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December 2000 archives, part 2

by Walter Olson on December 20, 2000


December 20 – Property taxes triple after wrongful-termination suit. “The Delaware County [Oklahoma] Excise Board voted Monday to impose a tax levy that will triple property taxes for Kenwood’s 128 residents to pay off a court judgment against the school system.

“Board members voted to set the levy after Kenwood school board members agreed Thursday to use $75,000 in federal Impact Aid funds to pay Garland Lane, the former school superintendent, who won a $305,600 judgment against the district in 1998 for wrongful termination.

“The school district still owes Lane $179,000. The federal trial judge ordered that Lane and his Tulsa attorney would be allowed to collect an additional 10 percent interest on the outstanding debt until it was paid.

“A Kenwood taxpayer who normally pays $224 in taxes for the year will now have to pay $763, under the levy approved Monday.” (Jann Clark, “Property tax triples in Kenwood”, Tulsa World, Dec. 12).

December 20 – Obese fliers. A judge has ruled that Southwest Airlines did not unlawfully discriminate against Cynthia Luther, whose weight exceeds 300 pounds, when it required her to buy a second seat on a flight from Reno to Burbank (“Large Passenger Has Suit Dismissed”, Yahoo/AP, Dec. 14) (via Drudge). Days earlier, a confidential report from an official agency in Canada recommended that airlines be forbidden to charge highly obese passengers for a second seat, on the grounds that their condition should count as a disability entitled to accommodation. The opinion from the Canadian Transportation Agency promptly came under fire from both directions, with the Air Transport Association of Canada charging that such a rule would be unacceptably expensive, and Helena Spring, founder of the Canadian Association for Fat Acceptance, saying that obesity should be viewed as a healthy condition rather than a disability (Glen McGregor, “Treat the obese as disabled, airlines told”, Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 10). Update Oct. 25-27, 2002: complaint by obese Canadian passenger fails.

December 20 – New batch of letters. Our letters page catches up on more of its backlog with letters from readers on the Florida recount, Microsoft’s decision to settle its “permatemps” case, and a view from British gangland on how lawyers ought to be paid.

December 20 – Jury orders Exxon to pay Alabama $3.5 billion. No, Alabama hasn’t lived down the reputation for jackpot justice it earned in cases like BMW and Whirlpool: a jury yesterday deliberated just two hours before tagging the oil company with the mega-verdict in a dispute over natural gas royalties owed the state. Consultants for the state had argued that it was due $87 million, Exxon said the figure was much lower or zero, but private attorney Bobo Cunningham of Mobile — whom the state had hired on contingency, promising him 14 percent of any winnings — convinced the jurors that $3 billion would be a much more appropriate sum (Phillip Rawls, “Jury orders Exxon to pay $3.5 billion to state in offshore gas case”, AP/Birmingham News, Dec. 19). Updates Dec. 1, 2003: first verdict thrown out, retrial yields $11.8 billion punitive damage award; Apr. 18, 2004 judge cuts that verdict to $3.6 billion.

December 18-19 – “‘Belligerent’ Worker Is Covered by ADA, Says Federal Court”. “A worker who suffers from major depression that makes her belligerent and hypersensitive to criticism has a right under the Americans with Disabilities Act to a reasonable accommodation from her supervisors, a federal judge has ruled.” After she was fired from her job as a manager with the Unisys Corp., Tina Bennett sued arguing that she had been suffering from major depression which manifested itself in interpersonal difficulties. “U.S. District Judge Franklin S. Van Antwerpen found that when a worker’s depression affects her ability to think and concentrate, she has the right under the ADA to get more feedback and guidance if it would help her perform her job. … Bennett met the test [for impairment of 'major life activities'], Van Antwerpen said, since the evidence showed she was ‘belligerent and displayed an unprofessional attitude,’ that she had ‘difficulty controlling her emotions’ and that she was ‘incredibly sensitive to criticism.’ Bennett’s supervisor testified that Bennett’s peers felt that they could not approach her and have a meaningful conversation with her, Van Antwerpen noted, and her poor interpersonal skills were listed as a reason she was fired.” Given her “evidence linking her behavior to symptoms of her mental disability,” the judge ruled, a jury must be allowed to consider her claim for damages under the ADA. (Shannon P. Duffy, Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), Dec. 13).

December 18-19 – Behind the subway ads. “[T]here isn’t a subway-riding adult in New York who hasn’t seen an ad for 1-800-DIVORCE, with the O formed by a diamond ring and a woman’s hand to the side making a tossing motion.” The law firm that picks up the phone when you call, Wilens & Baker, believes in the economies of scale obtainable from a volume business. It’s also unusual among advertisers in its emphasis on such lines as immigration and bankruptcy law: “There are a thousand lawyers advertising now, and 980 are personal injury lawyers,” says Michael Wilens. (Laura Mansnerus, “From a Captive Audience, Clients”, New York Times, Nov. 15) (reg).

December 18-19 – How to litigate an American quilt. For all their cozy and nonadversarial image, quilts these days “are hot items in copyright litigation” as designers head to court to accuse each other of swiping patterns. In one pending action, Paul Levenson, a New York attorney who makes a specialty in quilt law, is representing Long Island designer Judy Boisson in a suit against the Pottery Barn chain “over an allegedly infringing quilt that, like one of Ms. Boisson’s, contains eight-pointed pastel ‘Missouri Star’ blocks on a white background. One of the burdens that Mr. Levenson has to overcome is the fact that many quilt blocks and borders have been in the public domain for more than 100 years, and that the communal spirit that led pioneer women to make quilts is the polar opposite of the mindset of intellectual property law. … Home quilters are abuzz about Ms. Boisson’s copyright claims, but Mr. Levenson says her targets are commercial entities, not grandmothers making quilts for their own families.” (Victoria Slind-Flor, “Quilts: Traditional and ‘mine’”, National Law Journal, Nov. 13).

December 18-19 – Smoker’s suit nixed in Norway. “A Norwegian court ruled [last month] the tobacco industry could not be held responsible for a smoker’s terminal cancer in the country’s first tobacco compensation lawsuit. The Orkdal District Court said the smoker, Robert Lund, continued to smoke even after the dangers of smoking ‘became broadly known and accepted’ and said tobacco’s addictiveness did not free him from responsibility for continuing to smoke.” (Doug Mellgren, “Norway puts tobacco industry on trial”, AP/Nando Times, Nov. 10).

December 18-19 – Welcome Wall Street Journal readers. The Weekend Journal‘s “Taste” editorial commentary briefly mentioned our item on female Santa litigation (see Dec. 13-14). And today’s (Monday’s) Christian Science Monitor quotes our editor on the subject of workplace litigation over accent discrimination (Kelly Hearn, “What legal experts say”, Dec. 18, sidebar to main story, “Pegged by an accent“).

December 15-17 – Farm bias settlements: line forms on the left. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently agreed to pay more than $2 billion to settle suits claiming it had discriminated against black farmers; a suit by Indian farmers is proceeding as well. And now lawyers have filed suit seeking $3 billion in damages on behalf of female and elderly farmers allegedly treated unfairly in USDA programs. “The farmers are represented by Washington, D.C., attorney Phillip Fraas, who helped win the lawsuit brought by black farmers.” (“Women, Elderly Farmers Sue USDA”, Omaha World Herald, Dec. 11).

