proves hazardous. In July Publishers Clearing House, the magazines-by-mail company whose sweepstakes is promoted by Ed McMahon, agreed to settle a class action charging it with deceptive practices. The settlement provided for a maximum of $10 million in outlays by the company, to be divided roughly as follows: $1.5 million to send a notice of settlement to an estimated 48 million households in the class; $5.5 million or less to be refunded to dissatisfied magazine buyers that could muster the required paperwork, the exact sum to depend on how many did so; and $3 million in legal fees for the lawyers who filed the suit, sister-and-brother attorneys Judy Cates and Steven Katz of Swansea, Ill. and a third colleague.

The announcement did not sit well with St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan, who wrote August 27 that Cates and Katz “represent the modern version of the James Gang….They recently gained renown by galloping into the little town of Publishers Clearing House. They robbed the bank there, and rode away.” He added that “the way these class-action lawsuits usually work” is that “members of the class get very little. Usually nothing. Our lawyers get a lot. Always….It will be considered a cost of doing business, and like all such costs, it will be passed on to the consumers, who are, of course, the very same people who are allegedly benefiting from the lawsuit.”

And with that, almost before the popular columnist could tell what hit him, he was staring down the barrel of a writ. On August 30 Cates and Katz filed suit against McClellan in federal court in East St. Louis, Ill., seeking $1 million in damages for the libel of having been compared to bank robbers.

Unrepentant, McClellan followed up with a second and equally jocular effort, explaining that the lawyers had misunderstood: although upstanding Illinois might object to bank robbery, “Here in Missouri, we like the James Gang,” as folk heroes from the state’s Great Plains heritage. “So it is with the gallant class-action lawsuit lawyers. Close your eyes and see them the way I see them. They ride into town, file their lawsuits, reach their settlements and then, their saddlebags stuffed with money, they gallop into the night, but as they go, they throw coins to the cheering populace.

“And coins is the operative word, too,” McClellan added, pointing out that on average each of the represented households stood to gain something on the order of 12 cents, compared with $3 million for their lawyers. It is not recorded that Cates and Katz have dropped their suit or been in any other way mollified by this response. Bill McClellan, “Only Ones Who Gain From Class-Action Suits Are The Lawyers”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 27; “Missourians love James Gang and today’s robbers, too”, Sept. 1). Update: Nov. 30 (he criticizes them again, though case is still pending); Feb. 29, 2000 (they agree to drop suit).

November 4 – Bring a long book. It takes New York, on average, seven years to fully adjudicate discrimination cases filed with its Division of Human Rights. One woman in Orleans County spent 14 years in the system before obtaining a $20,000 award, while a complainant against Columbia University was still waiting for a hearing after 11 years. A federal judge has sided with the National Organization for Women in a suit demanding that the agency hire more employees on top of its current 190 to handle the case load; NOW wants that number tripled. (Yancey Roy, “State faulted on rights cases”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Nov. 2 — link now dead).

November 3 – Toshiba flops over. Last Friday’s announcement by Toshiba Corp. that it had agreed to pay a class-action settlement nominally valued at $2 billion over alleged defects in the floppy-drive operation of its laptop computers appears to represent a genuine breakthrough for plaintiff’s lawyers who’ve for years been gearing up a push to extract cash from high-tech companies over crashes, glitches and other subpar aspects of the computing experience. Many still unanswered questions about the new developments:

* Has the glitch led to any problems at all in real-world use? Conspicuously absent from the coverage of recent days has been any word from victims of the glitch saying that on such and such a date they lost important data because of it. Yet if the plaintiffs’ side had such witnesses available, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t have pushed them forward to public notice by now. Apparently the lawyers, through their expert, have found a way to configure Toshiba laptops so as to replicate data loss under carefully controlled demonstration conditions, but news coverage has not yet probed into the question of how artificial these conditions are or how likely they are to occur to real users who aren’t trying on purpose to get their computers to lose data. The plaintiffs’ theory, which seems rather convenient, is that the data loss is so subtle that people don’t know it’s happening or can’t trace it to the glitch afterward.

* Given the above, who if anyone has suffered damages? Next week Toshiba “will post on its Web site a free and downloadable software patch that eliminates the problem.” And a large percentage of laptop owners never or almost never use their floppy drive, preferring modem transmission of files. Yet all will be entitled to prizes.

