“A federal judge in Manhattan took the unusual step on Thursday of overturning settlements in four lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying the firm that negotiated the deals was seeking excessive legal fees and that the settlement amounts themselves were unreasonable.” Judge Alvin Hellerstein declared that to give the Maryland-based firm, Azrael, Gann & Franz $7 million for representing four Pentagon workers’ families “would reflect a very large windfall,” given that the firm’s “entire strategy seems to have been to coast on the work of others.” Hellerstein also noted that the settlement figures, averaging $7 million per victim, seemed out of line with earlier 9/11 awards for the families of modest wage earners. (Benjamin Weiser, “Judge Overturns Accords in 4 Suits by 9/11 Victims”, New York Times, Jul. 26). More: David Giacalone.

City governments, sometimes in league with private counsel working on contingency fee, “have started suing banks and mortgage companies to recoup their costs” on such services as “fire departments, police, code enforcement or even demolition” in blighted neighborhoods. “The lawsuits were filed in recent months under different theories, in state and federal court. Cleveland and Buffalo filed suits under public nuisance laws. Minneapolis’ suit was brought on consumer fraud grounds, while Baltimore took the unusual approach of filing suit in federal court under alleged Fair Housing Act violations.” Bank of New York says it was included in Buffalo’s suit against 39 lenders even though it neither originated nor purchased loans, but merely acted as trustee. (Julie Kay, “Empty Homes Spur Cities’ Suits”, National Law Journal, May 9).

That’s Carter Wood’s hard-to-improve-on headline over an item on how two youths involved on the perpetrator side of a sensationally vicious attack onboard a Maryland bus are now suing over being barred from the bus system. (”Teen ‘Ringleader’ In Bus Beating Sentenced To Juvy Jail; Boys To Sue MTA, Schools”, WBAL, Apr. 24; Point of Law, Apr. 24; Jeff Quinton, Inside Charm City, Apr. 23; Malkin, Apr. 23).

The purported class action on behalf of unharmed (and even un-inconvenienced) customers is looked on askance at Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog (”It is just far beyond silly.”) and by many readers at Consumerist (via P&S)(earlier).

• Judge expresses surprise at how many law firms want in on fees in Visa/MasterCard issuer settlement [NYSun]
• Mississippi bill would require a lawyer’s presence at real estate escrow closings; so rude to cite the profession’s self-interest as a factor [Clarion-Ledger]
• Following Coughlin Stoia’s lead, Mark Lanier announces he’s expanding into intellectual property litigation [The Recorder]
• Maryland legislation would require state-aided colleges and universities to report on what they’re doing to advance “cultural diversity” [Examiner via Bader/Open Market]
• New era at UK pubs? Under new directive, “employers will risk being sued if a bar worker or waitress complains of being called ‘love’ or ‘darling’, or if staff overhear customers telling sexist jokes.” [Daily Mail]
• ACLU just sued city of San Diego and snagged $900K in legal fees, but that’s no impediment to the city’s council’s enacting a special day of tribute to the group [House of Eratosthenes]
• George Wallace, who’s guestblogged here, hosts twin editions of Blawg Review #153 at his blogs Declarations & Exclusions and A Fool in the Forest, on piratical and Punchinello themes;
• Obama won’t support lowering drinking age [Newsweek]
• Such a shame for entrepreneurial plaintiffs, post-Proposition 64 if you want to sue a California business you might actually need to have been injured [CalBizLit]
• Time mag appeals $100 million Suharto libel ruling [IHT]
• Hey, no fair enforcing that fine print disclaiming liability for sweepstakes misprints [three years ago on Overlawyered]

I was a guest on Ron Smith’s Baltimore-based show, with Bruce Elliott hosting, this afternoon to discuss the possible settlement between the state of Virginia and families of slain Virginia Tech students (coverage: CNN, Washington Post, AP).