December 15-17 – U.K.: skipping, “conkers” taboo in schoolyards. Skipping and other pastimes are being banned in British schoolyards as potentially hazardous or antisocial, as is the age-old game of “conkers”, played by throwing chestnuts at classmates. Teachers “are nervous about legal action from parents if the children are injured, according to a survey by Keele University. … [A] poll found last month that 57 per cent of parents would ask for compensation if their child was injured at school. … Sarah Thomson, the survey’s author, said that one headmaster said he would prefer to ‘ban all playtimes, as they are a nightmare’” The survey of Midlands schools “concluded that playgrounds were now often ‘barren, sterile and unimaginative’ because of over-cautious staff.” (Glen Owen, “Playtime conkers banned as dangerous”, The Times (London), Dec. 8).

In other zero tolerance news, the Washington, D.C. subway system made news last month after its police arrested 12-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth for eating french fries in one of its stations (“Girl Arrested for Eating Fries in Subway”, AP/APBNews, Nov. 16; Petula Dvorak, “Metro Snack Patrol Puts Girl in Cuffs”, Washington Post, Nov. 16). See also Adrienne Mand, “Schools’ Zero-Tolerance Programs Both Praised and Attacked”, FoxNews.com, Oct. 11; “Zero tolerance turns silly” (editorial), Detroit News, Oct. 7.

December 15-17 – O’Quinn a top Gore recount angel. Tied for second among biggest donors to the Gore recount campaign was Houston trial lawyer John O’Quinn, a frequent subject of commentaries in this space (Aug. 4, 1999, etc.). (“Jane Fonda, others pony up for Gore”, AP/MSNBC, Dec. 8). Aside from his role representing the state of Texas in the tobacco litigation (May 22, 2000), O’Quinn is probably best known for having reaped a huge fortune suing on the theory that silicone breast implants cause autoimmune and related illnesses, a theory that O’Quinn and his p.r. firm, Fenton Communications, still strive tenaciously to keep alive — a far more dogged refusal-to-concede than in the Gore case, which lasted mere weeks. See also Doug Bandow, “Ending silicone breast implant saga”, TownHall.com, Dec. 13.

December 13-14 – Supreme Court: forget that recount. Looks like it’s really, really over this time, but every time we allow ourselves to think so, a hand resembling David Boies’s pops out of the ground and starts pulling us down as in the last scene of Carrie. (Charles Babington, “High Court Overrules Gore Recount Plea”, washingtonpost.com, Dec. 12; Supreme Court opinions (PDF)). The courts are going to come out of this one looking more partisan, partial and willful, writes Stuart Taylor, Jr., who predicted the Supreme Court’s 5-4 split; but the real blame should be laid on the Florida Supreme Court for having “betrayed its trust and done grave damage to the rule of law”. (“The Dangers of Judicial Hubris”, Slate, Dec. 11). “It should now be obvious to most people that the Rule of Trial Lawyers isn’t a good substitute for the Rule of Law. … it’s worth noting that three of the four justices who voted for Al Gore’s ‘adventures in recounting’ on Friday had been personal-injury trial lawyers.” (John H. Fund, “Saved from rule of trial lawyers”, MS/NBC, Dec. 9). And Christopher Caldwell, in a column making too many interesting points to recount, asks the question: why did the candidates file most of the Florida lawsuits against their own side, with Gore suing Democratic-run counties and Bush suing those run by the GOP, the opposite of what you might expect if the point of election challenges is to expose and correct partisan irregularities? (“Bench Press”, New York Press, Dec. 12).

December 13-14 – Latest female Santa case. Donna Underwood of Mount Hope, W.V. has sued a company that had hired her to play Santa Claus for children at a mall in Beckley. “She said the company fired her after one of the mall’s managers complained about having a female Santa.” (“Woman Fights for Right to Be Mr. Claus”, FoxNews.com, Dec. 11). In October (see Oct. 12) the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights said it was okay for Wal-Mart not to employ a female Santa.

December 13-14 – “Economy-class syndrome” class action. A Melbourne, Australia law firm is filing a proposed class action on behalf of victims of “economy-class syndrome” against airlines and travel agents. The suit will claim that the complainants were not warned that sitting for prolonged periods in cramped conditions might lead to blood clots in the legs and elsewhere, and were not advised to get up from time to time to walk about the cabin. (Alison Crosweller, “‘Economy-class syndrome’ victims to sue”, The Australian, Dec. 11).

December 13-14 – Internet service disclaimers. Anxious to limit their liability, Internet service providers insert into their service agreements a lot of “defensive legalistic blather designed to keep the company out of court”, which taken literally would place many of their ordinary users in violation for doing things like maintaining multiple chats at once. They also reserve the right to change the rules: “‘They could suddenly demand you wear a bra and panties and dance in the street, and you are contractually bound to it, the way this is written,’ says Andrew Weill, a partner at Benjamin, Weill & Mazer, an intellectual property firm in San Francisco.” In practice users treat the language as a joke (but also are slower to sue). (John Dvorak, “Nihilists at Home”, Forbes, Oct. 2).

December 13-14 – Hamilton’s example. “Few men contributed as much to the ratification of the Constitution as Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the majority of The Federalist Papers. Hamilton worked as a lawyer. Unlike the landed gentry, he had to earn a living. The individual whose economic policies ensured the young Republic’s survival did not amass a huge personal fortune. In Alexander Hamilton, American, Richard Brookhiser explains: ‘His skill and success put him in great demand . . . and if he did not become rich from his practice, it was because of the interruptions of public life and because he charged low fees.’

“Low fees? Those words seldom appear in stories about, for instance, the tobacco lawsuits. Hamilton didn’t eat in a soup kitchen or live in a shelter, but he didn’t make enough to buy the era’s equivalent of a sports team, either. And if all lawyers followed his example, then audiences would not hoot and howl during a certain intense Shakespearean scene.” (“Law school” (editorial), Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nov. 28).

December 11-12 – What was the Florida court thinking? In Slate, University of Utah law professor Mike McConnell clears up why the actions of the Florida Supreme Court in the recount case are properly reviewable by the federal courts: “Article II, Section 1 [of the Constitution] provides that electors [of a state] shall be appointed ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’ Any significant deviation from state statutory law is therefore a federal issue.” McConnell explains how the Florida high court has now (again) attempted to impose a method for the counting of votes (and thus for the resultant appointment of electors) markedly at odds with the manner laid down before the election by its legislature, making it proper for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene a second time to vacate its action. And McConnell raises the interesting question: if the Florida high court really thought a statewide hand count advisable, why didn’t it order one earlier, when it had access to the same basic information and there was much more time to conduct one? (“What was the Florida court thinking?”, Dec. 9).

