“Do you know who I am?” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Around the blogs is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

March 2003 archives, part 1 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“The most popular section of the vast overlawyered.com site is the ‘Whatever happened to personal responsibility‘ section. A few headlines offer a flavour of the kind of stories posted there: ‘Patient sues hospital for letting him out on the night he killed‘; ‘Rough divorce predisposed him to hire hitman‘; and ‘Pitcher hit by line drive sues maker of baseball bat‘. Before we get too smug, though, there is an increasing contribution from the UK, such as ‘Stop clowning around, clowns told‘, which came from The Times last year. It tells the sorry tale of UK clowns terrified that unappreciative patrons would sue them over injuries from thrown pies and water-squirting. Does it worry Olson that overlawyered.com is read as a comic site as opposed to a platform for his more earnest law reforming? Not at all. “I try to make sure it’s humorous. Otherwise, frankly, you’d just cry,” he says.”

In other recent publicity, TechCentralStation columnist Duane Freese reviews The Rule of Lawyers together with Catherine Crier’s The Case Against Lawyers, emphasizing our proposal that the litigation business be required to submit to more disclosure and transparency (“Legal Tyrannies”, Feb. 6). And in the New York Post, William Tucker flays Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for the way Spitzer has gone to court to defend the exorbitant fees being collected by tobacco lawyers representing New York state (“Spitzer vs. N.Y.”, Feb. 4). (DURABLE LINK)

February 2003 archives, part 2 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

The five law firms eventually hired by Morales are all “major contributors to Democratic candidates and causes”. Michael Tigar, attorney for the five, denies that any of their tobacco fees or expenses went to Morales but concedes that “some was paid to Austin political consultant George Shipley. Tigar said all the payments to Shipley were first reviewed by University of Texas law professor Charles Silver, who was retained by the lawyers as an ethics adviser.” (Clay Robison, Houston Chronicle, Jul. 12). (DURABLE LINK)

July 15 – Paper currency should accommodate blind, suit argues. “The American Council of the Blind, which seeks to improve conditions for the visually impaired, has sued the Treasury Department to force its way into the currency revamping process. …The group is not promoting a specific change that would help blind and sight-impaired Americans sift through their money, but hopes the government will study an array of options that would be helpful. A major step could be offering denominations in different colors or sizes with large-print features, like many other countries, [Ralph] Brunson said. Braille and textures also are possibilities, although the markings are prone to wearing off. ‘We did not specify a particular option because, primarily, at this point we’re trying to get the dialogue going,’ Brunson said.” (Mark Babineck, “Blind Group Sues U.S. over Currency”, AP/FindLaw, Jul. 1). (DURABLE LINK)

July 15 – New civil rights target: “linguistic profiling”. With assistance from a Ford Foundation grant, the National Fair Housing Alliance and Stanford education and linguistics professor Dr. John Baugh have launched a project “to study the impact of linguistic profiling on housing discrimination. This summer, Baugh will track the instances of bias that the housing markets show toward speakers of non-standard English over the telephone. Baugh says speakers who do not ‘sound white’ often are discriminated against over the telephone. ‘Even though the courts are reasonably well equipped to prosecute cases of face-to-face discrimination,’ says Dr. Baugh, ‘they have a hard time understanding and applying the law to linguistic profiling, and that’s where this research will help.’” “National Study on Linguistic Profiling in Housing Announced”, Jun. 26)(via Scott Norvell, FoxNews.com, Jul. 1). (DURABLE LINK)

July 12-14 – Welcome Salon.com readers, Bill O’Reilly listeners. We’re cited in Janelle Brown’s excellent article on parental lawsuits against teachers (“L is for Lawsuit”, Jul. 12) which mentions our subpage on overlawyered schools. And our editor is appearing today (Fri.) on Bill O’Reilly’s popular radio show to discuss the case of a New York City jury’s award to a woman who lay down on the subway tracks (see Jun. 26-27), along with other cases featured on our personal- responsibility subpage. Update: and welcome BBC-5 listeners, for whom our editor taped an interview arising from the Salon piece (DURABLE LINK)

July 12-14 – Credibility up in smoke? Environmentalist groups have strenuously denied that their use of litigation to stall road building, logging and the construction of firebreaks worsened this year’s raging wildfires out West (see Jul. 1-2). But it turns out that a recent General Accounting Office report, much cited by the enviro groups to show that they don’t sue often, actually may show nothing of the sort. “Environmental appeals delayed 48 percent of the [Forest Service]‘s fire-suppression projects in fiscal 2001 and 2002, thereby stalling efforts to clear the brush and small trees that fuel the catastrophic wildfires plaguing the West, according to an internal Forest Service report obtained by The Washington Times. The report, slated for release [Thursday], found that 155 of the agency’s 326 plans to log overgrown, high-risk national forests were stymied by appeals. In Arizona and New Mexico, sites of some of this summer’s worst wildfires, that figure rose to 73 percent, and climbed to 100 percent in the Pacific Northwest”. (Valeria Richardson, “Forest Service Says Activists Played Role in Fires,” Washington Times, Jul. 11; Kimberley A. Strassel, “Truth Under Fire “, Wall Street Journal/ OpinionJournal.com, Jul. 11). (& see letter to the editor, Oct. 23) (DURABLE LINK)

July 12-14 – Read the label, then ignore it if you like. “Two carpet installers who admit they read the label of an adhesive they used, admit they understood the adhesive was flammable and should not be used inside, used it inside anyway, caused an explosion, were burned badly, sued, and won $8 million dollars.” (Phil Trexler, “2 installers get millions in blast suit”, Akron Beacon Journal, Jul. 10) (link and description via MedPundit, Jul. 10). (DURABLE LINK)

July 12-14 – Financial scandals: legislate in haste. The “chief sponsor of the House [financial-reform] legislation, Republican Michael G. Oxley of Ohio … complained that some aspects of the Sarbanes bill appeared to be turning into ‘a gravy train’ for trial lawyers.” (Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Senate Backs Tough Measures to Punish Corporate Misdeeds”, New York Times, Jul. 11). House Republicans are particularly critical of provisions which, in line with a long-term goal of the plaintiff’s bar, increase the time permitted to bring securities fraud lawsuits. The Mobile Register editorially warns that a number of ideas emanating from the Senate “would be a huge boon to voracious plaintiffs’ attorneys. And the last thing the nervous stock market needs, now or ever, is to worry about companies being ruined by ever-more creative lawsuits whose practical effect would do far more to enrich the lawyers than to protect the interests of individual investors.” (“Bush right, Shelby not, on business reform” (editorial), Mobile Register, Jul. 10). “Robert Musil” has some thoughts on the newly popular idea of requiring CEOs to certify their company’s financial filings on penalty of perjury (Jul. 7). And before assuming that it was management malfeasance alone that destroyed the market value of such companies as WorldCom and Adelphia, it would be wise to note that Europe, without benefit of major scandal, has managed to see most of the value of its telecom stocks evaporate since the sectoral bubble burst, with historic enterprises like Deutsche Telekom, France Télécom and Royal KPN of the Netherlands losing 80 or 90 percent of their value, and Britain’s BT doing not much better (Edmund L. Andrews, “Europe Shares Pain of the Fall in Phone Stocks”, New York Times, Jul. 11). And see Steve Chapman, “Real and phony fixes for corporate corruption”, Chicago Tribune, Jul. 11). (DURABLE LINK)

July 12-14 – “Court Tosses ‘Sopranos’ Suit”. Following an appellate court’s ruling against them, the Italian-American Defense Association has dropped its suit against HBO charging that “The Sopranos” offends the dignity of Italian Americans in supposed violation of the Illinois Constitution’s “individual dignity” clause. Score one for free speech (N.Y. Daily News, Jul. 2)(see Apr. 6-8, 2001). (DURABLE LINK)

July 2002 archives, part 2 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

After suffering a severe auto crash which left him in a coma for a month, Wagner “hired Shapiro after his brother saw one of Shapiro’s TV commercials. Wagner dealt with a paralegal and never met a lawyer from Shapiro’s firm until after he agreed to a $65,000 settlement.” The jury found that the law firm had negligently failed to press Wagner’s case against the other motorist, instead accepting from that motorist’s insurer a settlement which undervalued the case and was insufficient to pay Wagner’s medical bills. “Shapiro, whose firm of Shapiro and Shapiro is based in Rochester, didn’t attend the trial. He testified by a videotaped deposition in which he admitted that he has never tried a case in court, leaves the legal work to subordinates and lives in Florida.” (Michael Ziegler, “Award claws ‘The Hammer’”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Jun. 12)(link now dead). Shapiro is also known for his role in websites entitled Million Dollar Lungs (asbestos client recruitment) and CPalsy.com (“Your child’s cerebral palsy may be the result of a mistake. Don’t Get Mad, Get Even”). See also Dec. 5, 2003. Update May 24, 2004: court suspends Shapiro from practice in New York for one year. (DURABLE LINK)

June 17-18 – Not worth the hassle? “Home Depot Inc., the nation’s largest hardware and home-improvement chain, has told its 1,400 stores not to do business with the U.S. government or its representatives.” Most managers in the chain surveyed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said “they had received instructions from Home Depot’s corporate headquarters this month not to take government credit cards, purchase orders or even cash if the items are being used by the federal government. … One Home Depot associate at a store in San Diego said, ‘It feels weird telling some kid in uniform that I can’t sell him 10 gallons of paint because we don’t do business with the government.’” Although the Atlanta-based chain is close-lipped about the reasons for its policy, companies that sell more than nominal quantities of products or services to the federal government risk being designated as federal contractors, a status that brings them under a large body of regulation over their practices in employment and other areas. (Andrew Schneider, “Home Depot stops doing business with federal government”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jun. 16). Update Jul. 1-2: company reverses policy. (DURABLE LINK)

June 17-18 – Alamo’s stand. “Alamo Rent A Car had no ‘duty to warn’ a Dutch couple visiting Miami not to drive into high-crime areas of the city, lawyers for the company told a three-judge panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal Wednesday in an effort to overturn a $5.2 million jury verdict. Lawyers for Alamo told the judges that there is no way their client could have known that the couple would venture into Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, where Tosca Dieperink was shot to death as she sat in the rental car in 1996.” We last covered this story Jun. 29, 2000, at which time we wondered: how many different kinds of legal trouble would Alamo have gotten into if it had warned its customers to stay out of the toughest urban neighborhoods? (Susan R. Miller, “Car Rental Agency Fights $5.2M Verdict for Slain Tourist”, Miami Daily Business Review, Jun. 14). (DURABLE LINK)

June 14-16 – “Civil Rights Agency Retaliated Against Worker, EEOC Rules”. Do as we say dept.: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the federal agency which claims for itself the role of public watchdog on discrimination matters, unlawfully retaliated against its former staff solicitor, Emma Monroig, after she filed a discrimination complaint against it in 1995. The commission, which has a staff of about 75, has been hit with nine recent EEOC complaints from employees, of which at least three have been settled. (Darryl Fears, Washington Post, Jun. 13). (DURABLE LINK)