A guestblogger will be joining us momentarily, and I’ll be posting less over the holidays. Meanwhile, my pipeline is still backed up with items from the past year that deserve a more serious treatment than a hurried roundup mention permits. Here are four of them:

• More docs moving to Texas? Watch out, they must be quacks! After the New York Times reported that doctors seemed to be showing fresh interest in practicing in Texas since its enactment of litigation reforms, our frequent sparring partner Eric Turkewitz of New York Personal Injury Law Blog quickly countered by noting that disciplinary actions in the state are way up, and — quite a jump here — concluded with a suggestion that the newly arriving docs must be causing quality problems. Among bloggers who took this idea and ran with it: Phillip Martin of Burnt Orange Report. Then Prof. Childs had to spoil the fun by asking whether the doctors being disciplined were in fact newcomers to the state and found that, to judge by an initial sampling, no, they’re not. And the medical blogs then knocked the remaining props out from under the reform-made-care-worse theory by linking to coverage documenting how the increase in disciplinary actions reflected the Texas medical board’s concerted recent effort to get tough on doctors — too tough, said many critics. In other words, the Texas medical profession was doing exactly what many skeptics demanded it do — submit to stricter oversight in exchange for liability reform — and now that very submission was being cited as if it proved that standards of care were slipping.
• Uninjured car owners can sue GM over seatbacks. No class members claim to have been injured, but Maryland appeals court allows class action over cost of replacing allegedly weak seatbacks in GM cars. [DLA Piper; opinion, PDF; Maryland Courts Watcher]
• The litigious stylings of Jonathan Lee Riches. We mostly ignore litigants who file handwritten pleadings from prison cells complaining of obviously hallucinated events, but there’s no getting around it: the South Carolina convict has become a pop culture phenomenon with his scores of lawsuits against sports figures, President Bush, Perez Hilton, William Lerach and Elvis Presley over a host of imagined legal injuries. Some of the coverage: The Smoking Gun, Dreadnaught, Deadspin, Justia, Above the Law. He even has several Facebook fan groups.
• Taxpayers and vaccine-compensation lawyers. Under the federally enacted vaccine-compensation program, notes Kathleen Seidel, “a petitioner who brings a claim in good faith is entitled to reimbursement for reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs, regardless of whether the claim is successful.” (Forget about loser-pays; this ensures that taxpayer-defendants can win but pay the other side’s fees anyway.) What sorts of bills do you think attorneys file for reimbursement under those circumstances? Yep, very optimistic bills, in which they expect taxpayers to shell out for their attendance at “advocacy group meetings, and attendance at a conference of trial lawyers representing autism plaintiffs”. In this case, HHS successfully appealed (PDF) an order that it pay the fees. Seidel’s Neurodiversity blog offers a remarkable trove of insight into litigation relating to autism causation theories, vaccines and thimerosal, and this post is no exception. (Updated to include links.)

Rockville, Maryland: “A Montgomery County jury has rejected a negligence lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed she was attacked by a Canada goose while at a shopping center in 2004, causing her to fall and break her hip.” Suzanne Webster’s attorney said “the store made the situation worse by letting employees feed the geese.” (AP/WJZ.com, Dec. 10).

All-automotive edition:

• Court won’t unseal settlement arising from $105 million Aramark/Giants Stadium dramshop case for fear girl’s father will try to get his hands on money [NJLJ, NorthJersey.com, Childs; earlier]
• Great moments in insurance defense law: you mean it wasn’t a good idea to infiltrate that church meeting to investigate the crash claim? [Turkewitz first, second posts]
• Columnist Paul Mulshine rejoices: Ninth Circuit decision “if it stands, will lead to the end of the SUV as we know it” [Newark Star-Ledger]
• Is it unfair — and should it be unlawful? — for insurers to settle crash victims’ claims too early? [Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog]
• If Ron Krist prevails in shoot-out of Texas plaintiff titans, he vows to have sheriff seize John O’Quinn’s Batmobile [American Lawyer; see also Ted's take earlier]
• In much-watched case, Australian high court by 3-2 split upholds highway authority against claim defective bridge design was blameworthy after youth’s dive into shallow water [RTA NSW v. Dederer, Aug. 30]
• Redesigning Toyota’s occupant restraint system? Clearly another job for the Marshall, Texas courts [SE Texas Record; Point of Law; more]
• Bench trial results in $55 million verdict against U.S. government after Army employee on business runs red light and paralyzes small child [OC Register]
• Vision in a purple Gremlin: her Yale Law days shaped Hillary in many ways [Stearns/McClatchy]
• Zero tolerance for motorists’ blood-alcohol — are we sure we want to go there? [Harsanyi, Reason]
• Driver falls asleep, so of course Ford must pay [two years ago on Overlawyered; much more on our automotive page]