More: Michael Barone on how the Florida fiasco is likely to bring judicial activism into further disrepute (“Red Queen rules”, U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 18). George Will finds lawyer David Boies getting away with some pretty fast moves before the Sunshine State jurists (“Truth Optional”, Washington Post, Dec. 10). The Chicago Tribune says the Florida court’s “reckless leaps of illogic not only have threatened the integrity of the election, but also have risked tossing the nation into real turmoil.” (“A Supreme Blow for the Rule of Law” (editorial), Dec. 10)

December 11-12 – “Stock Options: A Gold Mine For Racial-Discrimination Suits?”. Lucrative tactic for lawyers representing disgruntled minority employees of firms like Microsoft, Gateway, Sun, Cisco and AOL: claim that had it not been for racism your client would have gotten stock options. Given the way these stocks have been behaving lately, they’d better hurry up with this theory while the options are still worth something (Jordan Pine and Linda Bean, DiversityInc.com, Dec. 5 (reg after first page teaser)).

December 11-12 – New Jersey OKs retroactive tort legislation. “Filling in for Gov. Christie Whitman, the New Jersey Senate president, Donald T. DiFrancesco, [last month] signed into law a measure that eliminates a two-year statute of limitations on wrongful death lawsuits involving victims of murder or manslaughter. The law is meant to give distraught families time to deal with the trauma of losing a loved one before turning to the task of seeking compensation from the people, businesses or institutions [emphasis added] they believe are responsible for the death. Yesterday’s measure applies retroactively, and therefore allows … past victims’ families to sue, [according to a spokeswoman for Sen. DiFrancesco]. “Frank Askin, founder of the constitutional litigation clinic at Rutgers University, said that he did not see a problem with the clause being retroactive, so long as the defendants in lawsuits had been convicted, thus establishing beyond reasonable doubt that a murder or manslaughter did occur, and that the evidence was clear and convincing.” Askin’s answer seems curiously beside the point given that the most frequent financial targets of such suits are sure to be not the actual individual killers, but the “businesses or institutions” that will be accused of such sins as “negligent security” (based on, say, allegedly inadequate lighting or patrolling of parking lots). These defendants normally will not have been charged with any criminal offense at all in connection with the incidents, let alone had such guilt established beyond reasonable doubt, yet now are apparently being opened to suit retroactively, despite the expiration of the statute. Sen. DiFrancesco is expected to run for governor of New Jersey in 2001. (“New Law Ends Time Limits On Wrongful Death Lawsuits”, New York Times, Nov. 18) (more on decay of statutes of limitation).

December 11-12 – Florida lawyers’ day jobs, cont’d. The election isn’t the only reason a lot of lawyers hang out in the Sunshine State these days: “If South Florida is the Wild Wild West of the class-action world, then the region’s posse of plaintiff lawyers are the cowboys. Some of the wealthiest, most prominent power brokers in the community, these litigators have turned South Florida into a hotbed for class-action lawsuits.” (Julie Kay, “Along for the Ride”, Miami Daily Business Review, Oct. 24) (quotes our editor). St. Petersburg Times columnist Bob Trigaux found in October that the state of Florida won the not-coveted award for the year’s worst suit (“The most frivolous lawsuit award goes to …”, Oct. 4) (also quotes our editor) (and see Dec. 8-10).

December 11-12 – Trustworthy professionals. Nurses, pharmacists and veterinarians score highest in a survey of which occupations are viewed as most honest and ethical; teachers, clergy, judges and police also do well. Attorneys are “consistently rated among the top five professions for prestige, but near the bottom for ethics and honesty.” (Daniel B. Wood, “Who people trust — by profession”, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 28).

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November 2000 archives, part 3

by Walter Olson on November 29, 2000


November 30 – The right to be poisoned. Large numbers of urban apartments continue to have old lead-based interior paint on their walls, and you might think it makes obvious sense from a public health standpoint to take precautions to keep children who already show dangerous levels of lead in their blood from moving into such units. At least, you might think so if you weren’t among the “public interest” lawyers who’ve now successfully sued Northern Brokerage, a Baltimore landlord, over its policy of not letting lead-affected kids move into apartments where they might be exposed to more of the same. It’s a discrimination issue, you see: Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, said it’s “hugely discriminatory” to turn families away from such housing just because their kids already display high lead levels. In a settlement earlier this month, “Northern Brokerage agreed to no longer require testing for children under 6 and to pay a total of $13,000 in damages to the plaintiffs and their attorneys.” Of course, if the kids’ blood-lead levels keep rising after they move in, other lawyers might very well step forward to sue the same landlords for every last dime they possess. But that’s only fair, too, right? (John Biemer, “Landlord settles lawsuit for refusing to rent to lead-poisoned families”, AP/FindLaw, Nov. 16).

November 30 – Welcome Mother Jones readers. MoJoWire’s “Alternative Election News Coverage” summarized one of our commentaries about a Gore lawyer’s dimple flip-flop (see Nov. 24). “Not everyone is happy that it appears the next president will be chosen by what some have called a tournament of lawyers. America’s litigation explosion was itself a subtext of the campaign, critics point out. Mr. Bush has called for tort reform to limit the ability of class-action lawyers to win big judgments. Mr. Gore has adopted the traditional Democratic Party position of trial-lawyer defense.” (Peter Grier, Justin Brown and Francine Kiefer, “All Florida becomes a stage for lawyers”, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 30 — quotes our editor). And we evidently spoke too soon when we praised a New York Times editorial on the Florida mess immediately after the election (see Nov. 10), since within days the paper had reversed its editorial line almost completely on the relevant issues (Elizabeth Arens, “Times falls back into line”, National Review Online, Nov. 28).

November 30 – Updates. Further developments in stories previously covered in this space:

* “Samuel Feldman, convicted in September for a two-year spree of bread and cookie destruction in a Yardley supermarket (see Oct. 6), was sentenced [Nov. 20] to 180 days’ probation and ordered to make $1,000 in restitution payment.” He also got a severe scolding from the judge (Oshrat Carmiel, “Bucks bread squeezer sentenced to probation”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 21).

* Falling upward in Washington state: “An assistant attorney general who lost one of the state’s largest civil cases and later shared blame for missing the deadline to appeal the case has been promoted to a new job in state government.” As we reported Sept. 13, state attorney general Christine Gregoire missed a deadline to appeal a $17.8 million verdict against the state, a goof that aroused widespread consternation in Evergreen State legal circles. Now assistant attorney general Loretta Lamb, whom an investigation saddled with some of the responsibility for the mix-up, has been appointed assistant vice president of Washington State University for personnel and business administration. (Eric Nalder, “Attorney in missed deadline case gets new job”, Seattle Times, Sept. 29).

* Although a Bridgeport jury last year gave Microsoft an almost complete victory in an antitrust suit filed by competitor Bristol Technologies (see Aug. 31, 1999), awarding only a token dollar, federal judge Janet Hall upped the award under a Connecticut trade statute to $1 million and Bristol is now asking for a new trial (Thomas Scheffey, “Connecticut Judge Socks Microsoft with $1 Million in Punitives”, Connecticut Law Tribune, Sept. 11; “What was the Microsoft Jury Thinking?”, Nov. 27).

