Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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That’s one claim in a lawsuit by the government of Arlington, Virginia against such a plan. The chair of the county board says the issue never came up in county discussions and “only arose [in the lawsuit] because the environmental review includes socioeconomic impact”. [MyFoxDC via Below the Beltway]
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Lowering the Bar takes note of another little advance for criminalization.
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Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit to block construction. [Santa Barbara Daily Sound via Popehat]
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Now the parents of the 15-year-old, from Staten Island, N.Y., are planning a lawsuit. [Gothamist, Staten Island Advance] More: Matthew Heller, OnPoint News, TechDirt. Carter Wood is reminded of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft from Struwwelpeter. And Bruce Carton wonders whether warnings on cellphones are coming (”do not text while walking, could lead you to fall in manhole…”).
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And many happy returns to California taxpayers for the $8.6 million, courtesy of a Monterey County jury. Lowering the Bar: “I can’t remember how many times I have tried to warn people that bad things were going to happen if we didn’t tame our state’s boars and train them to be alert for drunk drivers when crossing the street. Why don’t people listen?”
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Or what passes by that name: lawyers for the ACLU say the design of a Milwaukee highway project is unfair to minorities (Rick Esenberg, Prawfsblawg; complaint, PDF, at WisPolitics.com).
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The liberalization of contingency fees in England has brought about a marked rise in pothole claims against local government authorities; it’s not clear whether that necessarily translates into an improvement in the target value of actual road safety. “Officials complained that a compensation culture has been created by no-win, no-fee lawyers and said legislation needed tightening to prevent ’spurious’ claims.” (Independent (U.K.), Oct. 8).
From the “Not About the Money” files; reader D.W. writes:
Seguin is about 35 miles east of downtown San Antonio. The deceased student/athlete was an adult, chose to run on a busy street despite ample on-campus facilities, and chose to run with traffic instead of facing it. The story doesn’t say, but the street in question is actually US90, possibly the heaviest traveled street in town aside from I-10. So naturally it’s the university’s fault she was struck and killed. Oh well, it could have been worse, at least they were only held 5% responsible.
(Ron Maloney, “Jury finds TLU partially responsible”, Seguin (Texas) Gazette-Enterprise, Aug. 29; more background here and here).
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Amanda Laabs was a passenger in a Porsche Carrera that was being driven at somewhere between 100 and 120 mph in Victorville, Calif., suggesting that the occupants were in quite a hurry to get to their destination, an In-N-Out Burger. Her driver did manage to slow down to an impact speed of 72 mph at the intersection at which he collided with the Mitsubishi of innocent driver Dorothy Specter. Have you spotted the allegedly responsible party yet? Yes, the city of Victorville, for designing the road with “inadequate sight distance and lack of warning signs, devices and signals”, so that Specter couldn’t see the Porsche coming, all that aside from the light pole that was too easy to run into. After pages of tortuous analysis, made more tortuous by the division of authority over the road between the city of Victorville and the County of San Bernardino, an appeals court upheld a trial court’s disposal of the case on summary judgment, but also declined the city’s request for fees, saying the city had not shown that an attorney would have assessed the claim as objectively unreasonable. (Laabs v. City of Victorville, courtesy Law.com; Civil Justice Association of California press release).
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The city known for ghost voters also has ghost parking signage, it would seem:
[Heather Thome] was dismayed when she returned to find a police officer had just written a ticket for violating a parking ban from 4 to 6 p.m.
“I asked him where the sign was,” said Thome, 35, a temp worker. “He said there used to be a sign on ‘that’ pole, and it hasn’t been there for two years. My logical question was, ‘How can you write a ticket?’ And he told me he doesn’t want to, but his boss tells him he has to go out every day and write tickets.” … She [appealed but] still was found liable.
(Gary Washburn, “City rakes in revenue from tickets”, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 12). More: Cernovich.