June 14-16 – Dealership on the hook. “A Michigan auto dealership that failed to complete the title transfer on a car involved in a fatal accident has been hit with a $12 million jury verdict.” In July 1999 Les Stanford Oldsmobile in suburban Troy allowed Mohammad Bazzi, then 20, to drive away his newly purchased 1996 Camaro convertible although the paperwork to transfer title was not complete. Bazzi was supposed to return to sign the papers, but never made it: two days later, driving intoxicated at an estimated 100 mph on I-75 at 2:30 in the morning, he smashed the car into the rear of a slower moving truck, killing his 18-year-old passenger, Ronny Hashem. Hashem’s survivors sued the dealership citing Michigan’s 70-year-old Owner Liability Statute, “which holds the owner of a car liable whenever the car is being operated consensually”. (Peter Page, “High-Speed Death”, National Law Journal, Jun. 12). (DURABLE LINK)

June 14-16 – Batch of reader letters. Readers take issue with our coverage of a Canadian court’s ruling on welfare reform (we stand accused of citing a conservative columnist) and of the recent suit against a baseball-bat maker by a teenager hit by a line drive; offer a different perspective on the Audubon String Quartet litigation; and track down the drunk driving defense law firm that has trademarked the phrase “Friends don’t let friends plead guilty”. (DURABLE LINK)

June 13 – Breaking news: slaying at Texas law firm. 79-year-old Richard Joseph Gerzine of Vidor, Tex. is in custody following a fatal shooting at the offices of the prominent Beaumont plaintiff’s firm of Reaud, Morgan & Quinn, known for its role in the asbestos and tobacco controversies. The victim was senior partner Cris Quinn. The perpetrator was said to have been angered by the law firm’s refusal to represent him in an asbestos case. (Beaumont Enterprise, Jun. 13; AP/Houston Chronicle, Jun. 13). (DURABLE LINK)

June 13 – “Student gets diploma after threatening lawsuit”. “A threatening letter from her lawyer and an opportunity to retake an exam hours before graduation helped a West Valley high school student get her diploma last month. … On May 22, Stan Massad, a Glendale attorney representing the Peoria family, faxed a letter to [English teacher Elizabeth] Joice asking her to take ‘whatever action is necessary’ for the student to graduate or the family would be forced to sue. ‘Of course, all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present, dealings with this and other students becomes relevant, should litigation be necessary,’ he wrote to the teacher.” (Monica Alonzo-Dunsmoor, Arizona Republic, Jun. 10; lawyer’s letter; teacher’s response; Joanne Jacobs, Jun. 12).

UPDATE: The case has mushroomed into a cause celebre in Phoenix (Arizona Republic coverage: Maggie Galehouse, “Decision to allow Peoria student to graduate draws outrage”, Jun. 12; “State Bar probes threat against teacher over student’s graduation”, Jun. 13; “Failing your classes? Get a better lawyer”, (editorial), Jun. 11; “Pathetic plight in Peoria” (editorial), Jun. 12; Benson cartoon, Jun. 11; Richard Ruelas, “Lawyer made an offer school couldn’t refuse”, Jun. 12). In the blog world, see Thomas Vincent, Jun. 11 and later posts; Edward Boyd, Jun. 11 and later posts; DesertPundit, Jun. 13. And InstaPundit and “Max Power” discuss issues of whether the lawyer might face bar discipline and why the family members have been allowed to keep their names confidential. More update: Monica Alonzo-Dunsmoor, “Peoria district issues an apology for furor”, Arizona Republic, Jun. 15. (DURABLE LINK)

June 13 – “The NFL Vs. Everyone”. “Why is it that football players/owners/teams are in court all the time? And why would the Broncos sue fans? The NFL is a great case study in litigiousness gone haywire.” (Dan Lewis, dlewis.net, Jun. 12; see “NFL Bootleg: Making the Court Circuit”, Bootleg Sports/FoxSports, Jun. 12). Lewis’s blog also calls our attention (Jun. 11) to this article explaining one remarkable implication of new “medical privacy” laws: “Law May Forbid Leagues to Say if Player Is Hurt” (Buster Olney, New York Times, Jun. 11 (reg)) (DURABLE LINK)

June 13 – He’s at it again. It seems Kevin Phillips has published another of his awful books. Here’s what we said about one of the earlier ones. (DURABLE LINK)

June 11-12 – “French ban sought for Fallaci book on Islam”. The true meaning of hate-speech laws? In France, an “anti-racist” group has filed a legal action demanding a ban on the publication of a new book by outspoken Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci criticizing Islamic fundamentalism and defending the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. (Reuters/MSNBC, Jun. 10)(& welcome InstaPundit readers). (DURABLE LINK)

June 11-12 – Malpractice crisis latest. More problems with the notion of suing our way to quality medical care: Philadelphia’s Jefferson Hospital, citing rising malpractice insurance bills, has laid off 99 workers and eliminated 80 vacant jobs. (Linda Loyd, “Jefferson Hospital cuts 179 positions”, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21). Brandywine Hospital, which operates the only trauma center in Chester County, Pa., said it would temporarily close its center, with the result that “trauma patients — the most severely injured accident victims — will be diverted to trauma centers at hospitals in surrounding counties.”. It blamed malpractice costs for difficulty in recruiting qualified physicians (Josh Goldstein, “Hospital closing trauma center”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jun. 5). The closure of a Wilkes-Barre ob/gyn practice typifies the forces driving doctors out of Pennsylvania, according to the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (M. Paul Jackson, “Frustrated doctors look to quit area”, May 1). The supply of neurosurgeons in central Texas is likewise under pressure, resulting in the family of an accident victim’s “being told a city of Austin’s size had no spine surgeon available when they desperately needed one”. (Mary Ann Roser, “Neurosurgeons in short supply”, Austin American-Statesman, May 19). Update: Francis X. Clines, “Insurance-Squeezed Doctors Folding Tents in West Virginia”, New York Times, Jun. 13). (DURABLE LINK)

June 11-12 – Flash: law firm with sense of humor. This one’s been around for a while, but we’ve never paid it due tribute: Denver’s Powers Phillips maintains the only law firm website we’ve seen that’s laugh-out-loud funny (and even manages to tell you a lot about the firm) (& update:Metafilter thread). (DURABLE LINK)

June 11-12 – “San Francisco Verdict Bodes Ill for Oil Industry”. Oil refiners are unhappy about a recent verdict in which a West Coast jury declared that the gasoline additive MTBE, which has a nasty tendency to seep into water tables, is defective and should never have been marketed. The refiners have contended that the federal government itself pushed the industry into adding MTBE to gasoline by way of the Clean Air Act’s 1990 amendments, which mandated the use of reformulated and oxygenated gas to reduce air pollution. At least two earlier courts did accept that defense, but now the industry may stand exposed to potential billions in damages. (June D. Bell, National Law Journal, May 3). Background: Energy Information Administration, “MTBE, Oxygenates, and Motor Gasoline” (Mar. 2000). (DURABLE LINK)

June 11-12 – Welcome “Media Watch” (Australia). On the Australian Broadcasting Corp. program, which monitors the press, Steve Price traces the circulation of the much-forwarded “Stella Awards”, a list of (fictitious, invented) outrageous lawsuits (see Aug. 27, 2001) (June 10). (DURABLE LINK)

June 2002 archives, part 2 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

MORE: The food-industry-defense group Center for Consumer Freedom has been on the warpath against Kennedy and his band of lawyers for a while. It quotes Iowa Agriculture Secretary Patty Judge as saying: “The true agenda of this group is to sue farms and take the monetary rewards back to the East Coast.” (“Trashing Pork, Cashing In”, Apr. 11). Kennedy has estimated “damages” against the industry of $13 billion: “We have lawyers with the deepest pockets, and they’ve agreed to fight the industry to the end,” he has said. “We’re going to go after all of them.” (“Kennedy’s Pork Police Hit Iowa”, Apr. 2; “Waterkeepers, Farmers Weepers”, Dec. 12, 2001) “‘We’re starting with hogs. After the hogs, then we are going after the other ones,’ referring to the poultry and beef industries.” (“Warning”, Jan. 16, 2001, citing “Concerns that pork suit may be extended to other areas,” Des Moines Register, Jan. 8, 2001). (DURABLE LINK)

April 19-21 – Traffic-cams, cont’d. In the controversy (see Apr. 8-9) over the uses and abuses of automated traffic camera systems, a reader writes in (see letters page) to say we were wrong to describe Lockheed Martin as the current contractor on the systems; it actually sold the operation last August to another company. Our apologies. And Eugene Volokh reports on his blog (Apr. 17) that he found some inaccuracies in Matt Labash’s Weekly Standard investigative series on the cameras which Labash and the Standard have been happy to correct. See also “Hawaii scraps ‘Talivan’ traffic cameras”, AP/ABC News, Apr. 11. (DURABLE LINK)

April 19-21 – Clipboard-throwing manager = $30 million clipping for grocery chain. The Ralphs supermarket chain in California had a store manager who over the course of a decade “physically and verbally abused six female Ralphs employees by calling them vulgar names, manhandling them, and throwing items like telephones, clipboards and, in one instance, a 30- to 40-pound mailbag, at them.” So a San Diego jury awarded them $5 million each in damages. (Alexei Oreskovic, “$30M Awarded in Sex Harassment Suit Against Grocery Chain”, The Recorder, Apr. 9)(& update Jul. 26-28: judge cuts total award to $8 million). (DURABLE LINK)

April 19-21 – See you … at the Big Apple Blog Bash Friday night. (DURABLE LINK)

April 18 – “Tampa Taliban” mom blames acne drug. By reader acclaim: “The family of 15-year-old Charles Bishop has filed a $70-million lawsuit against the maker of acne medication Accutane, saying nothing else explains the teenager’s suicidal flight into a downtown Tampa high-rise.” Bishop, whose father bore an Arab surname, left a suicide note praising Osama bin Laden; the county medical examiner’s office found no trace of Accutane in his bloodstream, although it says that does not rule out the possibility that he might have been on the medication, for which he had been written a prescription. Although the maker of the widely used acne drug denies that it causes psychosis or suicidal impulses, its cautious consent form “required the Bishops to agree to tell their physician ‘if anyone in the family has ever had symptoms of depression, been psychotic, attempted suicide, or had any other serious mental problems.’ Julia Bishop, however, did not reveal that in 1984, she and Charles’ estranged father failed in a bloody suicide pact during which she stabbed him with a 12-inch butcher knife.” Mrs. Bishop’s lawyer, Michael Ryan of Fort Lauderdale, calls that earlier suicide pact incident “completely irrelevant”. (Robert Farley, “Suit: Drug behind suicide flight”, St. Petersburg Times, Apr. 17; Natashia Gregoire, “Teen Pilot’s Family Sues Drug Maker”, Tampa Tribune, Apr. 17; “Accutane acne drug maker sued over suicide”, USA Today/Reuters, Apr. 16; Broward Liston and Tim Padgett, “Despair Beneath His Wings”, Time, Jan. 13; Howard Feinberg, “Is Accutane to Blame?”, TechCentralStation.com, Apr. 18; see Feb. 1). Updates: manufacturer wins first jury trial (Margaret Cronin Fisk, “Suits Probe Acne Drug, Depression”, National Law Journal, Apr. 25; Michael Fumento, “The Accutane Blame Game”, National Review Online, May 9). (DURABLE LINK)