November 29 – After an air crash, many Latin “survivors”. “Three of the 88 passengers and crew who died when Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 31 allegedly had something in common apart from their tragic deaths: They cheated on their partners, led secret lives and fathered secret illegitimate children, all of whom were growing up in Guatemala.” Or at least that’s the story being told by Coral Gables, Fla. lawyer Robert Parks, who’s filed wrongful-death suits against the airline, Boeing and other defendants on behalf of the alleged secret survivors. “The crash victims’ undisputed relatives and close friends say the stories have been fabricated in an effort to capitalize on the tragedy.” In one case, a 53-year-old San Francisco man who perished on the doomed flight is alleged to have recently fathered two Latin American children who deserved to collect for his decease, a story that ran into trouble when his outraged gay partner of twenty years, Dale Rettinger, 63, stepped forward to challenge it.

David Lietz, a Washington, D.C. lawyer hired by Rettinger to investigate the case, said: “We do this kind of work all the time and in the course of doing it, we’ve seen people who make their living lining up victims. It’s not uncommon to find people in Mexico or Central America who try to craft these stories and shop them around to lawyers,’ Lietz said. ‘It’s the aviation equivalent of ‘bus jumping,’ which is a bunch of people seeing a bus accident and running up to it so they can claim whiplash or something.” Many such claims come from Latin America, where “records are very bad and (false claimants) will swear under oath but say anything they want,” he added.

Families of two other victims also named as supposed secret fathers of Latin American children also reacted with indignation or incredulity. However, Parks, the Florida lawyer pressing the cases, says criticism is misplaced. “We wouldn’t have filed the lawsuits if we didn’t feel these people had claims. I don’t deal in coincidences … I’ve been involved in aviation litigation over 30 years, a lot in Central America and South America,” he said. “Sometimes in these areas, truth is stranger than fiction. … The process is going to sort this out. No one is trying to get something that isn’t there”. Parks is also preparing a claim on behalf of alleged secret offspring of yet a fourth Alaska Air crash victim, this time from a still unnamed Latin American country. (Scott Winokur, “Capitalizing On a Crash? Suits allege secret lives for some on fated Alaska Airlines flight”, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 26) (via Aero News Network)(and see April 10, 2001, Aug. 3, 2001) (DURABLE LINK)

November 29 – “Clinton readies avalanche of regulations” “The Clinton administration is striving mightily to pour forth regulations on the environment, labor, health care and other controversial topics before Jan. 20 brings a new occupant to the White House.” So-called midnight regulations are especially common in cases where a new party is coming in: “The Jimmy Carter administration became renowned for stuffing the Federal Register with 23,000 pages of regulations during the three months before Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.” The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has launched a website, RegRadar.com, to monitor the last-minute onslaught (Robert A. Rosenblatt and Elizabeth Shogren, L.A. Times/Chicago Tribune, Nov. 26).

November 29 – “Hush — good news on silicone”. More details on the release of that new study (see Oct. 23) exonerating breast implants of a once-feared link to cancer, which the National Cancer Institute commissioned at great expense but whose results it quietly buried: “NCI press representative Brian Vastag says he was ‘forbidden’ by his superiors from touting the impending release of this study the way he normally does with other public health research. … So Mr. Vastag, who had already announced he was leaving NCI, defied his bosses and e-mailed names in his media Rolodex. ‘It drives me crazy when tax-funded public health research doesn’t make it to the public,’ he said.” (John Meroney, Washington Times, Nov. 22).

November 28 – Highway responsibility. A Fort Lauderdale jury has awarded $7 million to Diana Mancuso, 43, who was badly hurt when her car was hit broadside by a drunk driver six years ago. The drunk driver, Shane Peter Leanna, who was 23 at the time, served nearly two years in prison. However, the ones being ordered to pay the bill are McFadden Leasing Inc., which owned the sport utility vehicle Leanna was driving, and Next Generation Inc., which leased it to him. (“Woman gets $7 million in DUI case”, AP/New York Times, Nov. 23). And last month the mother of late National Football League star Derrick Thomas went to court to blame various organizations for his death following a crash in which he had been speeding on an icy road without wearing a seat belt. The lawsuit names General Motors Corp. as a defendant as well as local ambulance service Emergency Providers Inc. and Liberty Hospital, both of which tried to save Thomas after the accident and may now have reason to be sorry they got near him. (Cindy Lin, “Derrick Thomas (1967-2000)”, ChannelOne.com, Feb. 9; Kenny Morse, editorial, MrTraffic.com, Feb. 10; “Derrick Thomas’ mother sues GM”, Jefferson City News-Tribune, Oct. 11). Update Aug. 18, 2004: jury rejects suit against GM. (DURABLE LINK)

November 28 – “NCAA Can Be Sued Under ADA, Federal District Judge Rules”. “In a major defeat for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a federal judge has ruled that it qualifies as a “place of public accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act and can therefore be sued by a learning-disabled student who says its discriminatory rules barred him from getting an athletic scholarship.” (Shannon P. Duffy, Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), Nov. 14).

November 28 – Federal power over mud puddles? The Supreme Court is expected to resolve this term whether the federal Clean Water Act applies to “isolated wetlands that have no connection to major rivers or drainage systems flowing from state to state.” Environmental groups favor wide federal authority over “prairie potholes” and the like, which they say are important to migratory waterfowl. A brief supporting property owners, however, counters: “Under the Corps’ [of Engineers] interpretation of the [Act], its regulatory authority stretches to virtually every body of water in the country — including seasonally wet areas in homeowners’ backyards — because virtually any water body is or could be used as a feeding or resting place by some of the 5 billion birds that migrate over the continental United States each year.” The brief also warns: “The Corps’ rationale would justify federal regulation not just of all waters but of virtually all human activity.” (Warren Richey, “Wetlands and federal power”, Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 31).

November 27 – Follow instructions, please. Well before Election Day, the Gore campaign was ready for a massive recount campaign based on a 1994 manual called The Recount Primer, whose tactical advice presciently foreshadows many recent developments (Ryan Lizza, “Overtime: How the Gore campaign came back from the dead”, The New Republic Online, Nov. 16).

“Note: If you make a mistake, return your ballot card and obtain another. AFTER VOTING, CHECK YOUR BALLOT CARD TO BE SURE YOUR VOTING SELECTIONS ARE CLEARLY AND CLEANLY PUNCHED AND THERE ARE NO CHIPS LEFT HANGING ON THE BACK OF THE CARD. –Voting instructions, Palm Beach County, Florida”

“The capitalized words appeared on the voting guide clearly posted in every Florida polling station that used Votomatic machines and in leaflets mailed to many voters in Palm Beach. They are the only instructions on the flyer in bold capitals. … The [Gore] position, so far as I can glean, is that … [a] vote should be counted … even if the voter blithely ignores clear voting instructions” … A Gore victory through judicially imposed, loosely interpreted hand counts in South Florida will resonate across the country as the triumph of a liberalism that has replaced responsibility with victimhood, law with legalism, character with partisanship. Rather than challenging voters to a new civic responsibility, the Democrats are defining down democracy to include those who cannot even be held responsible for following a simple ballot instruction.” (Andrew Sullivan, “TRB from Washington: Bad Intent”, The New Republic Online, Nov. 22; see also commentaries on andrewsullivan.com, and Charles Krauthammer, “There is a good reason that casting a ballot is a precise act”, Dallas Morning News, Nov. 24). “[I]t is the voter’s duty to take reasonable care to record a vote. To correct that judgment after the fact is unfair.” (“Dimples aren’t votes” (editorial), Miami Herald, Nov. 24).

