- Illinois now requires showing of ID, signing of log to buy drain cleaner. So long as you’re not trying to vote! [Consumerist via @amyalkon]
- Tribute to no-longer-anonymous Ken White of Popehat and his work defending bloggers from legal threats [Scott Greenfield; earlier; Ken's defense in Maryland of blogger Aaron Worthing; new case of science blogger in Texas]
- Politicos mobilize against risk that Wal-Mart will bring fresh produce choices to Harlem [Greg Beato] India frets about whether to allow chain stores, recapitulating a debate U.S. once went through [Tabarrok, MR]
- Colorado legislators honored at a luncheon where I spoke [CCJL]
- HHS launches initiative to audit health providers for compliance with HIPAA data privacy law, and many are unprepared [American Medical News, Dana Thrasher, Dom Nicastro/HealthLeaders Media]
- New scholarship on effects of Twombly/Iqbal [Drug and Device Law series first, second, third, CL&P]
- Congratulations to the outstanding Abnormal Use for winning the ABA’s “Blawg 100” vote for best torts blog; we feel pretty good about placing third without mounting a campaign. While exploring that site, don’t miss its stellar coverage of the tendentious documentary “Hot Coffee”.
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
Colorado,
HIPAA,
hot coffee,
Illinois,
India,
legal blogs,
pleading,
Wal-Mart
“When consumers in California visit the Dunkin’ Donuts website hoping to order a bag of their favorite java, they are met with the following message: ‘Important Notice: We are temporarily suspending the shipment of orders to California while we work to comply with Proposition 65 with the State of California. We apologize for any inconvenience.’” Acrylamide, a compound naturally present in many roasted or cooked foods, is among the hundreds of substances that must be warned against under Prop 65, which has led, as we noted in May, to a lawsuit against more than 40 coffee companies. [TechNewsWorld] Author Vivian Wagner quotes me:
“The law empowers private litigants to enforce its terms without having to show that any consumer has been exposed to any material or substantial risk, let alone harmed,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the E-Commerce Times. “As a result, entrepreneurial law firms roam the state identifying new, often far-fetched, unwarned-of risks and extracting cash settlements along with promises to warn from hapless defendants.”
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Prop 65
- Per New Jersey court, overly sedentary home office job can result in valid worker’s comp claim [Courier-Post, NJLRA]
- Trial bar’s AAJ denies it played “direct” role in backing “Hot Coffee” [WaPo, some background]
- “Cop repeatedly harasses waitresses, never disciplined. Feds defend their civil rights by . . . suing the restaurant.” [Palm Beach Post via Radley Balko]
- On “unauthorized practice of law” as protective moat around profession’s interests, Britain does things differently [Gillian Hadfield via Andrew Sullivan; related, Larry Ribstein] Forthcoming book by Robert Crandall et al urges lawyer deregulation [Brookings]
- “The Treaty Clause Doesn’t Give Congress Unlimited Power” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato on Golan v. Holder case headed to Supreme Court]
- The small bank regulatory shakedown blues [Kevin Funnell] Why is the Department of Justice including gag orders as part of its enforcement decrees against banks on race and lending? [Investors Business Daily via PoL] “Emigrant fights back against mortgage-discrimination suits” [Fisher, Forbes] Dodd-Frank squeezing out community banks [Funnell]
- “North Carolina to Seize Speeding Cars That Fail to Pull Over” [The Newspaper] “With what, a tractor beam?” [James Taranto]
Tagged as:
AAJ,
banks,
constitutional law,
harassment law,
hot coffee,
international law,
mortgages,
New Jersey,
North Carolina,
traffic laws,
workers' compensation
Great review by Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin casting a skeptical eye on the trial-lawyer film project (”done in by its essential dishonesty… like any good lawyer — and unlike any good documentarian — [director Susan Saladoff is] intent on concealing the weakness in her case).” Read it here. Meanwhile, from the “How does this sort of thing get past the editors of the Washington Post?” files, there’s this from Hank Stuever:
For to really embrace tort reform, you have to be willing to treat all potential plaintiffs as no-good grifters. … To support tort reform, you have to believe all lawsuits against businesses are a threat to the free market.