• Hush up with those jokes, now: Lerach Coughlin lawyer hailed as hero after jumping from his BMW to save pregnant woman attacked by pit bulls [ABA Journal]
• The “murky area between zealous advocacy and improper conduct”: Judge Preska sanctions Cleary Gottlieb for litigation abuse [WSJ Law Blog, Lat]
• Out-nannying them all? Edwards says his health plan will legally oblige everyone to go in for checkups with the doc [AP; MagicStats, Howard, Althouse]
• Apparently we missed out on the Aug. 31 celebration of Love Lawyers Day [Giacalone]
• To settle lawsuit by psychiatrist’s family, Augusten Burroughs agrees to call “Running with Scissors” a “book” rather than “memoir” [Althouse]
• Will contest over Maryland judge’s estate has dragged on for fourteen years [Washington Post]
• Recap of Flea fiasco (doc liveblogging his own trial); we get randomly mentioned [American Medical News; earlier]
• “Viacom charges man with violating his own copyright, after he YouTubed their program that used his video.” [Reynolds](but see: Evan Brown via Coleman]
• Is your lawyer a “chicken catcher” or a “chicken plucker”? [KevinMD]
• When if ever should “best interest” custody standard override parent’s right to free exercise of opinion, religion, cultural affiliation, etc.? [series of Eugene Volokh posts]
• Don’t forget to join our new Facebook group with distinctive content [if you're a member]
• New at Point of Law: Texas judge’s son withdraws from odometer class action; what do environmentalist litigators have against whales?; N.Y. Times’s born-yesterday Vioxx coverage (and this from Ted, which is pretty devastating); Dickie Scruggs takes down an insurance commissioner; sexual assault foreseeable when fraternity left in possession of unsupervised motel room? Marshall, Texas dignitaries rally to save their special court; and much more.

Minutes after being shot several times, Ibrahim Sidibe and Nicholas Watson identified 16-year old Francesco Kelly as the shooter. Kelly was arrested for the Silver Spring bus stop attack and convicted of first-degree attempted murder in 2003. Maryland’s high state court threw out the conviction on the grounds that Kelly’s inability to call two witnesses after the judge ruled (without a state objection) that their testimony was inadmissible hearsay violated Kelly’s rights. On retrial, a jury acquitted Kelly, to the dismay of Sidibe (who is paralyzed from the shooting) and Watson, who, perhaps implausibly, blames the shooting for his later criminal career. Kelly did not call the two witnesses whose testimony his attorneys previously claimed materially affected his ability to get a fair trial. The lawyers who made that argument to the Maryland Court of Appeals will suffer no consequences. (Ernesto Londoño, “As Suspect Is Acquitted, Shooting Victims Protest”, Washington Post, Aug. 2).

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In two separate New Jersey cases, building contractors RSA Enterprises and WBG Builders are suing websites that carried consumer complaints about them; in a third case in Maryland, a suit by SCS Contracting Group names as defendant the well-known site Angie’s List, which compiles user reviews of home-improvement services. (Truman Lewis, ConsumerAffairs.com, May 4). More: John Kelly, “Homeowner’s Web Gripe Draws Contractor Lawsuit”, Washington Post, Mar. 13 (SCS Contracting versus Angie’s List); Eric Goldman, Apr. 25 (RSA Enterprises versus Rip-Off Report, and Google). P.S. Eric Goldman adds further details.

In June 2006 (Overlawyered), a Maryland resident named Arthur Hoyte, in conjunction with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, sued Kentucky Fried Chicken for selling food made with trans fats; he claimed that he didn’t realize (despite being a medical doctor!) that fast food might not be the healthiest option for his diet. And this, of course, was KFC’s fault.