November 27 – Asbestos litigation destroying more companies. The lawsuits’ relentless logic is devouring more leading industrial companies. Armstrong World Industries, the nation’s pre-eminent manufacturer of flooring, failed to repay $50 million in commercial paper that came due Wednesday (Reuters/Yahoo, Nov. 22), and a Nov. 16 Bloomberg story said its parent, Armstrong Holdings Inc., may seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company’s stock, which stood at $36 in January, on Friday closed at 1 3/16 (stock chart). In early October (see Oct. 6-9) Owens-Corning, the number one maker of insulation, filed for bankruptcy protection (asbestos product makers list, law firm of Patten, Wornom, Hatten & Diamonstein).

Many of these concerns’ involvement with asbestos was both remote in time and tangential to their main operations. Of Crown Cork & Seal, the large packaging concern that closed Friday at 4 5/8, down from 24 in January and 50 in 1997, Yahoo/Reuters reported as follows: “Its only ties to asbestos-related products stem from an acquisition more than 40 years ago of a company that had a subsidiary that made insulation products, said Andrew O’Conor, an analyst with Merrill Lynch. It sold the insulation business three months after acquiring it, he said. ‘They’re more of a peripheral player,’ O’Conor said. ‘It was a tiny thing.’” (stock chart; “Crown Cork jumps on reevaluation of asbestos claims”, Yahoo/Reuters, Nov. 20). For trial lawyers’ ingenuity in identifying new defendants to name in suits, see June 1 and “Thanks for the Memories“.

Each removal of another solvent defendant shifts more litigation pressure onto remaining defendants. Owens-Illinois, the prominent glass and packaging concern, closed Friday at 3 13/16, down from 25 in January and 48 in 1998 (stock chart). Federal-Mogul (brakes, auto parts) closed at 2, down from 24 in January and 70 in 1998 (stock chart). W.R. Grace, the giant chemicals manufacturer much in the news lately because of the contamination of its Montana vermiculite mining operations with naturally occurring asbestos, closed Friday at 2 1/2, down from 15 in January and more than 20 earlier. (stock chart). Investment analyst Jim Cramer wrote last month that Armstrong, Federal-Mogul, and Grace, all longtime mainstays of industrial portfolios, now find themselves “on a death march to zero … I am combing through this embattled trio looking for signs that they won’t meet Owens’ fate. I haven’t found any yet.” (James J. Cramer, “The Death of the Value Stalwarts”, TheStreet.com, Oct. 25). Of the billions sunk in the litigation, a very high percentage goes toward the process itself, or other purposes other than actual compensation of workers for injuries. Meanwhile, intensive advertising and recruitment campaigns by law firms continue to attract thousands of new asymptomatic claimants into the system, while asbestos plaintiff’s lawyers are numbered prominently among instigators of the “tobacco round” as well as among the most prominent financial supporters of the Democratic Party and the Al Gore campaign. (DURABLE LINK)

November 26 – Sunday election special: votes only lawyers can see. “He squinted and stared, but Bob Kerrey was blind to the party line.” The Nebraska senator was making the South Florida rounds to talk up the Democratic line on the virtues of hand recounts and patience, but when he squinted at a ballot allegedly sporting an actual “dimpled chad” of the sort his fellow Democrats want to count, Kerrey admitted he couldn’t see it. “‘I better get out of here before I get you guys in trouble,’ Kerrey reportedly joked to his party’s team. But senator, isn’t it a little scary to decide an election with votes that only lawyers can see?” (Brad Hahn, “Nebraska senator sees sights — but can’t see chads”, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Nov. 25; Drudge Report transcript of Broward dimple-asserting). “On my local television station, the latest update was followed by the reassuringly familiar commercial for personal-injury lawyers Welch, Graham and Manby — ‘where winning is no accident’. That’s the spirit!” (Mark Steyn, “Even Al’s friends are sick of his dimples”, Sunday Telegraph (UK), Nov. 26).

On Saturday, the Broward County Election Canvassing Board conveniently decided to go looking for dimpled chads on 500 previously disqualified absentee ballots, even though on an absentee ballot the “voter can clearly see how he voted and whether the chad fell out, unlike the Votamatic machines used at polling places in Broward.” Did demonstrators, as Democrats claim, “intimidate[ ] the Miami-Dade canvassing board into canceling its planned recount [?]. Nonsense, say board members. ‘I was not intimidated,’ David Leahy told CNN. ‘My vote had nothing to do with the protests. It simply had to do with not enough time.’” (John Fund, “Gore’s Electoral ‘Lock Box’”, Opinion Journal (WSJ), Nov. 25).

“Vice President Gore’s effort to convince Florida election officials to count indented or ‘dimpled’ ballots as votes for him runs contrary to the practice in almost all jurisdictions that use the punch card system, with the notable exception of Texas, the home state of George W. Bush, his rival for the presidency. In the 38-year history of punch card voting, only a small number of communities have counted these ballots as valid, voting experts said. R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a nonpartisan group that trains and certifies election supervisors, said that to his knowledge, with the exception of Texas, ‘no election official has counted a dimpled chad as a vote. Instead they tend to turn the question over to a judge, and historically courts around the country have said dimpled chads aren’t clear enough for them,’ Lewis said, stressing that he is not referring to Florida.” (John Mintz, “Most states don’t count dimples”, Washington Post, Nov. 24). Despite the Florida Supreme Court’s wholesale rewrite of the state’s election law after the fact, “it is still possible that the will of the people will prevail. … Broward County has for 10 years refused to count ‘dimpled chad’ as a vote. Now, it has changed that rule. … It may become necessary for [the Florida legislature] to exercise its responsibility and ensure a fair outcome to the presidential election of 2000.” (“Elections: A grand larceny” (editorial), Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), Nov. 24).

“Today, the courts — that is, the lawyers – run nearly every aspect of American life. … They tell us how much tobacco is appropriate. Who may buy and sell guns — and how. What level of care governments must provide the needy. They set taxes and school curricula. Now they mean to pick a president.” (“Government by lawyers” (editorial), New York Post, Nov. 24 — cites our editor). “Where has abandoning law and tradition left us? Courts have put the fate of the election in the hands of Democratic partisans reviewing pregnant chads only in Gore’s strongholds. … Is it any wonder that the rest of the world is laughing at us?” (“Comedy of errors of the lowest sort” (editorial), Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 24).