April 18 – Judge compares class action lawyers to “squeegee boys”. A Florida judge has rejected the tentative settlement of a shareholder lawsuit filed by Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach against power company Florida Progress Corp. over a 1999 merger, saying the evidence indicated that the suit did not leave class members in a better position than if it had never been filed. Added Pinellas County Judge W. Douglas Baird: “This action appears to be the class litigation equivalent of the ‘squeegee boys’ who used to frequent major urban intersections and who would run up to a stopped car, splash soapy water on its perfectly clean windshield and expect payment for the uninvited service of wiping it off.” (Jason Hoppin, The Recorder, Apr. 17). (DURABLE LINK)

April 18 – Welcome Humorix.org readers. The Linux-humor site started linking to us way back in 1999, if we remember correctly. Also sending us visitors lately: Auckland (N.Z.) District Law Society, Mar. 14 (“For a change of pace, spend some time with this digest of news stories … Most cases reported on are from the U.S., but there are quite a few examples from Europe, Australia, and elsewhere”); WTIC-AM Hartford, “Morning Links”, Apr. 7; American Civil Rights Union “ACLU Watch”, Nintendominion “Site Unseen”, Mar. 31; Dog Brothers Martial Arts (Hermosa Beach, Calif.), Mutual Reinsurance Bureau, Anne Klockenkemper (Univ. of Florida) Media Law Resources, Smith Freed & Eberhard P.C. (attorneys at law, Portland, Ore.), Univ. of Nevada-Reno Tau Kappa Epsilon, RKKA.org (Russian Red Army-themed wargaming); Fureyous.com, Mar. (“My dream site, a site where I can find the entire downfall of civilization due to frivolous and pathetic lawsuits and legal actions”), and many more. (DURABLE LINK)

April 17 – New York Post op-ed on RFK Jr. & hogs. Our editor has a piece today on the op-ed page of the New York Post about the furor that broke out in Iowa when celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told a rally that large-scale hog farms are more of a threat to America than Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. For links to the local Iowa coverage, see our item here from Monday, of which the Post op-ed is an expansion. (Walter Olson, “Osama, the Pigs and the Kennedy”, New York Post, Apr. 17).

April 16-17 – Pharmaceutical roundup. The total cost of the settlement over the diet compound fen-phen has ballooned to more than $13 billion, swollen by mass recruitment by law firms of claimants who defendants believe have suffered no ill effects from the compound at all aside from possible worry. “Wyeth’s general counsel, Louis L. Hoynes Jr., said he believes that in a different legal climate his company might have been able to settle all serious claims for less than $1 billion. That would amount to an average of $1 million each for 1,000 cases.” (L. Stuart Ditzen, “Mass diet-pill litigation inflates settlement costs to $13.2 billion”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 9 — whole article well worth reading). Lawyers for a group of British women have filed what is believed to be the first injury suit over the “third-generation” birth control pill, which they say raises the risk of blood clots, and similar suits are expected to follow in the United States (Mary Vallis, “U.K. suit targets perils of The Pill”, National Post, Mar. 5). In one of the more recent applications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Daubert doctrine, courts have dismissed several lawsuits seeking to blame Pfizer’s anti-impotency drug Viagra for users’ heart attacks, ruling that the expert testimony in the cases was not based on scientific principles that had gained “general acceptance.” (Tom Perrotta, “Viagra Cases Dismissed”, New York Law Journal, Jan. 22). The Nov. 9, 2001 installment of CBS’s “48 Hours” launched a one-sided attack on psychiatric drugs used to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity and told the stories of two parents who say their use of the ADHD drug Adderall caused them to behave irrationally, resulting in the death of their children; but Hudson Institute fellow Michael Fumento finds that much was misstated or left out in the network’s account, including the exact role of the trial lawyers hovering in the background (Michael Fumento, “Prescription for Bias“, “Dawn Marie Branson: A Sad Story Only Half Told“) And although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not chosen to give a green light for the reintroduction of silicone breast implants for American women following the litigation-fueled panic that drove them from the market, they have regained popularity among women in Canada, reports the CBC (“Silicone implants back in style”, Sept. 20, 2001). (DURABLE LINK)

April 16-17 – A DMCA run-in. Tom Veal’s Stromata site, which covers topics ranging from pension regulation to science fiction, had a run-in a few days ago with its hosting service, Tripod, which abruptly closed down access to the site and then took its sweet time about reopening it. The reason? Tripod had received a nastygram from a law firm charging that Stromata was in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not because it had posted any copyrighted material itself, but because it had linked to another site which had (it said) posted an unauthorized translation of a widely discussed piece on terrorism by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Unfortunately, as Veal notes, the incentives under DMCA are for hosts to muzzle speech in haste and un-muzzle at leisure. (“Et Cetera”, Apr. 9). (DURABLE LINK)

April 16-17 – Unlikely critic of litigation. The Washington group Judicial Watch files lawsuits at a manic clip, but now its founder Larry Klayman is taking to the mails to decry our national problem of excessive litigiousness. “One may liken the overall effect of Klayman’s direct-mail sermon against frivolous lawsuits to that of a Weight Watchers commercial starring Marlon Brando or a temperance lecture given by Hunter S. Thompson.” (Tim Noah, “Larry Klayman Decries Evils of Litigation!”, Slate, Apr. 3). (DURABLE LINK)

April 15 – RFK Jr. blasted for hog farm remarks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the highest-profile spokesman for the developing alliance between trial lawyers and some environmentalist groups (see Dec. 7, 2000), “made an ass of himself” in remarks last weekend at a Clear Lake, Ia. rally, according to veteran Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen. Kennedy’s “statement that large-scale hog producers were a bigger threat to America than Osama bin Laden’s terrorists has to be one of the crudest things ever said in Iowa politics. … [Kennedy] brought his Waterkeeper’s Alliance for a rally [in Clear Lake]. It’s a group that is threatening lawsuits against livestock industries. … Rural America needs positive solutions to this problem, not the corrosive rhetoric of another out-of-state political operative or lawsuits from greedy trial lawyers. … What was one of the finest hours of this legislative session was marred by this fool from the East. … Kennedy looks to be cashing in on his family’s name. … If his name were Bob Fitzgerald, he’d be dismissed as another one of the kooks on the fringe of this debate.” Other reaction was not much more favorable: “‘You have to be a complete wandering idiot to make that statement,’ said [Luke] Kollasch [of Algona, Ia.], whose family owns several hog farms and feed and construction companies in northwest Iowa.” (Donnelle Elder, “Big hog lots called greater threat than bin Laden”, Des Moines Register, Apr. 10; “Kennedy’s outrageous rhetoric” (editorial), Apr. 11; David Yepsen, “Kennedy cashes in on family name while acting like a fool”, Apr. 14) (DURABLE LINK)

April 15 – Updates. Stories that seem to have a life of their own:

* Richard Espinosa, “who is suing the city of Escondido because his dog was attacked by a cat inside a city library, now says the attack was a hate crime.” (see Dec. 4, 2001) (“Cat attack now described as hate crime”, MSNBC, Apr. 5)

* “The Florida Legislature has partially undone a landmark Florida Supreme Court ruling issued in November that gave slip-and-fall injury victims the upper hand in lawsuits against supermarkets and other premises owners.” (see Jan. 7). The ruling had required businesses to prove they were not negligent when presented with slip-fall claims. However, trial lawyers extracted a compromise in which plaintiffs will not have to prove that a slippery material was on the floor for long enough for the store owner to have known about it. (Susan R. Miller, “Florida Legislature Passes Bill on Slip-and-Fall Cases”, Miami Daily Business Review, Mar. 27).

* “A Hays County judge has thrown out a default judgment that would have awarded $5 million to a local woman whose near-topless image was used in a national television ad for a ‘Wild Party Girls’ video without her permission. … Judge Charles Ramsay set aside the default judgment, ruling that the plaintiff had listed the wrong company in the lawsuit, and that the video’s makers were not either properly named or properly served.” (see Mar. 6-7) (Carol Coughlin, “Topless suit is groundless, judge rules”, San Marcos (Tex.) Daily Record, Mar. 30).

* More on the symbiotic relationship between state attorneys general and Microsoft competitors (see Apr. 3-4): “An April 2000 e-mail message from the Utah attorney general’s office to Novell, revealed in court, asked for ‘guidance … preferably without involving too many people seeing this language.’” (Declan McCullagh, “Report: MS Foes Bribed Attorneys”, Wired News, Apr. 6). (DURABLE LINK)

April 12-14 – Hey, no fair talking about the pot. During a 20-hour trip from California to Texas pulling a U-Haul trailer, three young women work their way through a bag of marijuana. Of course the ensuing rollover accident is, like, practically totally the fault of their Firestone tires and the U-Haul company, or at least so their lawyers argue in a suit against those companies, even though the tires did not suffer the “tread separation” that has heretofore been seen as the distinctive source of accident risk with the now-recalled Firestones. Now Matagorda County, Tex. Judge Craig Estlinbaum has declared a mistrial at the request of plaintiff’s lawyer Mikal Watts who complained that defense attorney Morgan Copeland “had breached a pretrial order by introducing detailed evidence of marijuana use” during the trip. If we read the AP story correctly, Judge Estlinbaum had ruled that the defense could mention only that portion of the marijuana it could prove the driver consumed, and attorney Copeland, who may now face sanctions in the famously pro-plaintiff county, had improperly let jurors know about the whole bag. The Ford Motor Co. was also named as a defendant but has already settled out of the case (“Texas judge declares mistrial in Firestone case”, Yahoo/ Reuters, Apr. 5; Pam Easton, “Judge declares Firestone mistrial”, AP/ MySanAntonio.com, Apr. 6). Update — additional coverage of ruling: Miriam Rozen, “Mistrial declared in Firestone case”, Texas Lawyer, Apr. 15).

April 12-14 – In the line of fire. Post-Enron, many companies feel the need to seek out savvier and more experienced executives to sit on boards and audit committees, but with escalating fears of personal liability “attracting talent may become nearly impossible. ‘Recruiting directors for the audit committee is like calling them on deck for a kamikaze attack,’ quips [corporate finance officer Bob] Williamson.” (Marie Leone, “Audit Committee? Thanks, But No Thanks”, CFO Magazine, Apr. 5).