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A federal judge has rebuked a large Minnesota personal-injury law firm that, even before rescuers had emerged from the treacherous waters, had petitioned for access to the I-35W site for three attorneys and two expert witnesses. And Democrat-Farmer-Labor State Rep. Ryan Winkler has suggested establishing a public compensation fund, along the lines of the 9/11 fund, for victims who agree not to sue:
The legal spectacle about to play out threatens to drag on for years and impose huge costs on some defendants.In the future, as Winkler has pointed out, even the largest contractors may hesitate to work on Minnesota’s riskiest projects: repairs to crumbling infrastructure. “If engineers and constructors are scared away from bidding,” he warns, “it will be a long time before our infrastructure is adequate and safe.”
(Katherine Kersten, “After I-35W bridge collapse, lawyers promptly pounced”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sept. 2). Earlier: Aug. 9, Aug. 2.
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Ramps and other aids to sidewalk and crosswalk accessibility having been one of the earliest and most successful demands of the modern disabled-rights movement, you might assume that the litigation and expense arising from the changeover was by now mostly a thing of the past. Not so, according to a Los Angeles Times piece last month. In California, plenty of legal action is in progress against cash-strapped municipalities, which say they can’t afford to comply. “The estimated cost in California alone is $2.5 billion. ‘The cost of retrofitting is phenomenal,’ said Gregory Hurley, a Costa Mesa attorney who has represented local governments. ‘Where is the money going to come from?’” The accommodations “include wheelchair ramps at curbs, level pavement, gently sloping driveways, minimum clearances for wheelchairs and crosswalk warnings for the vision-impaired.” (Dan Weikel, “Getting there is none of the fun”. Los Angeles Times, Nov. 13).
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From a New York Times article on the city of Los Angeles’s decision to curtail the planting of palm trees along public streets and parks, one reason being that the majestic plants have been known to drop bulky fronds on persons below:
“Hawaii has a lot of coconut tree liability problems because they fall on people’s heads,” he said. “But the people there have said, ‘That is something that we have to accept.’”
(Jennifer Steinhauer, “City Says Its Urban Jungle Has Little Room for Palms”, Nov. 26). See also Jun. 11(similar, from Torquay, England). More on coconut liability, in both cases relating to the decorated Mardi Gras variety: Mar. 4, 2005 (thrown at parade spectators); Mar. 13-14, 2002 (copyright claim).
Tourists from around the country descend on San Antonio to snap pictures of the famed Alamo, which looks pretty much as it must have looked in Texas’s pre-statehood days, with one big exception: the curb in front of the historic battle site and running the length of the building has been painted a garish orange, as an accident-prevention measure. TV station KSAT has a video clip of the controversy, and one local man’s efforts to get the decision reversed (”Bright Orange Curb Welcomes Visitors To the Alamo“).
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A likely winner of the Stendhal lottery — the one in which the prize is to write a book that will still be read a hundred years after it saw day — the urbanist is remembered by the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock at City Journal and by Tyler Cowen, Jesse Walker, Sissy Willis, Witold Rybczynski at Slate, Alan Ehrenhalt, New Haven Independent and Ann Althouse, to list just a small sampling. I put in my own laudatory two cents in a 1998 Reason symposium. More: 2Blowhards.
Fontana, Calif.: “Karen Medina, a student at A.B. Miller High School, was killed on Cypress Avenue in December 2001 when a car driven by a 15-year-old unlicensed driver veered out of control.” So who’s 75 percent to blame for her death? Why, the taxpayers of Fontana, because the city hadn’t built sidewalks on the thoroughfare in question — or so said a jury which awarded her parents $37.5 million. (Lance Pugmire, “Death of Girl May Cost Fontana Millions”, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 22; “Jury Blames City For Teen’s Death On Busy Road”, NBC4.tv, Sept. 22).
Now, around the country, it’s common for towns to refrain from building sidewalks alongside many or most of their roads, whether for aesthetic reasons, to reflect residents’ wishes, or simply because other ways of spending town funds seem more pressing. Fontana, known as a blue-collar community, planned to build sidewalks along Cypress Avenue at some point but was waiting for state grant money to come through. It may now have less wherewithal with which to pursue similar projects in the future. A footnote: although lawyers made much of the theme that the victim when hit was walking home from school, the actual accident occurred in a residential neighborhood which would appear not to have been especially close to the school (”less than a mile”).
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Point of Law Volokh