November 24-26 – Gore lawyers mishandled Illinois precedent. Lawyers for Vice President Al Gore repeatedly cited, and the Florida Supreme Court obligingly quoted at length and with approval, an Illinois Supreme Court opinion from 1990 which directed election officials to consider voters’ intent, which the Gore team suggested provided a rationale for counting punchcard ballots with the now-fabled “dimpled chad”. But in fact “the Illinois court actually affirmed a trial judge’s order to exclude dented ballots,” and a Cook County attorney who provided the Gore effort with an affidavit to the contrary last week now concedes that his recollection was mistaken (Jan Crawford Greenburg and Dan Mihalopoulos, “Illinois case offers shaky precedent”, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 23). “Doesn’t [Gore attorney David] Boies now have a professional obligation to inform the courts and others of his error?,” asks Mickey Kaus (“Hit Parade”, Kausfiles.com)

The generally liberal Miami Herald, which endorsed Gore in the election, editorializes that the Florida high court “made hash of Florida’s election law” and agrees with Gov. George W. Bush’s charge that the court “has changed the rules after the election”. It cites “the court’s unseemly willingness to stand in for the Legislature and create a new election scheme … by deciding that the counts could continue until as late as Monday morning, the justices have substituted their own deadlines for those that have long existed in state law and that Secretary [of State Katherine] Harris was sworn to uphold.” (“A muddled ruling raises questions of fairness” (editorial), Miami Herald, Nov. 23). On the New York Times op-ed page, New Republic legal affairs correspondent Jeffrey Rosen calls the Florida court’s rewrite of state election law “a bold example of judicial activism” in which the court “vastly overplayed its hand” and which “has made the justices appear to be partisans rather than neutral arbiters”. Rosen says the ruling allows Republicans to “argue plausibly that activist Democratic judges changed the counting rules in the middle of the game, only after it was obvious that the Democratic candidate needed dimpled ballots to win”. (“Florida’s Justices Pushed Too Far”, Nov. 23).

November 24-26 – “Qwest ordered to pay AT&T $350 million”. A Travis County, Texas jury has voted $1.2 million in actual damages and $350 million in punitive damages against telecommunications carrier Qwest for negligently cutting an AT&T fiber-optic phone line on several occasions in 1997. “It’s not unique that a fiber line gets cut. It’s unique it gets to [a] jury and gets this far down the road,” an investment analyst told the Austin American-Statesman. “We tried to send a message,” said a juror, as usual. “The only way to do that was to make the stockholders feel it in the bottom line.” (AP/CNet, Nov. 15).

November 24-26 – “Company Is Told to Stay and Face New Union”. A Los Angeles federal judge, “acting on a union’s complaint, has … issued a preliminary injunction preventing Quadrtech, a small manufacturer of earrings and ear-piercing machines, from laying off 118 newly unionized workers and moving its manufacturing operations to Tijuana until labor complaints against it are resolved. … Lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board, which petitioned the court on behalf of the workers, said this was the first time an American company trying to keep out a union had been prevented from leaving the United States.” (Anthony DePalma, New York Times, Nov. 23).

November 22-23 – “Gore’s point man argued against dimples in 1996″. Attorney Dennis Newman of Boston is now the point man in charge of putting Al Gore in the White House by insisting that “dimples show the true intent of the voter. Voters caused those dimples. Dimples should count. Four years ago, in a similar election spat, Newman took a much different stand. Employing his best legal tactics on behalf of a Democrat holding a slight lead in a primary race for Congress, Newman scoffed at the idea of counting the tiny indentations as votes.” Back in that case, Newman endorsed the series of propositions now urged by Republicans about the tiny indentations: that they could have been inflicted by later handling, that they could represent hesitation marks (the kind coroners find on suicides — ed.), and so forth. (Joel Engelhardt, Palm Beach Post, Nov. 22). Although the press has widely echoed the assertion of Gore attorneys that federal courts stay out of state electoral disputes — even, purportedly, when the elections are for federal offices such as president — Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor argues that there is squarely opposed precedent to the contrary in the Eleventh Circuit, which includes both Alabama and Florida. In Roe v. Alabama (1995), the Eleventh Circuit found a federal constitutional violation in state balloting irregularities that accompanied a very close race, including a court order which appeared to change the rules after the election as to which votes would count. Moreover, the federal court intervened in Roe even though the election was for Alabama state office, not federal office (“Attorney General Bill Pryor and Secretary of State Jim Bennett File Friend of the Court Brief in Presidential Election Dispute”, Office of the Alabama Attorney General, Nov. 20, links to PDF document). (DURABLE LINK)

November 22-23 – “Descent into the lawyerclysm”. Humorix, the Linux-oriented parody site, takes off from the Florida election mess to imagine the lawsuit-ridden dystopia of the not too distant future: “Nuclear weapons are scrapped and replaced by subpoenas. … While most forms of physical violence ceases, the ensuing legal violence is far, far worse — a fleet of lawyers can bring poverty and bankruptcy to billions of innocent civilians within a matter of hours. Stage 6. World economy collapses under the weight of overlawyering.” (Jon Splatz, Nov. 19).

November 22-23 – Don’t do it, Tillie! Tillie Tooter, 84, gained national attention in August when she survived for three days trapped in her wrecked car, which had gone over a Florida interstate highway abutment; she “survived by capturing rainwater in a steering wheel cover and divvying up a stick of gum, a cough drop and a mint.” Now a lawyer is representing her and has “put her rescuers on notice that she intends to sue them for not finding her sooner”. Jim Romenesko at Obscure Store has some advice for her: you’re an old lady, you really don’t want to spend your remaining days hanging around lawyers and courtrooms. (Jodie Needle, “Tillie Tooter to sue Lauderdale, FHP for not finding her sooner in wreck”, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Nov. 16).

November 22-23 – France OKs wrongful-birth suit. “A severely disabled French boy has won a landmark case against medical authorities for allowing him to be born rather than aborted.” Josette and Christian Perruche sued doctors for negligently failing to realize that Josette had contracted rubella (German measles) during her pregnancy; their son Nicolas was born deaf, part-blind and with mental disabilities as a result. “Would my son really have wanted to live if he’d known he had all these disabilities?” asked Christian. “That’s the question I’m posing.” (“Boy compensated for being born”, BBC, Nov. 17).

November 22-23 – “eBay suit wins class-action status”. San Diego Superior Court Judge Linda B. Quinn has granted class-action status to a suit against eBay that “alleges the largest Internet auction company is liable for facilitating the sale of fake sports memorabilia”. (“eBay suit wins class-action status”, Bloomberg News/CNet, Nov. 19) “If successful, the suit could undermine eBay’s business model,” the Industry Standard reported earlier this year (see July 13). “Legal experts say that if the company can be held liable for the actions of its users, it is likely to face a flurry of suits that would severely handicap its business.” Also earlier this year four New Jersey teens “were treated for vomiting and disorientation after taking a substance called dextromethorphan, or DXM”, which one of them had bought on the online flea market. (Mylene Mangalindan, “Is eBay Liable in Drug Sale?”, WSJ Interactive/ZDNet, May 31)(see letter, Jan. 16).