April 12-14 – L.A. police sued, and sued. The family of the late James Allen Beck, who died in a fiery shootout with L.A. sheriff’s deputies last August after barricading himself in his home, has filed a wrongful death claim against the sheriff’s department. During the standoff Beck, an ex-police officer with a history of stockpiling weapons at his home, shot and killed Deputy Hagop Kuredjian. (“Mother of gunman who died in shootout files claim”, Sacramento Bee, Apr. 10)(& see Feb. 23, 2000). And: “Heirs of the late rap star Notorious B.I.G. have filed a wrongful death and federal civil rights lawsuit against Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks, two former chiefs and the city of Los Angeles, claiming they did not do enough to prevent the rapper’s death five years ago in a drive-by shooting.” (“Notorious B.I.G. heirs sue LAPD, officials, city”, CNN, Apr. 11).

April 11 – Don’t ban therapeutic cloning. Though not usually the petition-signing types, we (our editor) have signed a petition being circulated by Virginia Postrel’s just-launched Franklin Society opposing the current stampede in Congress to ban all scientific use of cloned human cells including “therapeutic” (non-reproductive) uses, and even the use of imported pharmaceuticals developed via such methods (see “Criminalizing Science” (symposium), Reason, Nov.). If you agree with us that this proposed law is a bad idea, you can sign the petition here and view the list of distinguished signers: despite efforts in some conservative quarters to hand down a party line opposing this potentially life-saving branch of biomedical research, support for it in fact cuts across the political spectrum. For information on contacting elected representatives, see InstaPundit, Apr. 10. (DURABLE LINK)

April 11 – Texas doctors’ work stoppage. Monday’s one-day work stoppage by South Texas doctors outraged at spiraling malpractice costs (see Mar. 15-17) drew national attention (“Texas docs protest malpractice claims”, AP/CNN, Apr. 8; see also Dean Reynolds, “Crushing Cost of Insurance”, ABCNews.com, Mar. 5 (Nev., Pa.)). And a Florida physician has launched an insurance policy for doctors “that aims to provide them with the legal resources they would need to countersue lawyers or expert witnesses filing frivolous lawsuits”. (Tanya Albert, “Frivolous suits feel wrath of Medical Justice”, American Medical News, Feb. 11). (DURABLE LINK)

April 11 – Batch of reader letters. Topics include the “pedal-extender” suit against Ford; OxyContin; suing food companies for waistline problems; police getting ticketed while responding to calls; laws mandating handicap accessibility in private homes; and why schools would send kids home when they have a slight sniffle. One writer upbraids blogger Natalie Solent for thinking it crazy to impose strict product liability on British blood suppliers that currently offer their services free of charge to patients; he thinks she (and by extension we) must not have stopped to consider that blood transfusions can transmit lethal diseases like AIDS and hepatitis.

Best of all, we hear from attorney Jack Thompson, the anti-videogame crusader who has just filed a lawsuit claiming that Sony’s EverQuest game is responsible for the suicide of a user, and he turns out to be every bit as suave and ingratiating as we dared hope (“go to Afghanistan where your anarchist, pro-drug views will be greatly rewarded”), though we wonder whether he caught the phrase “as if” in our original Apr. 3 posting. Mr. Thompson will probably not appreciate Eugene Volokh’s new satirical piece for TechCentralStation.com (“Worse than Internet Addiction”, Apr. 10). (DURABLE LINK)

April 2002 archives, part 2 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Who knows how empty the sky is
In the place of a fallen tower.
Who knows how quiet it is in the home
Where a son has not returned.

— Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) (via Alex Beam, Boston Globe, Sept. 18, who says it’s from a cycle of poems, “Youth”)

September 25-26 – Vast new surveillance powers for state AGs? Mickey Kaus, on Kausfiles.com, expresses rightful unease about a most unpleasant little surprise in the counterterrorism package: he doesn’t “see why state attorneys general, the biggest showboaters in American politics, need to be given the power to employ the FBI’s ‘Carnivore’ email-tapping program without a court order.” He suggests they’ll “probably use it to ferret out tobacco users and sue them”. (“Hit Parade”, Sept. 22; see also Jacob Weisberg, “Microsuits: Why state attorneys general are suddenly suing everybody”, Slate, May 22, 1998). (But note that the contents of the legislative package keep changing rapidly; we couldn’t locate such a provision in the draft versions we consulted on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site.)

September 25-26 – Legal botches encouraged terrorists. “The international jihad arrived in America on the rainy night of Nov. 5, 1990, when [El Sayyid] Nosair walked into a crowded ballroom at the New York Marriott on 49th Street and shot and killed [extremist political figure] Rabbi Meir Kahane… With a room full of witnesses and a smoking gun, the case against Nosair should have been a lay-down. But the New York police bungled the evidence, and Nosair got off with a gun rap. At that moment, Nosair and [sidekick Mahmud] Abouhalima may have had an epiphany: back home in Egypt, suspected terrorists are dragged in and tortured. In America, they can hire a good lawyer and beat the system.” (Evan Thomas, Newsweek/MSNBC, Oct. 1).

September 25-26 – Third Circuit cuts class action fees. In a long-awaited ruling, the 3rd Circuit federal court of appeals last month ordered that a $262 million award of lawyers’ fees be slashed to a yet undetermined level in a $3.2 billion settlement of class action securities litigation against Cendant Corp. and its auditors, Ernst & Young. Objectors had argued that the case had been relatively easy to prove and that the award would pay lawyers at least 45 times their usual rates. The court “also criticized the use of ‘auctions’ to appoint lead plaintiffs’ counsel in securities class action cases”. (Shannon P. Duffy, “Cendant $3.2 Billion Settlement Upheld, but Attorneys’ Fee Award Must Be Reduced”, The Legal Intelligencer, Aug. 29) (see June 20 and Sept. 4, 2000).

The fee squabble had cast a spotlight on the tendency of many big class action firms to contribute heavily at campaign time to elected officials who by controlling state pension funds can put these lawyers in line for big fees by designating them to represent the state in such actions. “Milberg Weiss gave $127,125 to New York state candidates since 1999, including $16,000 to state auditor Carl McCall’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor,” and Barrack Rodos and Bernstein Litowitz have pumped big contributions into such states as Pennsylvania, California and Louisiana. The lawyers hired Harvard law prof Arthur Miller to defend their $262 million fee. (Tim O’Brien, “3rd Circuit Reviews Fees, Counsel Choice in Cendant Class Action Settlement, New Jersey Law Journal, June 4).

In a separate decision, involving a suit against CBS, the same appeals court ruled that “lawyers who represent shareholders in derivative actions [i.e., vicariously on behalf of the corporation] are not entitled to any fees unless the suit benefited the corporation.” It overturned a deal which would have given attorneys more than $580,000 in fees; the attorneys had claimed that the settlement of their derivative suit benefited shareholders by clearing the way for a $67 million settlement of a class action suit, but the judge said the test of benefit was whether shareholders were better off for its having been filed in the first place, not for its having been settled. (Shannon P. Duffy, “3rd Circuit Takes Back $580K in Lawyers’ Fees”, The Legal Intelligencer, Sept. 21).

September 25-26 – “Asbestos column raised awareness”. Steven Milloy of JunkScience.com fields reader reaction to his column raising the question whether asbestos insulation might have enabled the WTC towers to hold out longer before their collapse (FoxNews.com, Sept. 21) (see Sept. 17, 18).

September 24 – From mourning to resolution.

There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.

— Herman Melville, “The Martyr”, on Lincoln’s assassination (via AndrewSullivan.com and John Ellis, FastCompany)

September 24 – “Despite Protection, Airlines Face Lawsuits for Millions in Damages”. The newly passed bill puts the federal government and its taxpayers on the hook for costs of further terrorist strikes in the near term, and assists the airlines in their quest for insurance, but does less than one might imagine to shield them (and a long list of other defendants) from lawsuits over the Sept. 11 attack. (Charles Piller, L.A. Times, Sept. 22). It does not restrict filing of mass suits on creative theories based on damage on the ground, but instead gives victims a choice of whether to apply for government compensation through a “special master” in lieu of suing. Trial lawyers have already begun volunteering to help claimants with the special master process, which could put them in a position to steer those claimants back toward court-based options, especially if the taxpayer-funded compensation packages prove less than generous. And the airline bailout, which includes billions in cash subventions, may come at a high cost of future Washington entanglement for the industry: “A last-minute addition to [the bill] will let the federal government take equity stakes in the cash-strapped carriers and may even open the door to a government role on their corporate boards, lawmakers said on Friday.” (Adam Entous, “Airline Bailout Allows US to Take Stake”, Reuters/Yahoo, Sept. 21) (Yahoo Full Coverage).

September 24 – Blame video games, again. Expect renewed scrutiny of both videogames and flight simulator software, either of which might assist bad guys as well as good guys in honing skills relevant to lawlessness in the air. (David Coursey, “How video games influenced the attack on America”, ZDNet, Sept. 21; Marc Prensky, “Video games and the attack on America”, TwitchSpeed.com, undated). On earlier rounds of agitation against game makers and entertainment companies, see Gwendolyn Mariano, “Columbine victim families sue over violent games”, ZDNet, April 24, and collected commentaries on this site.

September 24 – Miami jury to Ford: pay $15 million after beltless crash. It wasn’t one of the much-publicized Explorer/Firestone cases, but instead arose from the rollover accident of an Econoline van none of whose twelve occupants was wearing seatbelts. A Ford spokeswoman criticized the verdict: “‘No proof of a manufacturing defect was shown,’ she said. ‘This was simply a tragic accident compounded by passengers not being belted.”’ (“Ford to Pay $15 Million in Rollover Case”, Reuters/FoxNews.com, Sept. 21). And the Association of Trial Lawyers of America is showcasing on its website an $18 million jury verdict against GM in favor of an 18-year-old driver who fell asleep at the wheel at 70 mph in his Chevrolet S-10 Blazer SUV. The automaker “tried to introduce evidence that plaintiff had a blood alcohol level between .04 and .07 at the time of the accident, which was illegal given his age. [Plaintiff's attorney Michael] Piuze successfully moved to exclude this fact on the ground that plaintiff had admitted his responsibility for the accident.” (ATLA Law Reporter, May — Lambert v. General Motors).

