Complainant Rory Beer — yes, her real name, though she used to be known as Rory Roberts — was dancing on the bar at Bar Chicago, a Division Street nightspot, when she fell off, with what her suit says are permanent injuries to her foot and ankle. “The lawsuit claims that Bar Chicago encourages patrons to dance on the bar, but doesn’t warn people of slippery surfaces or provide handrails, ‘cushioned flooring’ or ’safety nets.’” (Mark J. Konkol, “Dancer slips, now she wants bar to pay”, Chicago Sun-Times, Jul. 1; Chicagoist). We covered another bar-wasn’t-safe-for-her-to-dance-on suit, also from Illinois, last year.

The manual for the L120 John Deere mower reads:

DANGER: ROTATING BLADES CUT OFF ARMS AND LEGS

· Do not mow when children or others are around.

· Do not mow in reverse.

· Look down and behind before and while backing.

· Never carry children even with blades off.

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Illinois state Rep. Jay Hoffman of Madison County, who doubles as an attorney with the Lakin Law Firm, is also said to be a big-time political fundraiser and a key link between the county’s far-famed class-action culture and the world of Illinois politics. Hoffman has long been a close and loyal advisor to now-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, something that’s no longer such a big political advantage what with the Rezko trial having badly sullied the governor’s reputation. Things got worse last month when Hoffman’s name came up during some of the most explosive testimony at that trial, though he’s been charged with no wrongdoing. And now he’s at odds with a fellow Democrat, state house Speaker Michael Madigan — himself a longtime guardian of trial lawyer interests in Springfield — following what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describes as “the airing of a secret memo from [Madigan's] staff directing legislative candidates to call for Blagojevich’s impeachment — complete with instructions to deny that they’re getting instructions.” (AP’s version). Ed Murnane of the Illinois Civil Justice League has more at Illinois Review, as do the editorialists of the Chamber-backed Madison County Record, while Eric Zorn of the Tribune and ArchPundit speculate that Blagojevich might appoint Hoffman to Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate should his election as President leave it vacant.

As we discussed in Part IX, one of John Lott’s two claims was settled, when Steven Levitt apologized for e-mails he sent another economist. It’s questionable how much satisfaction Lott can get from this, since, as an economist, he surely realizes that, without a loser-pays rule or agreement, there is a pooling equilibrium whereby both the sincerely-apologizing Levitt and the insincerely-apologizing Levitt would take the same course of action to avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars defending a de minimis allegation of libel, regardless of the merits of the claim.

The more significant, if less meritorious, claim of libel in Freakonomics is on appeal; Lott is now claiming that the case should have been decided under the allegedly more friendly Virginia libel law than the Illinois law under which his claim fails, but that is generally an argument for (at best) a claim of legal malpractice, rather than for a do-over for an expressly waived argument in federal court. Lott has posted the briefs; David Glenn blogs about the 2-year mark in the case. Not that I think Lott has a valid legal malpractice claim, either, unless his attorneys told him he had a good shot at winning more than he would spend in legal fees.

Lott does interesting economic research, and it is unfortunate he is tarring his reputation with a lawsuit that has the potential to impinge upon academic freedom.

• Ninth Circuit, Kozinski, J., rules 8-3 that Roommates.com can be found to have violated fair housing law by asking users to sort themselves according to their wish to room with males or other protected groups; the court distinguished the Craigslist cases [L.A. Times, Volokh, Drum]
• Class-action claim: Apple says its 20-inch iMac displays millions of colors but the true number is a mere 262,144, the others being simulated [WaPo]
• U.K.: compulsive gambler loses $2 million suit against his bookmakers, who are awarded hefty costs under loser-pays rule [BBC first, second, third, fourth stories]
• Pittsburgh couple sue Google saying its Street Views invades their privacy by including pics of their house [The Smoking Gun via WSJ law blog]
• U.S. labor unions keep going to International Labour Organization trying to get current federal ground rules on union organizing declared in violation of international law [PoL]
• Illinois Supreme Court reverses $2 million jury award to woman who sued her fiance’s parents for not warning her he had AIDS [Chicago Tribune]
• Italian family “preparing to sue the previous owners of their house for not telling them it was haunted”; perhaps most famous such case was in Nyack, N.Y. [Ananova, Cleverly]
• Per their hired expert, Kentucky lawyers charged with fen-phen settlement fraud “relied heavily on the advice of famed trial lawyer Stan Chesley in the handling of” the $200 million deal [Lexington Herald-Leader]
• Actor Hal Holbrook of Mark Twain fame doesn’t think much of those local anti-tobacco ordinances that ban smoking on stage even when needed for dramatic effect [Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times]
• Six U.S. cities so far have been caught “shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners.” [Left Lane via Virtuous Republic and Asymmetrical Information]