November 22-23 – Canada reins in expert witnesses. “The Supreme Court of Canada accelerated its campaign against doubtful expert witnesses [Nov. 9], ruling that ‘novel scientific evidence’ from a Quebec sexologist had no place in a criminal trial.” Like the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 1994 Daubert decision, the Canadian high court urges judges to take responsibility as “gatekeepers” to exclude dubious testimony. (Kirk Makin, “Top court reins in use of experts”, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 10).

November 21 – The O.J. trial of politics. By early in the morning after the long election night, “the phones began ringing at the 16-lawyer West Palm Beach personal injury firm Lytal, Reiter, Clark, Fountain & Williams, which claims credit for 22 multimillion-dollar verdicts and settlements. Local Democratic staffers had used the firm’s conference room to make get-out-the-vote calls on Election Day, and the phones were still there.” (Peter Aronson, “Lawyers take center stage”, National Law Journal, Nov. 20). “This is the O.J. trial of politics,” the Boston Globe quotes GOP lawyer Tom Rath as saying, while the Wall Street Journal reports that clients in high-profile cases turn to attorney David Boies “as much to signal a declaration of war as anything else.” (Both quoted in Deborah Asbrand, “David Boies Rides Again”, Industry Standard/Law.com, Nov. 17). It’s a class action suit with the presidency rather than the coffers of the tobacco or gun industries as the target, argues the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial side (“Al Gore’s Class-Action”, Nov. 17). When Gore brings out the lawyers by the hundreds to help him, he’s bringing out his base (Rich Lowry, “Lawyers: The Gore Hard Core”, New York Post/National Review Online, Nov. 20).

November 21 – Burglar sues for compensation. In Australia, “[a] man who broke into a house and attacked the home owner when he was discovered has launched a civil action against his victim for compensation.” Shane Colburn says he is still suffering “physically and emotionally” from the aftermath of the 1997 incident, in which he scuffled with Peter Vucetic and Giavanna Grah and was attacked by the couple’s dogs. (“The thief who sued his victim”, Daily Telegraph (NSW, Australia), Nov. 17).

November 21 –Behind “Boston Public”. “[David E.] Kelley, an ex-lawyer [and creator of hit TV show Ally McBeal and the new Boston Public], has made this subject [overregulation] the obsession of every TV show he has written. Whenever teachers or administrators try to help or discipline students, they immediately butt up against their or their bosses’ anxiety about litigation. The worst, in Kelley’s book, are sexual harassment laws, which he started railing about in Ally McBeal long before Monica Lewinsky got down on her knees. But there are also digs at anti-discrimination laws and an episode about a degrading school board regulation that requires all teachers to submit to thumb printing since they work with children. . . . people who should be looked up to and supported are met instead by automatic suspicion.

“So what’s the parallel between Boston Public and the current crisis? That you can’t educate children, just as you can’t run a country, in an atmosphere of rancor and litigiousness, when the people who are supposed to be in charge are dismissed in a knee-jerk fashion as corrupt and illegitimate by the people they’re supposed to be governing.” (Judith Shulevitz, “Culturebox: The Ungovernable Boston Public”, Slate, Nov. 10; “Public-School Teachers, Those Ink-Stained Wretches”, Nov. 14 (more on teacher fingerprinting)).

November 21 – Reckless skier convicted. Nathan Hall has been convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the case arising from his fatal collision with another skier three years ago on the slopes at Vail, Colo. (see Sept. 25-26) (Steve Lipsher, “Skier verdict closes chapter”, Denver Post, Nov. 18; “Ski Racer Convicted in Homicide”, AP/FindLaw, Nov. 17).

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October 2000 archives, part 3

by Walter Olson on October 31, 2000


October 31 – Foster care abuses: taxpayers to owe billions? Injury lawyers plan a major push to develop damage lawsuits against government on behalf of children harmed under foster care, the New York Times reports. Florida tobacco-fee magnate Robert Montgomery (see Apr. 12) and other movers and shakers are encouraged by “court rulings that make government agencies easier to sue and sizable jury awards in foster care cases”. A lawyer with the National Center for Youth Law, part of the network of legal services groups that philanthropic foundations, organized lawyerdom, and taxpayers have all had occasion to support generously over the years, is cited saying that “groups like his had become more open to alliances with personal injury lawyers”. Suits often allege that different placement choices or more vigorous intervention by social workers might have prevented beatings, neglect or molestation of youngsters in foster care. States fear taking the cases to trial: “They’re very difficult cases to defend in front of juries because juries often have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight,” says a lawyer for the state of Washington, where “government payouts in civil cases in general have quadrupled in six years”. “Some officials, including Kathleen A. Kearney, the secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, say such litigation unfairly detracts from continuing efforts to improve child welfare, diverting resources that legislatures, not courts, should control.” (Nina Bernstein, “Foster-Child Advocates Gain Allies in Injury Lawyers”, New York Times, Oct. 27) (reg). See also Aug. 23-24 (billions demanded in lawsuits over Canadian residential schools).

October 31 – Tales from the tow zone. “A Dallas-area jury has ordered Chrysler Corp. and a local dealership to pay $83.5 million to a Texas couple who charged that the defendants misled them on the towing capacity of the Dodge Ram pickup truck they bought.” The couple did not suffer physical injury from the towing-force deficit, but argued that because the vehicle turned out not to be strong enough to pull horse trailers, they lost their equine transport business and the husband subsequently suffered depression. Nearly all of the award, $82.5 million, was in punitive damages; Texas’s limits on that category of damages, much deplored by trial lawyers, make it likely that the actual payout to the couple will not exceed $2.4 million, assuming they prevail in Chrysler’s planned appeal. (Margaret Cronin Fisk, “Jury Tags Chrysler for $83 Million”, National Law Journal, Oct. 5).

October 31 – Fat tax proposed in New Zealand. The proposal, floated by public health activists down under in the country’s Medical Journal, got a cool reception from the Kiwi health minister as well as from people in the farming and meat businesses. The idea was hailed as worth considering, however, by a medical adviser to the country’s Heart Foundation. It would apply a saturated-fat tax to such food items as butter, cheese, meat and milk, the “full-cream” variety in particular (Al Gore isn’t the only one campaigning against the “top one percent”). (Martin Johnston, “Fat-tax plan to reduce disease”, New Zealand Herald, Oct. 30).

October 30 – Netscape “Best of ‘What’s Cool’”. Last month Overlawyered.com was one of the picks on Netscape’s popular “Cool Sitings of the Day”, and this weekend we were featured in its “Best of ‘What’s Cool’”, with another flood of newcomers resulting.