September 21-23 – “The high cost of cultural passivity”. “FAA’s silly rules did exactly nothing to stop the hijackers” (Mark Steyn, National Post, Sept. 17; “Making it safe to fly” (letters to the editor), Washington Post, Sept. 21). What did help was the revolt of the heroic passengers on United Flight 93 (Rick Reilly, “Four of a Kind”, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 19; Dan LeBatard, “Final heroic act not forgotten by the many saved”, Miami Herald, Sept. 20; some particularly good commentaries from Virginia Postrel on Sept. 20 and earlier days; proposal for a monument to them). Writes Lisa Snell: “I would rather be on a hijacked airplane with someone inoculated by Power Rangers than someone who believes the inherent message of every school institution: that weapons are bad and that the authorities and the government will solve all problems and protect you” (quoted by Joanne Jacobs, Sept. 14).

September 21-23 – Judge to “Sopranos” suit: Fuhgetaboutit. Free speech prevails: “A judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Italian-American organization that accused the makers of the HBO television series ‘The Sopranos’ of offending Italian-Americans by depicting them as mobsters. ….The American Italian Defense Association sued Time Warner Entertainment Co. under the ‘individual dignity’ clause of the Illinois Constitution.” (AP, link now dead; “Judge dismisses ‘Sopranos’ lawsuit”, MSNBC/Reuters, Sept. 19) (see April 6-8).

September 21-23 – “Don’t sacrifice freedom”. We can win this one without giving up what makes us Americans (Glenn Reynolds, FoxNews.com, Sept. 14; Dave Kopel, “Don’t Press the Panic Button”, National Review Online, Sept. 21; Stuart Taylor Jr., “Thinking the Unthinkable: Next Time Could Be Much Worse”, National Journal/The Atlantic, Sept. 19; E. J. Dionne, “To Go On Being Americans”, Washington Post, Sept. 14).

September 21-23 – “Lawsuits From Attacks Likely to Be in the Billions”. Trial lawyers speculate about various targets for the vast amount of litigation they intend to file; on the list are airlines, New York’s much-sued Port Authority and a great many others. (Robert Gearan, New York Daily News, Sept. 19; “In aftermath of terror attacks, lawyers holding off on lawsuits, but they’re coming”, ABCNews.com, Sept. 20; “Attorneys hold off on flurry of lawsuits”, USA Today, Sept. 21; “S&P: Airlines Need Relief From Lawsuits”, Reuters/Yahoo, Sept. 20).

September 2001 archives, part 3 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

It turns out that M-LAW’s Mr. Dorigo Jones was living dangerously by making such remarks. Within days he had received a letter (which he’s shared with us) from “Love Your Neighbor”‘s attorney, Julie Greenberg of Birmingham, Mich.’s Gifford, Krass, Groh, Sprinkle, Anderson & Citkowski, P.C. The tone of the letter might reasonably be called menacing coming from a lawyer: it says that for him to have called her lawsuit unnecessary had “caused damage to my personal reputation in the legal and social community”. It claims to be “particularly disturbed” that Mr. Dorigo Jones would presume to comment on her suit even though he is not an expert in trademark law; “indeed, you are not even an attorney”. And it proceeds to the following bottom-line demand: “In an effort to curb potential ongoing damage to my reputation from your quote in the Free Press, I request that you retract your statement made, and further that you take all references to me or this lawsuit from your [M-LAW's] website, or your affiliated website Overlawyered.com, which is promoted and hyperlinked by your website. I look forward to your prompt response.”

Oh, dear. “Your affiliated website Overlawyered.com“? How’d we get dragged into this? As even casual investigation should have revealed to attorney Greenberg, Overlawyered.com and M-LAW aren’t “affiliated” with each other in any normal sense of that word: we link to them and they link to us, but that’s true of any number of other sites as well. Yet she seems to think Mr. Dorigo Jones has the power to get items removed from our site — or is that she thinks he should take down his site’s link to us? Whichever is the case, we have bad news for her: Mr. Dorigo Jones tells us that he has no intention of removing M-LAW’s link to Overlawyered.com, and we have no intention of removing our previous item mentioning Greenberg’s client, or this one either (& letter to the editor, July 6) (DURABLE LINK)

MORE: According to Bell’s report, Arnold Abbott founded the Florida charity in 1992 “in memory of his deceased wife”. Ms. Sims, who has registered the phrase as a trademark, had earlier challenged Mr. Abbott’s right to the domain name lovethyneighbor.org but lost in arbitration. Attorney Goldstein’s letter says the filing was “necessary” because owners of trademarks can lose their rights if they do not police infringement, and notes that various efforts by her client short of litigation had failed to keep the Florida charity from going right on calling itself “Love Thy Neighbor”. Mr. Abbott, for his part, told reporter Bell that “he is flabbergasted that it is possible to register rights to an expression that ‘has been around for 5,700 years. ‘If she’s right, then every time someone prints a Bible they’d have to pay her a royalty.”

June 20 – “Gambling addiction” class action. “A lawyer in Canada’s Quebec City is launching a class action suit against the province’s gambling monopoly for not warning players about the alleged dangers of its games.” The suit says the video gambling machines are addictive. (Mike Fox, “Addicted gamblers sue in Quebec”, BBC, June 14).

June 20 – By reader acclaim: “dog slobber” slip-fall case. Mary Lee Sowder of Rocky Mount, N.C. is suing a PetsMart store in Roanoke, saying she slipped on canine “slobber” on its floor. She claims knee damage and wants at least $100 grand. (Tad Dickens, “‘Dog slobber’ at pet store caused her fall, woman says in lawsuit”, Roanoke Times, June 19).

June 19 – Keeping child in her lap = homicide conviction. Prosecutors have prevailed on a Chattanooga, Tenn. jury to convict 20-year-old Latrece Jones of criminally negligent homicide in the death of her 2-year-old son Carlson Bowens Jr., “who was in her lap instead of a car seat during a car crash.” When we use the phrase “safety cops”, we’re really not kidding. (“Car seat conviction”, ABCNews.com, June 15) (& letters to the editor, July 6).

June 19 – Tobacco: Boeken record. Per AP and CNN reports, $3-billion jackpot winner Richard Boeken started smoking in 1957, yet “testified that he ‘never heard or read about the health risks of smoking until congressional hearings were held in 1994.’ This claim does not simply strain credulity; it smashes credulity into a million tiny pieces. … Until 1997, California law … classified tobacco as a product that is ‘known to be unsafe by the ordinary consumer…with the ordinary knowledge common to the community.’ Now we see the sort of idiocy that provision was holding back.” (Jacob Sullum, “Beyond belief”, June 12). The Onion weighs in with a satire, if it’s possible to satirize such things (“The $3 Billion Judgment“). See also Robert Jablon, “Los Angeles Jury Orders Philip Morris to Pay $3 Billion to Lifelong Smoker”, AP/Law.com, June 7; Bob Van Voris, “Big Bucks Guy Shows Little Ego”, National Law Journal, June 15 (profile of winning attorney Michael Piuze). And after Salon ran a piece by veteran tobacco-litigation advocate Elizabeth Whelan trying to defend the outcome of the L.A. case it immediately drew an influx of reader mail strongly disagreeing with her (“Tobacklash!”, June 15; letters, June 18). Update Oct. 2, 2004: appeals court orders punitive award cut to a sum not to exceed $50 million.

June 19 – Docs and Dems. The American Medical Association, which used to take a dim view of the litigation biz but now eagerly builds it up as a way of revenging itself against managed care, is tilting its campaign contributions these days toward lawsuit-friendly Democrats (OpenSecrets.org “Money in Politics Alert — New Friends: The American Medical Association, Democrats and the Patients’ Bill of Rights”, June 18). See also Kelley O. Beaucar, “Critics Decry ’1-800- LAWSUITS’ Bill”, FoxNews.com, June 18 (quotes our editor); Fred Barnes, “The Right Medicine” (editorial), Weekly Standard, June 25. And SmarterTimes, the indispensable corrective to each morning’s dose of West 43rd St. tendentiousness, finds a number of misleading assertions in Monday’s New York Times editorial on “patients’ rights”. For instance: “The editorial says, ‘The White House, for its part, says the bill would open the floodgates to a wave of frivolous lawsuits, a claim not supported by the evidence in those states that have adopted similar legislation, including Texas under Governor Bush.’ This is misleading; the Texas patients’ bill of rights included limits on civil damage awards that are not included in the federal legislation to which the White House is objecting.” (June 18 — scroll to “Patients’ Bill of Wrongs”; “The Right Patients’ Bill of Rights” (editorial), New York Times, June 18).

June 19 – “Candles might be polluting your home, EPA says”. A new indoor environmental menace: just what we needed to ruin our wick end. (Traci Watson, USA Today, June 14).

June 18 – Lawsuits on overseas terrorism: guess who foots the bill. “Thanks to Congress’ largesse, U.S. taxpayers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate victims of foreign terrorism. And the tab might soon soar.” Given American jurors’ low opinion of regimes like those of Iran and Libya, trial lawyers often score big awards suing them — which they can then present to U.S. taxpayers for at least partial payment. “Stuart Eizenstat, deputy Treasury secretary under President Clinton, says lawyers are pressing cases under two laws: a 1996 statute that lets Americans file suit in U.S. courts against seven countries on a State Department list of terrorist states, and a 2000 law that authorizes the government to pay some damages. Congress has to approve new awards, but it has in every case so far. ‘It has become a race to the courthouse and then a race to get Congress to appropriate funds,’ Eizenstat says.” (Barbara Slavin, “Taxpayers get the bill when terrorists lose in court”, USA Today, June 14). “Two former hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian kidnappers sued Iran on Tuesday, contending the country was responsible because its Muslim government shields and supports terrorists. The lawsuits, filed by Rev. Benjamin Weir and Frank A. Regier, seek $100 million in compensatory damages and an unspecified amount in punitive damages.” (“Former Iran [sic] Hostages File Lawsuits”, AP/FindLaw, June 13).

June 18 – Villaraigosa and the litigation lobby. One group that may be less than happy about leftist Antonio Villaraigosa’s June 5 loss to James Hahn in the L.A. mayoral race: trial lawyers, who’ve found Villaraigosa a close ally in his powerful post as speaker of the California Assembly. “In the 1997-1998 campaign cycle, Villaraigosa received $612,400 in campaign contributions from personal injury lawyers, a number that works out to be 25% of the almost $2.4 million given to California Assembly candidates,” notes California’s Torrance-based Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (“2001 L.A. Mayor’s Report“, undated). “In the 1999-2000 campaign cycle, he received $220,600 from personal injury lawyers, which works out to be 10 percent of funds contributed to California Assembly candidates.” See also Todd Purdum, “Hahn Wins Los Angeles Mayor’s Race”, New York Times, June 6 (reg).

June 18 – Next time, “endorse” only products you like? Tennis pro Martina Hingis has sued the Sergio Tacchini Italian sportswear company, claiming that its shoes caused her feet to hurt and made her drop out of tournaments. Couldn’t she just have removed the offending footgear? Well, she’d agreed to wear it as part of a $5.6 million endorsement deal. (“Hingis claims shoes injured her feet”, AP/ESPN, June 11; “Shoemaker says Hingis has no basis for claim”, AP/ESPN, June 12).