Stuever does not, for some reason, name any proponent of reform who has actually asserted either of the propositions. Do you think that might be because he’s trafficking in absurd caricatures? (earlier on “Hot Coffee” here, here, here, etc.)
P.S. More: Cory Andrews, WLF. And if lawyers are really eager to have the facts of the Liebeck v. McDonald’s case come out, it’s curious they don’t take steps to release the trial transcript, in the absence of which critics of the case are obliged to speculate on key points. And as I just wrote in a comment at Abnormal Use:
I believe organized tort reform groups were caught flat-footed by the McDonald’s case and didn’t get around to doing much with it until it had already become the talk of the nation through talk shows, late night TV and so forth. As often happens, plaintiff’s-side advocacy groups were more aggressive in seeking coverage for their side in the media. Thus Public Citizen and allies gave a press conference on Capitol Hill and were rewarded with a big Newsweek story summarizing their talking points (as well as, earlier, coverage in the news-side WSJ). I’m pretty sure no groups critical of the Liebeck award ever did a comparable press push; and the McDonald’s company itself, so far as I know, never chose to cooperate with commentators who might be sympathetic to its legal case.
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
McDonald's,
media bias,
Stella Liebeck
“A defense lawyer’s fleeting reference to the ‘uniquely iconic’ McDonald’s coffee case was enough for the Utah Supreme Court to order a new trial in a pedestrian accident lawsuit and allow the plaintiff to seek a larger damages award.” [Matthew Heller/OnPoint News; Jodie Hill/Downtown Lawyer] And Abnormal Use is out with a new interview of Ted Frank, who has written frequently on the hot-coffee case for this site, and who says:
The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.
I, too, gave a lot of thought to writing up the long controversy over the Liebeck case in my latest book, precisely because academic sources, and not just trial-lawyer publicists, persistently spread distortions and misconceptions about the case. Eventually it seemed like too wide a digression from the book’s main themes — but someone still needs to write up that story.
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Ted Frank
“A Manhattan woman has failed to persuade a U.S. appeals court that Starbucks Corp should be held liable for severe burns she suffered after spilling tea served in a double cup.” [NY Daily News]
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Starbucks
As a connoisseur of hot-coffee cases, I’m always excited to see a court get one right. The Abnormal Use blog points us to Colbert v. Sonic Restaurants, No. 09-1423, 2010 WL 3769131 (W.D. La. Sept. 21, 2010). The plaintiff made the usual gamut of “design defect” and “failure to warn” claims, but the court wasn’t buying it. Note that the plaintiff claimed to be injured by the coffee at Sonic Restaurants, yet another refutation of the trial-lawyer claim that Stella Liebeck’s McDonald’s coffee was unusually hot.
Tagged as:
eat drink and be merry,
failure to warn,
hot coffee,
restaurants,
Stella Liebeck
Brooklyn mother Villona Maryash spills tea on her five-month-old infant, infant burned, sues Starbucks. But the complaint is not that the beverage was too hot, but that Starbucks should’ve served it on a tray and with a sleeve. Of course, protective sleeves are in ready reach of customers at every Starbucks I’ve been in, and it’s likely that Starbucks doesn’t insert the cups in sleeves automatically for environmental reasons. [NY Post; Gothamist commenters are not impressed]
Tagged as:
eat drink and be merry,
hot coffee,
New York,
Starbucks
A lawsuit over a hot coffee mishap in the fast-food drive-through lane turns out to be barred by California’s financial responsibility law, which “prohibits uninsured motorists … from collecting noneconomic damages in any action arising out of the operation or use of a motor vehicle.” [Pat Murphy, Lawyers USA "Benchmarks"]
Tagged as:
California,
hot coffee,
insurance
By popular demand, we note the existence of the case of Zeynep Inanli v. Starbucks Corp et al, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 105767-2010, where Ms. Inanli has alleged second-degree burns from tea that was “unreasonably hot, in containers which were not safe.”