Andrew M. Grossman and James L. Gattuso analyze the CPSC Reform Act, S. 2663 (the update to S. 2045). We discussed Feb. 20 and Feb. 25, as well as briefly Jan. 1. Update: After the jump, Senator DeMint’s office provides the “Top Ten Reasons to Oppose the CPSC “Reform” Act (S. 2663)”

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(Updating and bumping Feb. 4 post about to roll off bottom of page because of new comment activity)

• Judge Fallon denied the motion of Florida plaintiffs to expedite a hearing on their inclusion into a settlement when they did not even bring suit (Jan. 30). Merck and the PSC are required to respond Feb. 15, and the hearing will be Feb. 21, where one can expect the motion to be denied.
• At Point of Law, I comment on the recent grand jury investigation into Merck marketing of Vioxx.

Update, Feb. 8: separately, Merck yesterday settles for $650 million different Medicaid fraud allegations over the marketing of Vioxx and other drugs. The qui tam relator will get a jackpot award of $68 million. [WaPo; DOJ; Merck] The pricing theories at the center of these lawsuits—which hold Merck liable for purportedly charging too little—definitely deserve longer discussion another time.

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Back in 2005, when the first lawsuits were filed over the Grand Theft Auto hot coffee mod, I wrote:

Me, I’m just amused by the thought of class action attorneys trolling for a named plaintiff parent who will testify that, while she was okay for her little Johnny to buy a game involving drug dealing, gambling, carjacking, cop-shooting, prostitution, throat-slashing, baseball-bat beatings, drive-by shootings, street-racing, gang wars, profanity-laced rap music, violent homosexual lovers’ quarrels, blood and gore, and “Strong Sexual Content,” she is shocked, shocked to learn that the game also includes an animation at about the level of a Ken doll rubbing up against an unclothed Barbie doll with X-rated sound effects…

Alas, Take Two games has given in to the blackmail and settled the case, but a sense of how frivolous it was can be seen from the following deposition excerpt of lead plaintiff Brenda Stanhouse, a schoolteacher in Belleville, Illinois, who will receive $5000 for her role in the litigation. Recall that Mrs. Stanhouse is alleging she was defrauded because she would not have bought a game that could be modified to include “pornography,” but take a look at pp. 67 ff. of the deposition, where she makes clear she didn’t have the faintest idea what was in the game that she did buy. Readers: type your favorite Stanhouse deposition excerpts in the comments.

Judy Cates, known to readers of this site for her role in the controversial Publishers Clearing House class action settlement and thereafter for suing a columnist who wrote critically about the pact, yesterday narrowly lost (in the Democratic primary) her bid for a judgeship in southern Illinois. Cates is a former head of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association. (Ann Knef, “Wexstten defeats Cates”, Madison County Record, Feb. 5; earlier). Bill McClellan, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist sued by Cates and her brother Steven Katz, has written another amusing column on the topic (”For potential Judge Judy, millions have been served”, Feb. 1).

A reader writes regarding our post on the perverse incentives given social workers:

Frankly, I’m surprised this story is news. The belief of every case worker I know (I’ve only been at this since July) is that if a kid on your caseload dies, the odds are that you’ll be fired no matter what you did right or wrong. Besides the perverse incentives you mentioned, that cause over-removal of children at lower levels, there are perverse incentives for the people at the top of the chain–if they make the requirements so unattainable they can never be done perfectly, and keep caseloads high enough that no one can complete all his tasks, there will always be something they can find that caseworkers didn’t do, and the caseworkers (and sometimes their immediate supervisors) can be fired.

One of the greatest needs I’ve seen for a loser-pays system has been this year in my work with county dependency courts. The Child Protective Investigators, who remove children and work with the state AG’s office to get them adjudicated dependent on the state, prosecute the most absurd cases because it hardly costs them anything if they lose.

Right now I’m working with a CPI who is trying to take custody of a 17-year-old girl from her mother–even though by the time the trial comes around and the girl is adjudicated (probably won’t be, because the CPI has a crappy case against her) she’ll be one month away from aging out of the system. Since the CPIs don’t pay if they lose, and don’t even usually show up at trial to get chewed out by the judge, they have no reason not to waste my time, the judges’ time, the attorneys’ time, and (worst of all, since these poor folks aren’t paid to be there) a phenomenal amount of innocent parents’ time and money.