June 18 – Reader contributions pass $1,000. We’re doing better with the Amazon Honor System than most sites we know, thanks to generous readers like you; our average contribution is nearly $10. Have you done your bit yet?

June 15-17 – Jury: drunk driver hardly responsible at all for fatal crash. A Broward County. Fla. jury has found the state Department of Transportation and a highway construction firm to be 90 percent responsible for the 1995 traffic accident that took the life of former Miami Dolphins linebacker David Griggs. Griggs “had a blood-alcohol level of .16, twice the legal limit of .08, after which a person is considered drunk in Florida, according to the toxicology report from the Broward County Medical Examiner.” A second trial is set for the fall to determine damages. (“Jury: Road firm, government mostly to blame for Griggs’ death”, AP/Sacramento Bee, June 14).

June 15-17 – “Doctor liable for not giving enough pain medicine”. On Wednesday an Alameda County, Calif. jury found Dr. Wing Chin liable for recklessness and elder abuse for not giving sufficient pain medicine to 85-year-old William Bergman, who died three days later of lung cancer. “During the month-long trial, the doctor testified he followed established protocols in prescribing pain medication to Bergman. His attorney Bob Slattery also argued neither the patient nor his family requested that the doctor prescribe more pain medication to alleviate the suffering.” Plaintiff’s lawyer Jim Gearan said Dr. Chin had failed to take training in pain management. (“Doctor liable for not giving enough pain medicine”, CNN, June 14). We wonder whether this case ties in in any way with the phenomenon convincingly documented by Jacob Sullum, namely the widespread undertreatment of pain by doctors in a medical culture swayed both by fear of narcotics themselves and by fear of the enormous hassle from state regulators and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that can descend on the heads of doctors perceived as too ready to furnish narcotics (“Who’ll stop the pain?”, Reason, Jan. 1997).

June 15-17 – “Lender hit with $71M verdict”. A Holmes County, Mississippi jury voted $69 million in punitive damages and $2.2 million in compensatory damages after a group of 23 plaintiffs accused Washington Mutual Finance Group of “goading customers into renewing loans with additional undisclosed charges”. The plaintiff’s lawyer was Rep. Edward Blackmon Jr., who chairs one of the two Judiciary committees in the lower house of the Mississippi legislature; his wife Barbara, also a plaintiff’s trial lawyer, serves in the state Senate where she sits on the Judiciary committee and is vice chair of the Insurance committee. (Jackson Clarion-Ledger, June 14).

June 14 – Wal-Mart-as-”cult” suit: it is about the money. A lawsuit accuses Wal-Mart of maintaining a “cult-like” atmosphere which encourages employees to put in unpaid overtime. “You bet it’s about the money,” said litigant Taylor Vogue. (“Wal-Mart Brainwashes Workers, Suit Alleges”, AP/Omaha World-Herald, June 9).

June 14 – “Lawsuit rocks Virginia string quartet”. Further developments in the ongoing Audubon String Quartet mess, last reported on here June 5, 2000: estranged first violinist David Ehrlich is suing the other three members of the ensemble for $2 million and has obtained a court order preventing them from playing together under the Audubon name or any other group name (they can still use their individual names). Robert Mann, an original member of the Juilliard Quartet, thinks chamber musicians should not take differences to court: “If anyone who becomes disaffected with his group can sue the others for money, it would be disastrous.” (Chris Kahn, AP/ SFGate.com, June 8). Update Nov. 13, 2001: judge awards Ehrlich more than $600,000 in damages.

June 14 – Fee fracas still going 23 years after case filed. Chick Kam Choo was a ship worker killed in 1977 in an accident on a tanker in Singapore harbor. His survivors’ wrongful-death suit against Exxon and other defendants was filed in Houston, Tex., with its big verdicts, rather than in Singapore. It finally settled this January for $2.7 million after protracted battles that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, but as of April the plaintiffs hadn’t seen a penny because of new squabbling between eight different plaintiff’s lawyers over who gets fees. John O’Quinn of O’Quinn and Laminack, whose doings are frequently reported on in this space, says his firm gets it all. But Newton B. Schwartz Sr., C. Benton Musslewhite Sr. and his son Charles B. Musslewhite Jr., Richard Sheehy, Gary Polland, and Joseph C. Blanks all maintain that they deserve some or all of the fees. (Brenda Sapino Jeffreys, “A Piece of the Action”, Texas Lawyer, April 17).

June 13 – Dodge ball on endangered list. “Educators in several states are fighting to ban dodge ball, but the game remains popular with kids.” A professor at Eastern Connecticut State University says the game is “litigation waiting to happen.” (“Educators want dodge ball tossed out”, AP/CNN, June 7). And a touch football game has brought youngsters to court in a Wisconsin broken-arm case unlikely to have any real winners (Tom Kertscher, “Trial is about pals, football, evening the score”, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 10).

June 13 – Antidepressant blamed for killing spree. Three years after Donald Schell went on a murderous rampage, a Cheyenne, Wyo. jury has blamed the episode on Glaxo SmithKline, maker of the anti-depressant Paxil, with an $8 million verdict. (“Shooter’s family awarded $8 million in drug suit”, AP/CNN, June 7).

June 13 – Batch of reader letters. The latest sack of correspondent mail includes a note from Ric Espinosa, who filed the “library cat” suit reported on last month; letters on the ethics of ghostwriting for lawyers, class action suits, Prof. Richard Daynard’s conflicts and their tardy disclosure, the Casey Martin case, and flashlight warnings; along with the possibly relevant lyrics of an Al Stewart song.

June 12 – “Hearsay harassment” not actionable. Diane Leibovitz, a now-retired mid-level manager at the New York City Transit Authority, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the TA because, though she had not herself been a target of harassment, reports had reached her at second hand that other women employees had been. She got a $60,000 jury award after a trial presided over by federal judge Jack Weinstein, but the Second Circuit U.S. court of appeals has reversed it, saying the law does not confer a right to sue on a worker who “was not herself a target of the alleged harassment, was not present when the harassment supposedly occurred, and did not even know of the harassment when it was ongoing”. Leibovitz’s lawyer, Merrick Rossein, a law professor at CUNY and author of a widely used textbook on employment discrimination law, was disappointed: “They’re saying that since she didn’t directly observe the harassment and didn’t prove the harassment actually occurred, it is not cognizable under the theory of hostile environment.” (John Springer, “Court overturns transit authority sexual harassment award”, Court TV/Yahoo, June 11).

June 12 – Ghost blurber case. Almost as fast as Sony Pictures got caught inventing quotes from nonexistent film critic “David Manning” to hype four of its films, a class action lawyer sued on behalf of two L.A. moviegoers whose desire to engage the studio in legal battle no doubt welled up in a wholly spontaneous fashion (Denise Levin, “Sony’s Bogus Blurbmeister Spurs Class Action Suit”, Yahoo/Inside.com, June 8; Anthony Breznican, “2 Moviegoers Sue Sony Over Review”, AP/Yahoo, June 8). And even faster off the dime was Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who seized on the scandal’s very tenuous Nutmeg State connection (the fictitious Manning was said to work for the Ridgefield Press) as excuse for an investigation (“Conn. AG to Investigate Film Reviews”, AP/Yahoo, June 6). According to Jim Knipfel of the New York Press, the investigation may be a wide-ranging one : “Blumenthal is not only upset by the fake critic business, but also by the age-old publicist’s trick of carefully editing lukewarm reviews into raves” via ellipses, and says that may be unlawful too. Where has he been for the past 30 years, Knipfel wonders? “Mr. Blumenthal should find himself some sort of hobby.” (“Billboard: ‘Stunning! … An Amazing Achievement … Seething with Forbidden … Desire!’”, New York Press, June 6 (strong language); Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles “Hit Parade” (left column — scroll to June 8).

June 12 – Bicycles not “motor vehicles”, court rules. Aren’t you relieved? If they had motors, you’d always be buying gasoline for them. (Danielle N. Rodier, “Bicycles Not Motor Vehicles Under Governmental Immunity Statute”, The Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), June 7).

June 12 – Record traffic on Overlawyered.com. Last week set another record for pages served at 31,600 (with about 14,000 distinct visitors). We must have gotten some big publicity Thursday (more than 8,000 pages served on that day) but we’re not sure what it was.

June 11 – Blockbuster Video class action. Yet another headline-grabber from the world-famed courts of Beaumont, Tex.: customers will get various free-rental and cents-off coupons with a notional value approaching $450 million and a real value of some minute fraction of that, while class-action plaintiff’s lawyers will take home $9.25 million. The video chain’s sin was, allegedly, to have made too much money from late fees and to have changed its policies without notifying customers. (“Blockbuster settles suits”, AP/CNNfn, June 5; details; William F. Buckley, Jr., “Trial lawyers vs. sanity”, National Review Online, June 8).

June 11 – “Plastic surgery addiction” patient loses suit. In a unanimous ruling, New York’s highest court last week “tossed a lawsuit from a woman addicted to plastic surgery — she had over 50 operations — who claimed her doctor should have referred her to a psychiatrist before using the knife.” A lower court had ruled that the suit could proceed, raising fears that physicians might have to arrange psychiatric pre-screening of patients before many elective operations (see Aug. 15, 2000) (Kenneth Lovett, “Plastic-Surgery Addict Suit Gets Carved Up”, New York Post, June 8).

June 11 – $5,133.47 a cigarette. That’s how much the jury awarded plaintiff Richard Boeken last week when it told Philip Morris to pay him $3 billion for having enabled his smoking habit, according to calculations by reader Nathan Clark by WSJ OpinionJournal “Best of the Web” (June 8). “Based on Boeken’s claim that he smoked two packs a day for 40 years, Clark figured Boeken had smoked 584,000 cigarettes”, which divided into $3 billion “comes to $5,133.47 per cigarette Boeken smoked. Look for a big increase in teen smoking as word gets around the schoolyards that it’s a ticket to untold wealth.” Update Oct. 2, 2004: appeals court orders punitive award cut to a sum not to exceed $50 million.

June 11– End the dairy compact. Sen. Jeffords (I-Vt.) has been a leading defender of the “indefensible boondoggle” by which Northeastern milk prices are kept high, and his party switch makes a perfect opportunity to get rid of the thing (Jonathan Chait, “Spilled milk”, The New Republic, June 11). And Republican electoral victories in states like West Virginia are dearly bought if the quid pro quo for them is that consumers in the rest of the country have to suffer restrictions on steel imports (“Protectionist Bush?” (editorial), Christian Science Monitor, June 11).