You will recall that part of the trial lawyer defense of the McDonald’s hot coffee case are the factually false claims that (1) only McDonald’s sold beverages hot enough to cause burns and (2) after Stella Liebeck won her suit, hot-beverage vendors everywhere reduced their temperatures to a “safe” level. Of course, the Reuters account fails to indicate sufficient facts to determine whether Ms. Inanli’s scenario reflects injuries from a spill that was her own fault or the fault of Starbucks.
Tagged as:
eat drink and be merry,
hot coffee,
Starbucks
Late-night fast food at a Virginia gas station McDonald’s proves fateful, if not fatal. [Kevin Couch at new, South Carolina-based Abnormal Use: An Unreasonably Dangerous Product Liability Blog]
P.S.: Jim Dedman of the Gallivan firm writes in email: “Walter, we’re big fans of Overlawyered here at our firm in South Carolina, and I myself have been reading it since I was a law student. We started our blog on the first business day of 2010, partially inspired by having read your site for years. Thanks again, and we look forward to being a part of the blogosphere with you.” Inspiring others to jump in is one of the true psychological rewards of blogging.
Tagged as:
accolades,
hot coffee,
McDonald's
Aurora Hill alleges that McDonald’s coffee is “extremely hot in the extreme” and caused nervous shock, pain, and scarring when it spilled on her. (Aimee Green, The Oregonian, Feb. 4).
You may recall that part of the trial lawyer fiction about the merits of the infamous Stella Liebeck suit was that it supposedly successfully caused fast food restaurants to lower the temperature of coffee so that no one would ever be burned again.
My faith in humanity is encouraged when I see that the poll of Consumerist blog readers on the topic marks 86% for the option “Hot coffee is hot. Deal with it” on a blog that usually is reflexively pro-trial lawyer. Ironically, I wouldn’t count this suit as entirely meritless: Hill alleges that McDonald’s workers failed to adequately affix the lid to the cup, causing the spill as they handed her the coffee in the drive-through, which, if true, would strike me as actionable.
Tagged as:
eat drink and be merry,
hot coffee,
McDonald's,
Oregon
Canadian health officials require poutine—a Canadian dish of french fries, cheese curds, and gravy—to be heated to 140 to 165 degrees for health reasons, a temperature somewhat that below of hot coffee. Alas, this is a temperature that can cause second-degree burns if a consumer happens to suffer an epileptic fit and fall face-first into their poutine, as happened to an Ontario teenager dining alone at a local KFC. No lawsuit appears to be planned, though her father seems to be demanding warnings of some sort. (Don Peat, “Teen burned in KFC poutine mishap”, canoe.ca, Jan. 19 (h/t Bumper)). Of course, given that warnings cannot deter epileptic seizures, it’s not clear why this would have made a difference. And as the Mocking Words blog points out:
What if instead she ended up falling down and hitting her head on the concrete floor? Are you going to go around warning people that concrete is a very solid material and that people should be aware that if you fall and hit your head on the floor that it’s going to hurt and is possibly going to injure you?
Tagged as:
Canada,
eat drink and be merry,
failure to warn,
hot coffee
- “Common sense makes a comeback” against zero tolerance in the classroom [USA Today]
- Slip at Massachusetts antiques show leads to lawsuit [Wicked Local Marion]
- Update: Washington Supreme Court takes up horn-honking case [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
- MICRA as model: “California’s Schwarzenegger stumps for medical liability reform” [American Medical News]
- “Inventing a better patent system” [Pozen, NYT]
- Google Books settlement narrowed to countries with “common legal heritage” [Sag, ConcurOp]
- One way to make ends meet: cash-strapped Detroit cops are seizing a lot more stuff [Detroit News via Business Insider]
- What temperatures are hot coffee actually served at? Torts buffs (including our Ted Frank) want to know [TortsProf exchange with Michael Rustad and followup, more and yet more]
Tagged as:
California,
forfeiture,
Google,
hot coffee,
Massachusetts,
medical malpractice,
patent law,
Ted Frank,
Washington state,
zero tolerance