Yesterday, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, pointing out that it didn’t even identify any injury suffered by Hoyte, and mocking him for pretending not to realize that fast food might contain trans fats. (”The suggestion is that, by its silence, KFC misled plaintiffs into believing that its products did not contain harmful trans fat. This is a questionable premise at best [...] Especially since, as plaintiff submits, consumers have a ‘growing awareness of trans fat and the need to avoid it.’ If consumers are increasingly aware of trans fat, where do they expect to find it if not in fast food restaurants?”)

This is a big victory for restaurateurs — as KFC pointed out in its motion, under the logic espoused by Hoyte (who was seeking class action status), effectively everyone who ever ate a meal at a restaurant would have a cause of action against the restaurant, and could claim a minimum of $1500 in damages. (Although Hoyte’s claim was about trans fats, the same reasoning would apply to virtually every other ingredient in existence, since any one of them might represent a potential health risk if eaten to excess.)

But it certainly won’t end the CSPI’s attempt to achieve via litigation what it can’t through regulation; Hoyte’s claim failed only because D.C. courts have narrowly interpreted the badly-drafted D.C. Consumer Protection Act to require that plaintiffs demonstrate an injury before suing, and because he wasn’t creative enough in drafting his complaint to allege the right kind of injuries. This suit was no more frivolous than the similar suits filed against McDonalds, some of which courts have been extremely tolerant of. (See, e.g. Sep. 2006)

Update: Hans Bader comments over at CEI’s Openmarket blog, noting the irony that at one time, CSPI actually used to teach that trans fats were safer than saturated fats.

Last month, Mohammed A. Hussain went to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore for a medical procedure. Before it began, he wanted to pray; he alleges he was mistreated by a hospital security guard, who “proceeded to manhandle him, yell racial epithets at him, push him down the corridor and order him to exit the hospital.”

So, on Friday Hussain filed a $30 million lawsuit, alleging assault, battery and the ubiquitous emotional distress. But (you guessed) it:

Hussain’s attorney, David Ellin, said his client sued the hospital because he did not think executives were taking his case seriously enough.

“He felt the only way to get their attention and make any changes was to really put their feet to the fire and file a lawsuit,” Ellin said.

Ellin said Hussain’s aim with the suit is not to win compensation but to raise awareness about Islam and religious prejudices.

“This is really done to try to educate people on the religion of Islam and make people more tolerant and just educate them on different religious backgrounds,” Ellin said.

And if he happens to also get $30 million for it, hey, so much the better.

The Legal Times has a great deal more about the litigiousness of Mr. Sibley:

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Once again, second thoughts prove unavailing after modesty is cast to the winds: “A magazine that published a photograph of a woman baring her breasts at a pig roast for motorcycle enthusiasts did not intrude on her privacy, a federal judge has ruled. Tonya Barnhart sued Paisano Publications LLC, publisher of Easyriders magazine, after it ran the picture of her in its March 2005 issue, claiming unreasonable intrusion, false light invasion of privacy and appropriation of her likeness.” But U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz of Maryland ruled against Barnhart on summary judgment. Her behavior “cannot reasonably be said to have constituted a private act,” Motz wrote. “She exposed herself at an outdoor fundraising event open to any members of the public who purchased a ticket.” (”Judge: Photo of woman baring her breasts didn’t violate privacy”, Examiner.com, Oct. 23; “Woman Can’t Sue Magazine After Flashing Breasts”, AP/WBAL, Oct. 23; link to Memorandum and Order). Similar: Jul. 4, 2006, etc.

I was a guest on the high-rated Baltimore show this afternoon, discussing my BlackBerry column.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals recently vacated a “substantial” jury verdict in a defamation case against The Boston Phoenix, finding that the lower court was too quick to earlier rule on summary judgment that the plaintiff, a Maryland state prosecutor, was not a “public figure” for purposes of libel law.

Judge Selya chose an interesting metaphor to open the Court’s opinion:

“The oenologist’s creed teaches that we should drink no wine before its time. Much the same
principle applies to summary judgment; it is a deliciously helpful device if properly timed, but one that can leave a sour taste if brought to bear on an insufficiently fermented record.”

Orson Wells introduced us to that motto on behalf of that tower of oenological perfection, Paul Masson. But like the wine of Paul Masson, I find Judge Selya’s stretching of the metaphor a little dry on the palate.