June 2001 archives, part 2 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Appeals courts are now considering Fieger cases “totaling an estimated $50 million to $100 million … Among those cases is $25 million awarded in the infamous Jenny Jones talk-show case and $20 million to a woman who was sexually harassed at a Chrysler plant.” (Update Oct. 25-27, 2002: appeals court throws out Jenny Jones verdict. Further update Jul. 24, 2004: state high court throws out Chrysler verdict). Fieger, who was the unsuccessful Democratic challenger to Michigan Gov. John Engler at the last election, charges that the appeals courts are politically biased against him: “It’s a conspiracy to get me”. However, a reporter’s examination of Fieger cases that went up to appeals courts indicates that the partisan or philosophic background of the judges on the panels doesn’t seem to make a marked difference in his likelihood of success (Dawson Bell, “Fieger’s wins lose luster in appeals”, Detroit Free Press, May 29). “Colorful” barely begins to describe Fieger’s past run-ins with the law and with disciplinary authorities; see Dawson Bell, “Fieger’s skeletons won’t stay buried”, Detroit Free Press, August 13, 1998.

May 31 – “Dead teen’s family sues Take our Kids to Work”. Had to happen eventually dept.: in Welland, Ontario, “[t]he family of a teenage girl killed while driving a utility vehicle at a John Deere plant is suing the company, the school board and the organizers of Take Our Kids to Work day.” (Karena Walter, National Post, May 25).

May 31 – Pale Nanny with an ad budget. The Indoor Tanning Association, a salon trade group, is “worried about proposed legislation in Texas that would outlaw indoor tanning for anyone under age 18, require tanning salons to post pictures of different types of skin cancer, and allow dermatologists and anti-tanning activists to make contributions to the Texas Health Department to pay for an anti-tanning advertising campaign.” You didn’t think these sorts of campaigns were going to stop with tobacco, did you? (“Inside Washington — Presenting: This Season’s Latest Tan Lines”, April 14, National Journal, subscribers only).

May 30 – Supreme Court: sure, let judges redefine golf. By a 7-2 vote, the high court rules that the PGA can be forced to change its rules so as to let disabled golfer Casey Martin ride in a cart between holes while other contestants walk. (Yahoo Full Coverage; Christian Science Monitor; PGA Tour v. Martin decision in PDF format — Scalia dissent, which is as usual the good part, begins about two-thirds of the way down). For our take, see Reason, May 1998; disabled-rights sports cases).

May 30 – Microsoft v. Goliath. “The antitrust laws originally aimed to preserve competition as idealized by Adam Smith. Can they now preserve and promote Schumpeter’s ["creative destruction"] competition? The Microsoft case suggests that they cannot. ” (Robert Samuelson, “The Gates of Power”, The New Republic, Apr. 23).

May 30 – Evils of contingent-fee tax collection, cont’d. Another city, this time Meriden, Ct., has gotten in trouble for hiring a private firm to assist in its taxation process on a contingent-fee basis — in this case, the firm conducted property reassessments and got to keep a share of the new tax revenue hauled in by them. A Connecticut judge has now found that this system gave the firm a pointed incentive to inflate supposed property values unjustifiably, that it had done so in the case at hand, and that the incentive scheme, by destroying the impartiality that we expect of public servants, had deprived taxpayers of their rights to due process under both federal and state constitutions. He ordered the city to refund $15.6 million to two utility companies whose holdings had been overassessed in this manner. (Thomas Scheffey, “Connecticut Judge Blasts City’s $15.6 Million Mistake”, Connecticut Law Tribune, May 3). It’s yet another recognition (see Jan. 10, 2001; Dec. 3, 1999) that when governments hire contingent-fee professionals to advise them on whether private parties owe them money and if so how much, due process flies out the window — as has happened routinely in the new tobacco/gun/lead paint class of lawsuits, which operate on precisely this model.

May 29 – Claim: inappropriate object in toothpaste caused heart attack. A Shelton, Ct. man is suing Colgate-Palmolive, claiming he discovered an extremely indelicate object in a six-ounce standup tube of the company’s regular toothpaste and that the resulting stress caused his blood pressure to escalate over a matter of months, leading him to suffer a heart attack a year later. The company said it does not think its production processes would have allowed the offending object to have entered the tube. (“Man sues over condom in toothpaste”, AP/WTNH New Haven, May 25).

May 29 – States lag in curbing junk science. According to one estimate, only about half of state courts presently follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s standard for excluding unreliable scientific evidence from trials (Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 1993). Where states follow a laxer standard, they run the risk of approving verdicts based on strawberry-jam-causes-cancer “junk science”. A new group called the Daubert Council, headed by Charles D. Weller and David B. Graham of Cleveland’s Baker & Hostetler, aims to fix that situation by persuading the laggard states to step up to the federal standard. (Darryl Van Duch, “Group is Pushing ‘Daubert’”, National Law Journal, May 25).

May 29 – Brace for data-disaster suits. Companies with a substantial information technology presence are likely to become the targets of major liability lawsuits in areas such as hacker attacks, computer virus spread, confidentiality breach, and business losses to co-venturers and customers, according to various experts in the field. (Jaikumar Vijayan, “IT security destined for the courtroom”, ComputerWorld, May 21).

May 28 – Holiday special: dispatches from abroad. Today is Memorial Day in the U.S., which we will observe by skipping American news just for today in favor of the news reports that continue to pour in from elsewhere:

* Swan victim Mary Ryan, 71, has lost her $32,600 negligence claim against authorities over an incident in which one of the birds knocked her to the ground in Phoenix Park in central Dublin, Ireland. She testified that she had just fed the swan and was walking away when she heard a great flapping of wings and was knocked down, suffering a broken wrist. “Ryan said park commissioners should have put up signs warning the public about ‘the mischievous propensity and uncertain temperament’” of the birds, but Judge Kevin Haugh ruled that evidence had not established that the park’s swans were menacing in general, although the one in question had concededly been having “a very bad day.” (Reuters/Excite, May 25).

* In Canada, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal has ruled improper the disbarment of Fredericton attorney Michael A.A. Ryan, whom the Law Society had removed from practice after finding that he had lied to clients and falsified work, reports the National Post. To conceal his neglect of cases which had lapsed due to statutes of limitations, “Mr. Ryan gave his clients reports of hearings, motions and discoveries that never occurred, and when pressed for details of a supposedly favourable judgment, forged a decision from the Court of Appeal. The clients were eventually told they had won $20,000 each in damages,” but in the end Ryan had to confess that he had been making it all up. “The lawyer has admitted to a long-standing addiction to drugs and alcohol, and told the court he was depressed during the period of his misconduct because of the breakup of his marriage.” (Jonathon Gatehouse, “Court gives lawyer who lied to clients second chance,” National Post, May 18).

* Authorities in Northumbria, England, have agreed to pay thousands of pounds to Detective Inspector Brian Baker, who blames his nocturnal snoring on excessive inhalation of cannabis (marijuana) dust in the line of police duty. Baker says that his spending four days in a storeroom with the seized plants resulted in nasal congestion, sniffing, dry throat, and impaired sense of smell as well as a snore that led to “marital disharmony”. (Ian Burrell, “Payout for policeman who blamed his snoring on cannabis”, The Independent (U.K.), April 11; Joanna Hale, “Drugs inquiry made detective a snorer”, The Times (U.K.), April 11). And updating an earlier story (see May 22), a woman in Bolton, Lancashire has prevailed in her suit against a stage hypnotist whose presentation caused her to regress to a childlike state and recall memories of abuse; damages were $9,000 (AP/ABC News, May 25).

May 25-27 – “Judge buys shopaholic defense in embezzling”. “A Chicago woman who stole nearly $250,000 from her employer to finance a shopping addiction was spared from prison in a novel ruling Wednesday by a federal judge who found that she bought expensive clothing and jewelry to ‘self-medicate’ her depression.” Elizabeth Roach faced a possible 18-month prison term for the embezzlement under federal sentencing guidelines, but U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly reduced her sentence, sparing her the big house, in what was evidently “the first time in the country that a federal judge reduced a defendant’s sentence because of an addiction to shopping.” She had bought a $7,000 belt buckle and run credit-card bills up to $500,000. (Matt O’Connor, Chicago Tribune, May 24).

May 25-27 – Columnist-fest. More reasons to go on reading newspapers:

* A New York legislator has introduced a joint custody bill that he thinks would significantly reduce the state’s volume of child custody litigation, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. Leaving aside debates about the other pros and cons of joint custody, one reason it languishes is that it “has been opposed by matrimonial lawyers in the state. ‘They make their living on these divorces,’ said [assemblyman David] Sidikman, a lawyer himself. “… The parents usually start off these cases promising to be adults, but that doesn’t last once the lawyers get involved.” “(John Tierney, “The Big City: A System for Lawyers, Not Children”, New York Times, May 15 (reg)). Bonus: Tierney on the NIMBY-ists who would sue to keep IKEA from building a store in a blighted Brooklyn neighborhood (“Stray Dogs As a Litigant’s Best Friend”, April 13).

* Steve Chapman points out that the recent release of an Oklahoma man long imprisoned for a rape he didn’t commit (see May 9) casts doubt not only on shoddy forensics but also on that convincing-seeming kind of evidence, eyewitness testimony (“Don’t believe what they say they see”, Chicago Tribune, May 13). Bonus: Chapman on the scandal of medical-pot prohibition (“Sickening policy on medical marijuana”, May 17).

* Reparations: “Germans may be paying for the sins of their fathers but asking Americans to stump up for what great-great-great-grandpappy did seems to be rather stretching a point. ” (Graham Stewart, “Why we simply can’t pay compensation for every stain on our history”, The Times (U.K.), March 22).

May 25-27 – “Gone with the Wind” parody case. The legal status of parody as a defense to copyright infringement is still uncertain in many ways, and contrary to a widespread impression there is no legal doctrine allowing extra latitude in copying material from works such as the Margaret Mitchell novel that have become “cultural icons” (Kim Campbell, “Who’s right?”, Christian Science Monitor, May 24; Ken Paulson, “What — me worry? Judge’s suppression of Gone With the Wind parody raises concerns”, Freedom Forum, May 20).

May 24 – “Family awarded $1 billion in lawsuit”. Another great day for trial lawyers under our remarkable system of unlimited punitive damages: a New Orleans jury has voted to make ExxonMobil pay $1 billion to former state district judge Joseph Grefer and his family because an Exxon contractor that leased land from the family for about thirty years left detectable amounts of radioactivity behind from its industrial activities. Exxon “said it offered to clean up the land but the Grefers declined its offers.” The company says the land could be cleaned up for $46,000 and also “claims that less than 1 percent of the land contains radiation levels above naturally occurring levels.” The jury designated $56 million of the fine for cleaning up the land; the total value of the parcel is somewhere between $500,000 (Exxon’s view) and $1.5 million (the owners). (Sandra Barbier, New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 23; Brett Martel, “Jury: ExxonMobil Should Pay $1.06B”, AP/Yahoo, May 22; “Exxon Mobil to Appeal $1 Billion Fine”, Reuters/New York Times, May 23).

