- Alleged wife murderer “sues J.P. Morgan for cutting off his home equity line of credit.” Reason cited: “imprisonment”. [Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider via Fountain]
- Charles Krauthammer on the need to “reform our insane malpractice system. … I used to be a doctor, I know how much is wasted on defensive medicine.” [Der Spiegel interview]
- Popehat looks back on turning two, in customarily entertaining fashion [unsigned collective post]
- Sigh: “Chamber of Commerce Sues ‘Yes Men’ for Fake News Conference” [ABA Journal]
- Coverage mandates explain a lot about why health insurance is so much costlier in some states than others [Coyote] More: Tyler Cowen (autism treatment)
- Watch out for those default judgments: PepsiCo hit with $1.26 billion award in Wisconsin state court, says word of suit never got to responsible officials within the company [National Law Journal]
- Ohio appeals court: characterizing incident as “Baby Mama Drama” is not prosecutorial misconduct [The Briefcase]
- Ideological tests for educators? On efforts to screen out would-be teachers not seen as committed enough to “social justice” [K.C. Johnson, Minding the Campus]
Tagged as:
banks,
defensive medicine,
insurance,
mortgages,
Ohio,
on other blogs,
prosecution,
schools,
soft drinks,
Wisconsin
- Uh-huh: new report from federal Legal Services program calls for gigantic new allocation of tax money to, well, legal services programs [ABA Journal]
- “Judge: Man’s a ‘vexatious litigator’” [Cincinnati.com]
- Wisconsin governor signs bill requiring prescription to buy mercury thermometer [Popehat]
- “Injured by art?” Woman sues Museum of Fine Arts Houston after fall in artist-designed light tunnel [Mary Flood, Houston Chronicle "Legal Trade"]
- On Carol Browner and the cry of “environmental racism” (a/k/a “green redlining”) [Coyote]
- New York: “Lawyers implicated in $9 million mortgage fraud” [Business Insider]
- In Canada, as in the U.S., medical privacy rules hamper police investigations [Calgary Herald]
- Stalin’s grandson loses lawsuit in Russia against newspaper that supposedly defamed the dictator [WSJ Law Blog, Lowering the Bar, Volokh]
Tagged as:
art and artists,
Canada,
Cincinnati,
environment,
HIPAA,
Houston,
legal services programs,
mortgages,
redlining,
Russia,
serial litigants,
Wisconsin
Apparently thousands of British borrowers had guns held to their heads when they signed on to mortgages that provided low or zero interest rates but promised the lenders the lion’s share of future increases in home value. The subsequent huge runup in housing prices in Great Britain made this a great deal for the banks, and some of the homeowners are now taking their retrospective buyers’ remorse to court in a group action. [Independent] Note the interesting use of the phrase “trapped in their homes and unable to move”, which appears from context to mean “free to move, but lacking the large accumulation of equity that they wish they had”.
Tagged as:
mortgages,
United Kingdom
- Online game purveyor Evony threatens to sue UK critic in Australian court [GameSetWatch, Ken at Popehat, Patrick at Popehat]
- 106: number of (counted) cases filed since 2005 that blame errant grapes for slip-fall injuries [ABA Journal]
- Bayonne, N.J.: “Connolly suing county for $1M over job switch” [Jersey Journal; background (city councilman took six months off from job as coordinator of 9/11 emergency call center; "doctors won't let him go back because it's too stressful.")]
- “Lessons from Andrew Sullivan’s pot bust” [Sullum, Reason] More: Patrick at Popehat.
- “The Appraisal Debacle: How Not to Regulate” [Jack Guttentag, Yahoo Finance, via Fountain]
- Bizarre: “Paralegal Guilty in Fake-Libel-Suit Scam That Briefly Won $3M” [ABA Journal]
- Idea for immigration reform: “Let the smart people in”. [Farhad Manjoo, Slate, via Alkon] More: “Free the H-1Bs, free the economy” [Vivek Wadhwa, TechCrunch]
- Academic finds that depending on whom you ask, “It’s not about the money” or maybe it is [Relis, SSRN/Pittsburgh 2007, via Burch, Mass Tort Lit]
Tagged as:
Australia,
food safety,
forum shopping,
immigration law,
libel slander and defamation,
mortgages,
New Jersey,
not about the money,
public employment,
slip and fall,
videogames
- Federal court rules “shy bladder syndrome” an ADA-protected disability [World of Work via Hyman]
- “Goldman Sachs Backs Down in Long Legal Battle With Blogger” [American Lawyer, WSJ Law Blog, Coleman, earlier]
- San Diego: unforeseen consequences of “anti-blight” lender regulation [Outside the Box]
- 1,000 lose jobs as environmental litigation halts Northern California refinery project [Wood, ShopFloor, update]
- City of Detroit lawyers on ethical hot seat after former mayor’s texting coverup scandal [ABA Journal, earlier]
- What happens when IP law firms breed homegrown patent trolls? [Ron Coleman]
- “It’s kind of like the practice of law, except that the clients are more likely to leave happy.” [Glenn Reynolds being naughty on Instapundit]
- U.K.: Owner of copyright to John Cage’s avant-garde “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence” work sues later impresario whose album track includes one minute of silence [seven years ago on Overlawyered; New Yorker treatment]
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
Detroit,
disabled rights,
environment,
mortgages,
music and musicians,
oil industry,
patent trolls,
San Diego
From Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider, the story of the Long Island retail developer who was comfortable in a nice $40 million loan, until the lenders began waving their tempting if predatory offers to borrow more than that.