The single biggest problem with the dependency system, at least here in Florida, is that we don’t have loser-pays.

Sorry for the rant. That post hit close to home!

On a similar point: see Illinois Alliance for Parents & Children, whose website isn’t quite finished.

• Longtime Overlawyered favorite Judy Cates, of columnist-suing fame, is using large sums of her own money to outspend incumbent James Wexstten in hard-fought race for Illinois state judgeship; Democratic primary is Feb. 5 [Belleville News-Democrat, Southern Illinoisan]
• City council told: we’ll cancel your liability coverage if you throw all meetings and city records open to public [Seattle Times]
• Attorney member of Canadian Senate in spot of bother after revelation that she billed client for 30 hours in one day [Vancouver Province, edit]
• A public wiki just for Scruggsiana? After Keker’s minions swoop in to do their edits, the Mississippi attorney may wind up portrayed as the next Mother Teresa, and not the Hitchens version either [WikiScruggs]
• Same general category of point, my Wikipedia entry now suddenly describes me as “controversial”, when but a month ago I wasn’t;
• $28 to $52 million in 18 months for serving as a DoJ “corporate monitor” sounds like nice work if you can get it, and former AG Ashcroft got it without competitive bidding [Lattman, St. Pete Times edit, PolitickerNJ, NJLJ]
• The Amiable Nancy (1818), admiralty case that could prove crucial precedent in Exxon Valdez punitive appeal, has nothing to do with The Charming Betsey (1804), key precedent on international law [Anchorage Daily News; Tom Goldstein/Legal Times]
• “First do no harm… to your attorney’s case” [Cole/Dallas Morning News via KevinMD]
• Probers haven’t come up with evidence of more than middling tiger-taunting, and attorney Geragos says he’ll sue zoo’s p.r. firm for defaming his clients [KCBS; SF Chronicle; AP/USA Today]
• UK’s latest “metric martyr” is Janet Devens, facing charges for selling vegetables in pounds and ounces at London’s Ridley Road market [WSJ; earlier]
• Lawyer can maintain defamation suit over being called “ambulance chaser” interested only in “slam dunk” cases, rules Second Circuit panel [eight years ago on Overlawyered]

(Re-posted from Point of Law.)

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• Marie Gryphon rounds up what’s known about the Republican candidates and their views on litigation reform [Point of Law]
• Obama’s signature achievement as an Illinois legislator was a law requiring that police videotape interrogations and confessions, the better to protect both suspects from beatings and cops from false charges of abuse; some “death penalty abolitionists … worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument” (!). [Peters/WaPo]
• Giuliani-bashers had a fine old time hammering the former mayor on supposed scandal over girlfriend’s driver. So was there anything there? [NYTimes, Newsday "Spin Cycle", Frum; standard disclaimer]
• Edwards has resolved to run as a plaintiff’s lawyer in full jury-stirring mode; we know a fair bit about his trial-winning style, less about how he settles cases [Beldar]
• Quite a few adherents of the scary Christian Reconstructionist movement seem to like Gov. Huckabee a lot, one hopes he doesn’t like them back [Lindsey, Cato-at-Liberty; Box Turtle Bulletin]

Democratic front-runner (if it’s okay to call him that now) Barack Obama tells a Newton, Iowa audience about his early decisions to pursue civil rights, community organizing and public office rather than more lucrative legal specialties, and is blasted in parts of the lefty blogosphere for the implied dig at John Edwards. (Shailagh Murray, Washington Post “The Trail”, Dec. 30; Kos, TPM, Kia Franklin, etc.) Per the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, “Obama is starting to use the term ‘trial lawyer’ more often on the stump to describe Edwards, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the negative associations many voters have with that particular profession.” (”The Trail”, Dec. 31).

P.S. Some highlights of our earlier Obama coverage: Aug. 5, 2004 (”Anyone who denies there’s a crisis with medical malpractice insurance is probably a trial lawyer”); Apr. 10, 2007 (making inroads nonetheless on Edwards’ trial-lawyer donor base; per Legal Times, “Despite Obama’s silence on the issues trial lawyers care about, those who support him say they are confident he will back trial lawyers when the time comes”); Jul. 31 and Aug. 5 (auditions at AAJ/ATLA convention). P.P.S. Plus Ted at Point of Law a year back (”far from convinced” that Obama will cross the trial bar, despite his vote for the Class Action Fairness Act).

