Tagged as:
AAJ,
bar associations,
Chicago,
child protection,
feeing frenzy,
immigration law,
judges,
New York,
politics,
tort reform,
workers' compensation
- Florida man and attorney file multiple ADA complaints against businesses in Seminole-Largo area [Tampa Bay Newspapers]
- “The growing ambitions of the food police”:
dietary paternalism in Bloomberg’s NYC and Washington, D.C. doesn’t go over well with writers at Slate [William Saletan, Jacob Weisberg, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Glenn Reynolds]
- Assumption of risk is alive and well in New York cases over sports and spectator injuries [Hochfelder first, second, third posts, NYLJ]
- Favorable review of William Patry, “Moral Panics and the Copyright Laws” [BoingBoing]
- Kentucky high school case: “Coach Acquitted in Player’s Heatstroke Death” [ABA Journal]
- Olivia Judson on the Singh case and the many problems with British libel law [NYT; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Kids behave stupidly with girlfriends/boyfriends or dates, then the law ruins their lives [Alkon, Balko, Sullivan]
- “Report a bad doctor to the authorities, go to jail?” [Orac/Respectful Insolence, Texas; disclosure of patient and official information alleged against nurses]
Tagged as:
ADA filing mills,
assumption of risk,
baseball,
crime and punishment,
nanny state,
New York,
obesity,
privacy,
sports,
United Kingdom
The New York Post reports on a putative class action brought by Marc Verzani complaining that Costco’s 16-oz shrimp platter doesn’t hold 16 ounces of shrimp. The SDNY judge noted that the platter holds other materials such as sauce and lemon wedges, and simultaneously denied and ridiculed the preliminary injunction motion. Verzani was alleging $40 million in annual damages.
Tagged as:
class actions,
fraud,
New York
At a Dix Hills, Long Island golf course, Dr. Azad Anand was injured when his golfing buddy hit the ball flying without yelling the traditional cry of “fore”. A New York appellate court, however, “said getting hit by an errant ball is an ‘inherent risk of the game of golf.’” [AP/Staten Island Advance] More: John Hochfelder discusses the concept of the “foreseeable danger zone“.
Tagged as:
assumption of risk,
golf,
New York
If allegations by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo are true, one of the most fundamental elements of due process for civil defendants — notice of a pending legal action through service of process — simply gets ignored in thousands of instances. “Sewer service” was a major concern of court reformers in the 1960s; it sounds as if the problem may never actually have gone away. [Newsday, Popehat]
Tagged as:
debtor-creditor law,
New York,
procedure
Dustin Dibble was intoxicated when a Manhattan subway train ran over him in 2006, but a jury found the transit authority 65% responsible in February: $2.3 million for the lost right leg.
James Sanders stumbled onto the tracks and was hit by a train in 2002, but a New York City jury again found him only 30% responsible: $7 million for a lost right leg and eye.
Gloria Aguilar did not look both ways when she crossed the street; there was a dispute whether she was in the crosswalk. A Manhattan jury–after a seven-week trial–found the transit authority 100% responsible, and awarded $27.5 million for her lost left leg; a judge refused to reduce that figure.
Clearly a left leg is more valuable than a right leg. Or, as I’ve noted several times in the past, noneconomic damages are essentially random jackpots.
New York City is appealing all three verdicts. (Liz Robbins, “Woman Run Over by Bus Is Awarded $27.5 Million”, New York Times, Apr. 16).
Tagged as:
deep pocket,
jackpot justice,
New York,
noneconomic damages,
personal responsibility,
remittitur,
taxpayers
The New York Times quotes my testimony to the hearing on H.R. 847.
Unfortunately, the story incorrectly refers to AEI as a “lobbying organization,” which it is definitively not. It is unimaginable how the Times could have made this mistake, given that just three weeks ago, they had to correct an identical mistake; the senior editor has promised me a correction.
Tagged as:
Ground Zero dust lawsuits,
media bias,
New York,
New York Times,
September 11,
Ted Frank,
workers' compensation
Last year New York trial judge Herman Cahn ruled in favor of class-action giant Milberg in a high-profile dispute over whether it could share its winnings from past cases with disgraced felon and former name partner Melvyn Weiss, the firm’s former driving force. Judge Cahn stepped down from the New York bench in December, and now it develops has been hired by Milberg as its “distinguished” new attorney. And you — with the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists today — certainly have a suspicious mind. There probably won’t be any shortage of funds with which to pay the former jurist: an American Lawyer headline last month read “Milberg Among Plaintiffs Firms Awarded $120 Million in Xerox Class Action”.