Tagged as:
banks,
mortgages
- “Sioux split on suit seeking money for Black Hills” [Associated Press]
- More on nomination of Mothers Against Drunk Driving CEO to head highway safety agency [Balko, see also comments on earlier post]
- Push by advocates in Congress to extend shakedown-enabling Community Reinvestment Act to all financial institutions [Victoria McGrane, Politico] And some numbers from Bank of America raise doubts about those oft-heard “CRA default rates lower than regular default rates” assertions [Weisenthal, Business Insider]
- Illinois attorney general Madigan to Craigslist: purge vice ads or I’ll see you in court [L.A. Times]
- Here and there, acknowledgments in the press of the damaging effects of laws entrenching auto dealers against termination [L.A. Times via Craig Newmark]
- How many people get arrested for “contempt of cop”? [Coyote Blog] Blogosphere has helped spread awareness of police-abuse issues [Greenfield]
- Virginia Postrel: I told you so on that light bulb ban story [earlier]
- U.K. law reform panel: “charlatan” and “biased” expert witnesses put defendants at risk of wrongful conviction [Times Online]
Tagged as:
auto dealership protection laws,
Craigslist,
expert witnesses,
Indian tribes,
MADD,
mortgages,
police,
South Dakota
by SSFC on December 24, 2008
Desiderata from the web, mostly off-topic:
- How the mighty have fallen: A German solar power company offered to buy out GM’s Opel subsidiary, which survived the worst of the Great Depression, two World Wars, Nazi expropriation, allied bombing, and Soviet takeover, for a billion Euros, but GM had to front the Euros on credit. Fortunately the American government intervened, offering billions of Euros with no preconditions. The linked article, translated from French, is recommended to those who find “Engrish” funny, as well as those who want to know what Europeans think of stupid Americans, safe in the knowledge that their articles won’t be translated into Engrish;
- That was pretty long for a microblog, wasn’t it? This is shorter: The Mos Eisley Spaceport of the Blogosphere;
- A very funny web comic (a la xkcd) explaining the mortgage crisis – strong language (Via Nancy Friedman);
- Out of the mouths of babes, a Christmas parable, complete with dinosaurs;
- Disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer observes that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” (Via Above the Law);
- Money for nothing. Focus groups where participants get cash for attendance may come with a catch;
- Buy a lemon of a used car, go directly to jail, and get a tax lien from the IRS – an automotive horror story from TaxProf Blog;
- What Barack Obama isn’t telling about contacts with Rod Blagojevich.
We’ll have something of substance up later today.
Tagged as:
Eliot Spitzer,
humor,
mortgages
Now-disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich pushed Illinois into risky mortgage lending and did his best to politicize housing finance (Carney, Dec. 9).
Tagged as:
Illinois,
mortgages
“In what appears to be the first legal action of its kind, an association of community-based organizations has filed a federal civil rights complaint against two of the three largest Wall Street ratings agencies, charging that their inflated ratings on subprime mortgage bonds disproportionately caused financial harm to African American and Latino home buyers.” (Kenneth Harney, Washington Post, Nov. 29; Hans Bader, CEI “Open Market”, Nov. 30).
P.S. Mickey Kaus (permalinks gone again, scroll to Dec. 1):
Hmmm. Didn’t community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining? I think they did. It’s one thing to argue that they maybe weren’t the major cause of the subprime meltdown. It’s another for them to pose as victims wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up (including the securitization that enabled banks to keep up “reverse redlining”).
Tagged as:
discrimination law,
mortgages
A federal judge has declined to order mortgage watchdog website Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter to remove allegedly defamatory reporting about “the Grant America Program, a seller-financed down payment assistance program for low- to moderate-income homebuyers”. Sam Bayard at Citizen Media Law Blog has the details (Nov. 11).
Tagged as:
libel slander and defamation,
mortgages