• Housekeeping service in Florida proclaims, “We Speak English”. So will they get sued? [Smerconish/Phila. Daily News]
• Update: Dad who long ago walked out on his family won’t get chunk of estranged son’s $2.9 million 9/11 fund benefit [NY Post (link fixed now); earlier]
• Did Illinois state’s attorneys advise Marine sergeant complaining of car vandalism that there wasn’t much point trying to recover from the suspected offender since he was a lawyer? [Blackfive via Zincavage and many readers; Kass/Tribune] And what kind of trouble might the lawyer be in if he suggested slipping the repair costs along to an insurer? [Patterico commenters, Goldberg/NRO Corner correspondent] More: Bainbridge.
• Not long after American Lawyer pronounces the demise of securities class actions, we learn they may be back on a cyclical upswing [August TAL; new Stanford Clearinghouse]
• If rising tide of outrage leads to abolition of peremptory challenges, many lawyers won’t have anyone to blame but themselves [Reed]
• Brooklyn judge’s presenting of box of candy to plaintiff among grounds for reversal of $14 million brain-damaged infant verdict [NYLJ]
• Yet more health privacy madness: “HIPAA is adversely affecting our ability to conduct biomedical research” [Reuters on JAMA study via Kevin MD; relatedly, Karvounis/HealthBeat]
• People kept tearing down no-swimming signs at much-used park in Bellingham, Wash., and you know what’s going to happen next without our having to tell you [AP/Seattle Times]
• Two Illinois judges in drunk-driving accident that broke other driver’s leg draw mere reprimand with “no consequences other than public embarrassment” [Post-Dispatch]
• Suit against Avvo lawyer-rating suit dismissed on First Amendment grounds [Seattle Times, Post-Intelligencer; earlier]
• Saves her friend’s life, then sues her [seven years ago on Overlawyered]

ATRA’s remarkably successful annual Judicial Hellholes report highlighting the high and low points of several jurisdictions’ legal systems is out. (PDF) Regular readers will recognize many of the stories and jurisdictions (and an op-ed I wrote even gets a shout-out), but the report is a handy summary of the year in tort reform and lawsuit abuse. Lots of news coverage (AP/Fool.com; National Law Journal; the Examiner; others) and blog coverage (Lattman; Bader; Torts Prof; NAM; NAF; Murnane; Pharmalot).

• As governor, Huckabee signed a good tort reform package capping punitive and non-economic damages, and reforming joint and several liability and venue law, but the rest of his economic record is big-government. And David Harsanyi is critical of Huckabee’s claimed opposition to nanny-statism. [Insurance Journal; Human Events; Harsanyi; RCP; Michael Tanner @ FoxNews]
• Update to the popular Bridezilla flowers lawsuit; florist files opposition. Lots of comments ensue. [Lattman]
• South Dakota Supreme Court: no, you can’t sue a pharmacy for being a “drug dealer” when plaintiff steals prescription medicine for a disabled friend and injures himself OD’ing on it. [On Point]
• Former litigator hired to invest $100m in court cases for UK hedge fund. [Times Online]
• Atkins fallout in Texas and California, as professional anti-death-penalty experts there happily minimize subject IQs to call their intelligent clients retarded. Earlier: Feb. 2005; Sep. 2003. [Science Evidence blog; and again]
• Heartbalm tort of alienation of affection withstand constitutional challenge in Mississippi. Earlier: Jul. 5; Nov. 2006, etc. [Torts Prof]
• Bob Woodruff biography: I would have died if my injury happened in the United States because of fear of liability. [Murnane]
• I’ve updated my paper on Thomas Geoghegan’s new book. [SSRN]
• Overlawyered holds slim lead at ABA Blawg 100 popularity contest. But why aren’t any of you voting for Point of Law? [ABA Journal]

According to the U.S. Chamber-affiliated Madison County Record, if lawyers are successful in pursuing an Illinois class action against mortgage broker Amerifirst over the meal-interrupting telephonic intrusions, “the lawyers would have to notify each and every aggrieved member of the class with an unsolicited phone call of their own.” (”Our View: All in the Family”, Oct. 28; Ann Knef, “Class plaintiff’s attorney-husband is TCPA specialist”, Oct. 24; “Lakin files class action against mortgage lender over pre-recorded messages”, Oct. 22).