May 24 – Humiliation by litigators as turning point in Clinton affair. “It strikes me as relevant that the turning point in the Lewinsky saga was the broadcasting of Clinton’s deposition, an image of an actual human being humiliated for hours on end. It was then that we realized we had gone too far — but look how far down the path we had already gone.” (Andrew Sullivan, TRB from Washington, “Himself”, The New Republic, May 7).

May 24 – Tobacco: angles on Engle. With three cigarette companies having agreed to pay $700 million just to guarantee their right to appeal a Miami jury’s confiscatory $145 billion verdict in Engle v. R.J. Reynolds, other lawyers are piling on, the latest being an alliance of hyperactive class action lawyers Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll with O.J. Simpson defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran (“Lawsuit says tobacco industry tried to hook kids”, CNN/AP, May 23; Jay Weaver, “Tobacco firms agree to historic smoker payment”, Miami Herald, May 8; “Tobacco Companies Vow to Fight $145 Billion Verdict”, American Lawyer Media, July 17, 2000; Rick Bragg with Sarah Kershaw, “”Juror Says a ‘Sense of Mission’ Led to Huge Tobacco Damages”, New York Times, July 16, 2000 (reg); “Borrowing power to be considered in tobacco suit”, AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 1, 2000 (judge ruled that companies’ ability to borrow money could be used as a predicate for quantum of punitive damages)).

May 23 – “Insect lawyer ad creates buzz”. Torys, a large law firm based in Toronto, has caused a stir by running a recruitment ad aimed at student lawyers with pictures of weasels, rats, vultures, scorpions, cockroaches, snakes and piranhas, all under the headline “Lawyers we didn’t hire.” The ad, devised by Ogilvy and Mather, says the firm benefits from a “uniquely pleasant and collegial atmosphere” because it doesn’t hire “bullies, office politicians or toadies”, who presumably go to work for other law firms instead.

However, some defenders of invertebrates and other low-status fauna say it’s unfair to keep comparing them to members of the legal profession. Vultures, for example, “provide a really essential role in terms of removing dead animals and diseases,” says Ontario zoologist Rob Foster. “It’s slander, frankly,” he says, “adding that one exception might be the burbot, a bottom-feeding fish whose common names include ‘the lawyer.’ … ‘Whenever I see a dung beetle portrayed negatively in a commercial, I see red,’ he said yesterday, recalling that in The Far Side comic strip, cartoonist Gary Larson once drew two vermin hurling insults by calling each other ‘lawyer.’” (Tracey Tyler, Toronto Star, Apr. 19). (DURABLE LINK)

May 23 – “Working” for whom? An outfit called the Environmental Working Group has recently taken a much higher profile through its close association with “Trade Secrets”, a trial-lawyer-sourced (and, say its critics, egregiously one-sided) attack on the chemical industry that aired March 26 as a Bill Moyers special on PBS. Spotted around the same time was the following ad which ran on one of the FindLaw email services on behalf of EWG: “Thought the Cigarette Papers Were Big? 50 years of internal Chemical Industry documents including thousands of industry meeting minutes, memos, and letters. All searchable online. Everything you need to build a case at http://www.ewg.org“. Hmmm … isn’t PBS supposed to avoid letting itself be used to promote commercial endeavors, such as litigation? (more on trial lawyer sway among environmental groups)

MORE: Michael Fumento, “Bill Moyers’ Bad Chemistry”, Washington Times, April 13; PBS “TradeSecrets”; Steven Milloy, “Anti-chemical Activists And Their New Clothes”, FoxNews.com, March 30; www.AboutTradeSecrets.org (chemical industry response); ComeClean.org; Ronald Bailey, “Synthetic Chemicals and Bill Moyers”, Reason Online, March 28. The New York Times‘s Neil Genzlinger wrote a less than fully enthralled review of the Moyers special (“‘Trade Secrets’: Rendering a Guilty Verdict on Corporate America”, television review, March 26) for which indiscretion abuse was soon raining down on his head from various quarters, including the leftist Nation (“The Times v. Moyers” (editorial), April 16). (DURABLE LINK)

May 22 – From dinner party to court. “I’m never going to invite people around for dinner again,” says Annette Martin of Kingsdown, Wiltshire, England, after being served with a notice of claim for personal injury from dinner guest Margaret Stewart, who says she was hurt when she fell through a glass and steel dining chair in Miss Martin’s home. Martin says that “up to then we had been good friends,” and that Miss Stewart “looked perfectly fine when she walked out the door that evening. … I feel very strongly about the television adverts that encourage this sort of nonsense. I think the Government should intervene before we become like the Americans and sue over anything.” (Richard Savill, “Dinner party ends with a sting in the tail”, Daily Telegraph, May 19). In other U.K. news, a woman from Bolton, Lancashire, is suing stage hypnotist Philip Green, claiming that during one of his performances “she was induced to chase what she believed were fairies around the hall, drink a glass of cider believing it was water and believe she was in love with Mr. Green,” all of which left her depressed and even for a time suicidal, calling up memories of childhood abuse. (“Woman sues stage hypnotist over ‘abuse memories’”, Ananova.com, May 21) (more on hypnotist liability: March 13). UpdateMay 28: she wins case and $9,000 damages.

May 22 – Razorfish, Cisco, IPO suits. In a decision scathingly critical of the “lawyer-driven” nature of securities class action suits, New York federal judge Jed Rakoff rejected a motion by five law firms to install a group of investors as the lead plaintiff in shareholder lawsuits against Razorfish Inc., a Web design and consulting company. The investor group had been “cobbled together” for purposes of getting their lawyers into the driver’s seat, he suggested. “Here, as in many other such cases, most of the counsel who filed the original complaints attempted before filing the instant motions to reach a private agreement as to who would be put forth as lead plaintiff and lead counsel and how fees would be divided among all such counsel.” Rakoff instead installed as lead counsel Milberg Weiss and another firm, which jointly represented the largest investor claiming losses in the action. “Judge Rakoff noted drily in a footnote that numerous complaints were filed within days that essentially copied the original Milberg Weiss complaint verbatim,” and wondered whether the lawyers filing those copycat suits had taken into account the requirements of federal Rule 11. (Bruce Balestier, “Judge Rejects Lawyers’ Choice of Lead Plaintiff in Razorfish Class Actions”, New York Law Journal, May 8).

Observers are closely watching the onslaught of class action suits filed against Cisco Systems since its stock price declined. Stanford securities-law professor Joseph Grundfest, who “helped craft the 1995 reform act and has worked on both plaintiffs-side and defense cases … said he sees the Cisco case as part of a buckshot strategy by plaintiffs’ lawyers. They are suing multiple technology companies with hopes of extracting a large settlement from at least one. ‘They only need a small probability to make it worth their while,’ Grundfest said. ‘How much does it cost to write a complaint?’”. (Renee Deger, “Cisco Inferno”, The Recorder, April 27). Shareholder suits in federal court are headed toward record numbers this year in the wake of the dotcom meltdown (Daniel F. DeLong, “Lawyers Find Profit in Dot-Com Disasters”, Yahoo/ NewsFactor.com, May 14; see also Richard Williamson, “Shareholder Suits Slam High-Tech”, Interactive Week/ZDNet, Dec. 19, 2000).

May 22 – Welcome SmarterTimes readers. Ira Stoll’s daily commentary on the New York Times mentioned us on Sunday (May 20 — scroll to first “Late Again”). And Brill’s Content has now put online its “Best of the Web” roundtable in which we were recommended by federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski (May — scroll about halfway down righthand column).

May 21– Six-hour police standoff no grounds for loss of job, says employee. “A formerly suicidal insurance executive who lost his job after a six-hour standoff with police at Park Meadows mall [in Denver] is suing his former employer for discrimination under federal and state laws protecting the mentally disabled. The 43-year-old plaintiff, Richard M. Young, alleges he was wrongfully terminated from Ohio Casualty Insurance Co. after the company interpreted a suicide note he wrote to be his letter of resignation. … The civil complaint says Young was on emergency medical leave for an emotional breakdown May 29, 2000, when he drove to the shopping center’s parking garage and was spotted on mall security cameras with a revolver. … Douglas County sheriff’s deputies finally coaxed him into surrendering”. His suit seeks back pay, front pay and punitive damages. (John Accola, “Man who was suicidal sues ex-employer for discrimination”, Rocky Mountain News, May 18). (DURABLE LINK)

May 21 – “Anonymity takes a D.C. hit”. If Rep. Felix Grucci has his way, you won’t be able to duck into a library while on the road to check your Hotmail; the New York Republican has “introduced legislation requiring schools and libraries receiving federal funds to block access from their computers to anonymous Web browsing or e-mail services. … Grucci says it’s necessary to thwart the usual suspects, terrorists and child molesters.” (Declan McCullagh, Wired News, May 19). And did you know that it would be unlawful to put out this website in Italy without registering with the government and paying a fee? New regulations in that country are extending to web publishers an appalling-enough-already set of rules that require print journalists to register with the government. Says the head of the Italian journalists’ union approvingly: “Thus ends, at least in Italy, the absurd anarchy that permits anyone to publish online without standards and without restrictions, and guarantees to the consumer minimum standards of quality in all information content, for the first time including electronic media.” (Declan McCullagh’s politechbot, “Italy reportedly requires news sites to register, pay fees”, April 11; “More on Italy requiring news sites to register, pay fees”, April 12) (via Virginia Postrel’s “The Scene”, posted there May 6). (DURABLE LINK)

May 21 – “Patients’ rights” roundup. Well, duh: “Doctors supporting patients’ rights bills have suddenly become alarmed that some of the proposals could boomerang and expose them to new lawsuits.” (Robert Pear, “Doctors Fear Consequences of Proposals on Liability”, New York Times, May 6 (reg)). “Consumers do not consider the right to sue health insurers over coverage issues a top healthcare priority, according to new survey data released by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA),” which is of course an interested party in the matter; a right to sue “finished last among 21 major health issues that consumers were asked to rank.” (Karen Pallarito, “Poll: Right to sue HMOs low priority for consumers,” Reuters Health, April 26 (text) (survey data — PDF)). And if liability is to be expanded at all, Congress should consider incorporating into the scheme the “early offers” idea developed by University of Virginia law professor Jeffrey O’Connell, which is aimed at providing incentives for insurers to make, and claimants to accept, reasonable settlements at an early stage in the dispute (John Hoff, “A Better Patients’ Bill of Rights,” National Center for Policy Analysis Brief Analysis No. 355, April 19). (DURABLE LINK)

MORE: Greg Scandlen, “Legislative Malpractice: Misdiagnosing Patients’ Rights”, Cato Briefing Papers, April 7, 2000 (executive summary) (full paper — PDF); Gregg Easterbrook, “Managing Fine”, The New Republic, March 20, 2000.

May 2001 archives, part 3 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system