Tagged as:
judges,
Melvyn Weiss,
Milberg Weiss,
New York
“Tracing the legal principles behind a New York statute on lawyer deceit to a law adopted by the English Parliament in 1275, the New York Court of Appeals has determined that an attorney can be subject to treble damages in New York for an unsuccessful attempt to deceive a court. Responding to certified questions from the 2nd Circuit, the Court of Appeals ruled that the ‘unique statute of ancient origin’ was not a codification of common law fraud, and applied to attempted deceptions as well as successful ones.” [Joel Stashenko, New York Law Journal]
Tagged as:
New York,
sanctions
One can almost fill an entirely separate blog with variations on the McDonald’s hot coffee case. In Manhattan, 77-year-old Rachel Moltner ordered a hot tea from a Starbucks, but had trouble removing the tightly-secured lid, spilling the beverage all over her. (You will recall other lawsuits complaining that the Starbucks lids are not tight enough.) Moltner not only blames Starbucks for her resulting second- and third-degree burns (and recall that the raison d’être of the Stella Liebeck suit was the false claim that only McDonald’s served beverages that were hot enough to cause third-degree burns), but for the broken bones she suffered when she fell out of bed in Lenox Hill Hospital while being treated for burns. Moltner’s asking for $3 million.
Press coverage in the NY Post (h/t P.G.) is short on legal details (though one is encouraged to see Starbucks publicly defending themselves, an apparent change in policy). But I’ve downloaded and uploaded the complaint, which was filed in state court and removed to federal court. The kitchen-sink allegations include a defective cup, defectively hot tea, and a failure to warn. Right now the parties are haggling over federal removal jurisdiction, as Starbucks waited more than thirty days after receiving the complaint–until a formal demand for money was made–to seek removal. This is an interesting example of sandbagging; if defendants remove cases simply on the possibility that alleged damages will exceed the amount-in-controversy requirement, they may incorrectly remove cases that should remain in state court, but if they wait for the formal confirmation from the plaintiff, they may face the allegation that they’ve missed the 30-day window to remove a case–something to consider when plaintiffs’ attorneys complain that defendants reflexively remove cases to federal court that don’t belong there. Moltner has a good argument that Starbucks waited too long to remove, because alleged damages would have clearly exceeded $75,000 despite the lack of an ad damnum clause in the complaint citing a number, but the consequence of such a ruling will be that defendants will be forced to prematurely remove cases that perhaps should not be removed. (Moltner v. Starbucks Coffee Co., #: 1:08-cv-09257-LAP-AJP (S.D.N.Y.)).
Tagged as:
failure to warn,
hot coffee,
New York,
procedure,
proximate cause,
Starbucks
Coyote also points to this page, which magically promises simultaneously to reduce health premiums while requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions and doing lots of other generous stuff. Total discussion of medical liability issues consists of the following bullet point:
Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.
Yes, because suppressing current malpractice insurance rates by adopting artificially rosy premises as to future payouts worked out so well when tried in New York. Update Monday: transition yanks entire “Agenda”, this section and others.
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
insurers,
medical malpractice insurance,
New York
The office of New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo “said it planned to file a lawsuit this week against Arbitron, the company that compiles the data, because of concerns that minority listeners were not being adequately represented. … Recruiting and retaining enough respondents from these demographic groups [blacks and Hispanics] has proved difficult for Arbitron, leading some stations that cater to urban and ethnic audiences to claim that they are not being sufficiently counted.” (Brian Stelter, “Cuomo to Sue Radio Ratings Company, Claiming Minorities Are Underrepresented”, New York Times, Oct. 7).
Tagged as:
attorneys general,
broadcasters,
New York
We covered this legal malpractice claim last year, with particular attention to the defendant law firm’s argument that it didn’t matter whether the case was handled flawlessly since it was obviously low on merit in the first place. Now a New York appellate court has reversed the trial court and dismissed the action on other grounds. (Scott Kreppein, Sept. 17).
Tagged as:
legal malpractice,
New York