* How valuable are those prizes? There’s some talk of refunds for recent purchasers, but presumably most would rather download a software patch than return a computer they like. (Toshibas are popular.) Others will get coupons mostly valued at $100-$225 “for the purchase of Toshiba computer products sold through Toshiba’s U.S. subsidiary”. Usually the face value of a coupon settlement is a highly unreliable guide to what the settlement is actually costing; otherwise a Sunday paper with $30 in grocery coupons in it would sell for $30. Yet Toshiba is taking a $1 billion accounting charge, and pledges to donate unclaimed amounts from the settlement fund to “a newly created charitable organization”. And it’s also agreed to pay a very non-imaginary $147.5 million to a not-so-charitable organization, the lawyers that brought the suit.

* Can the lawyers take their act industry-wide? “On Sunday night, four new suits were filed in U.S. District Court in Beaumont, Texas [where the Toshiba case had been filed only six months ago], against PC makers Hewlett-Packard Co. Compaq, NEC Packard-Bell and e-Machines Inc.” Compaq says there are specific diferences between its machines and Toshiba’s which render the case against it meritless. Pattie Adams, a spokeswoman for eMachines, said her company still hadn’t seen the suit but expressed the view that it. “doesn’t really apply to us…It appears to be about laptops, which we do not have, and the technology is from before we were even established.” As if that would save them in our current legal system! Another news report suggests the lawyers are busily trying to rope in governments as plaintiffs, à la guns-tobacco-lead paint: “federal investigators have attended laboratory demonstrations sponsored by plaintiffs’ lawyers intended to show the occurrence of the alleged defect, these people said. State and local agencies can opt to assert damage claims on their own.”

The law firm involved, Reaud, Morgan & Quinn, of Beaumont, Texas, may not be a familiar name to tech-beat reporters, but it’s quite familiar to those who follow high-stakes litigation. After growing rich on asbestos claims it moved into the tobacco-Medicaid suit on behalf of Texas (Forbes, July 7, 1997; Sept. 21, 1998 and sidebar). It also made the Houston Chronicle’s list of top ten political donors in Texas (five of whom, all consistent Democratic donors, happen to have represented the state in tobacco litigation for $3.3 billion in fees). Beaumont, which also is home to another of the Big Five Texas tobacco firms, is sometimes considered the most plaintiff-dominated town in the United States. (DISCUSS)

Sources: Toshiba press release, Oct. 29; Terho Uimonen, “Toshiba Settles Floppy Disk Lawsuit”, IDG /PC World News, Oct. 29; Andy Pasztor and Peter Landers, “Toshiba to pay $2B settlement on laptops”, Wall Street Journal Interactive/ZDNet, Nov. 1; Michael Fitzgerald and Michael R. Zimmerman, “PC makers hit with ‘copycat’ suits”, PC Week/ZDNet News, Nov. 1; “More PC lawsuits filed”, AP/CNNfn, Nov. 2 (link now dead); “Laptop Illogic”, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 3.

November 3 – Flag-burning protest requires environmental permits. You’re so angry you want to burn a flag in public? You’ll have to fill out these two environmental permissions first, please, one for the smoke aspect and one for the fire aspect. We don’t think this is a parody. (Vin Suprynowicz, “Levying a Free-Speech Fee”, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 28 — full column)

November 3 – Welcome RiskVue and Latex Allergy Links readers. Coverage of EEOC protection of illegal aliens is here, and of possible Rhode Island-led suits against glove makers, here.

November 2 – School shootings: descent of the blame counselors. It may seem incredible to Americans, but after the 1996 massacre at Dunblane, Scotland, in which 16 kindergarteners and their teacher were killed, “not a single lawsuit was filed”. How different in Littleton, Colo., West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark., where busy litigators — call them blame counselors? — seem to outnumber grief counselors, aiming suits in all directions: at school districts, entertainment companies, gunmakers, and most controversially the parents of the killers. Many victim families still decline to sue, taking the older view of litigation as an obstacle to forgiveness and community reconciliation; others throw themselves vigorously into their suits as a cause, believing they’re helping expose deep-seated evils of today’s America or at least the negligence of certain bad parents; and then there’s the middle ground represented by one Columbine High School mother who says she’s forgiven the shooters’ parents, but, frankly, now needs the money. (Lisa Belkin, “Parents Suing Parents”, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 31) (see also July 22, 1999 and April 13, 2000 commentaries).

November 2 – “Responsibility, RIP”. Columnist Mona Charen comments on two auto safety suits, one of them the child-left-in-hot-van case discussed in this space Oct. 20. In the other case, $2 million went to the survivors of a Texas man who’d left a truck running on a hill and walked behind it. “You don’t need an owner’s manual to tell you that it’s dangerous to walk behind a running, driverless vehicle on a steep hill. This used to be known as common sense. But so long as juries return such verdicts, the concept of individual responsibility gets hammered ever lower…the trial lawyers’ wallets grow corpulent, an