October 30 – Ohio high court races. Buckeye State voters next week will decide on the hotly contested re-election bid of Democratic state supreme court justice Alice Robie Resnick, a key member of the court’s 4-3 liberal majority; also seeking re-election is Republican Deborah Cook, who has voted on the opposite side from Resnick in several controversial cases. Bone of contention number one is last year’s decision in which Resnick and three other justices relied on a strained reading of the state constitution to strike down the liability reforms passed by that state’s legislature (see Aug. 17 and Aug. 18, 1999), a move highly welcome to the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers, which has supported Resnick’s re-election. Also at issue are a series of other Ohio Supreme Court decisions that have outraged the state’s business community, including a line of cases holding that commercial auto insurance policies by which companies cover their employees’ work-related driving can be made to pay for accidents suffered by the employees and their families in their own cars on their own time. (Scott-Pontzer v. Liberty Mutual (Ohio PIA); Charles T. McConville, “The Ohio Supreme Court, Your Business and Its Insurance”, Ohio Matters (Ohio Chamber of Commerce), Nov./Dec. ’99; Ohio Chamber of Commerce Court 2000 page). In some ways the hard-fought Ohio contest is the mirror image of the one in Michigan, where trial lawyers and labor unions have mounted a major effort to knock off conservative justices Clifford Taylor, Robert Young and Stephen Markman in next week’s vote (see Aug. 25-27, May 9, Jan. 31).

MORE: editorials, Cincinnati Post, Sept. 30, and Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 29; Spencer Hunt, “Business, GOP work to boot Resnick”, Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25; William Glaberson, “A Spirited Campaign for Ohio Court Puts Judges on New Terrain”, New York Times, July 7 (reg); websites of Justice Alice Robie Resnick (incumbent) and challenger Terrence O’Donnell, Justice Deborah Cook (incumbent) and challenger Tim Black. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce has come under fire for supporting a group that has run hardball advertising against Resnick: Lee Leonard, “Sideswiping political ads ought to be ruled out of bounds”, Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 23; Randy Ludlow, “Resnick attack is ugly”, Cincinnati Post, Oct. 21 (DURABLE LINK).

October 30 – Cornfield maze as zoning violation. Zoning authorities in Snydersville, Pa. have sent a violation notice to father and son farmers Jake and Stuart Klingel. Their offense? Carving a maze through their cornfield and opening it to the public. (“Going in Circles?”, AP/Fox News, Oct. 6).

October 30 – $20 million for insolvency trustee? “Former Securities & Exchange Commission chairman Richard Breeden, 50, could make more than $20 million as the court-appointed trustee of Syracuse’s fraudulent, failed Bennett Funding Group. While a judge has the final say, Breeden could get a statutory 3% of what he recovers for creditors, less $642,000 in annual salary and expenses, and less a one-time $250,000 bonus. To investors facing an 82% haircut, he snaps, ‘I’m worth every penny of it.’” (Dorothy Pomerantz, “The Informer: Make That Breeden Funding”, Forbes, Sept. 4).

October 27-29 – “Lawyer take all”. Just as lawyers used to be barred from taking contingency stakes in their clients’ lawsuits lest they be tempted to push overly aggressive positions on their behalf, so they used to be discouraged from taking equity stakes in businesses they advised, lest they be tempted to assist in regulatory evasion or sharp financial practices. “In time, the dollar signs got bigger than the ethical misgivings.” Now, following major windfalls obtained by California tech lawyers who took holdings in clients’ stock, big law firms on the East Coast are rushing to emulate the practice. (Chana Schoenberger, Forbes, Oct. 16).

October 27-29 –“Yankees Must Step Up to Plate in Civil Rights Action”. A judge has ordered to trial a case filed against the New York Yankees by a black woman who says she was told she could not enter the stadium restaurant wearing only a tank top, although once inside she noticed white women dressed in that manner. “The club’s dress code, which is printed outside the entrance to the club and on the back of the admission pass, prohibits the wearing of ‘tank tops . . . thongs or any other abbreviated attire.’” Lawyers for the Yankees said the plaintiff, V. Whitney Joseph, was let into the restaurant after she went back to her car and put on a t-shirt, and said the brief inconvenience should not be enough to support a federal lawsuit, but a judge said Joseph should be allowed to reach a jury with her claim that the dress code had been inconsistently applied. (Michael A. Riccardi, New York Law Journal, Oct. 20).

October 27-29 – Judge rules against Tattered Cover. Fears about free expression notwithstanding, a Denver judge has ruled that the city’s famed Tattered Cover book store can be forced to turn over customer purchase records to narcotics police seeking to identify the owner of two books on drug manufacturing found at the scene of an illegal methamphetamine laboratory (see April 28). (Susan Greene, “Judge: Cops can seize bookstore records”, Denver Post, Oct. 21).

October 27-29 – Patients’ Bill of Wrongs. “The ground is thus set for an uneasy alliance between the physicians who staff HMOs and MCOs and health care consumer organizations. Both, for different reasons, would like to neuter the managed care organizations by removing from their management teams the power to control physician practice. Yet by so doing, they do more than remove excessive intervention. They necessarily compromise, perhaps fatally, the critical cost containment functions that these organizations must supply if they are to survive at all. . . . In the short run, physicians will love the creation of a system that promises a restoration of their autonomy and insulates them from the costs of their mistakes after they settle their case out cheaply. . . . But in truth a rather different agenda is at work here, which becomes evident from looking at the one exclusion to the proposed Patients Bill of Rights. It seems not to apply to the United States Government in its role as the provider of health care services through Medicare or Medicaid. The proposals therefore are designed to cripple the private programs which compete in the political arena with government-supplied health care.” (Richard Epstein (University of Chicago Law School), “Managed Care Liability”, Manhattan Institute Civil Justice Memo #39, Sept.)

October 26 – Lab mice paperwork. “In a couple of years, medical progress could come to a screeching halt when it slams up against new regulations to be written by the Agriculture Department. The regs will extend the Animal Welfare Act to the millions of mice, rats, and birds used in lab experiments. When that happens, researchers will have to file papers for each individual critter. By the time they get through with the paperwork they might have just enough time to turn out the lights before going home.

“This all results from a settlement the Department made with the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation (an arm of the Anti-Vivisection Society) and Kristine Gausz, a psychology student at (really) Beaver College. Ms. Gausz said in an affidavit that the sight of rats being ‘subject to deplorable living conditions’ was ‘an assault on her senses’ that left her ‘personally, aesthetically, emotionally, and profoundly disturbed.’… Perhaps the next thing medical researchers should try to find is a cure for the common lawsuit.” (“Leash lawsuit” (editorial), Richmond Times-Dispatch, Oct. 23).

October 26 – Drunk-driving standards nationalized. Dealing a blow to principles of local control as well as rural hospitality, the federal government will arm-twist all states into adopting 0.08 blood alcohol standards by 2004 under legislation just signed by President Clinton as part of a transportation bill. “The .08 percent limit is clearly only a way station on the road to making life miserable for social drinkers. MADD’s [Mothers Against Drunk Driving's] Web site now calls for lowering the BAC limit to .05 percent,” writes Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop (“Phonies for .08 – Harassment of social drinkers”, Oct. 8; “Clinton signs bill to lower drunken driving standards”, AP/Dallas Morning News, Oct. 23).

October 26 – New unfairness for old. Don’t assume voters or politicians are anti-gay just because they harbor doubts about setting up sexual orientation as a new category in job bias law, as would happen under the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). “Why does the term ‘special rights’ have such political potency? Because by now most people have had personal experience with the way employment discrimination laws operate. Members of protected classes are not equal, they’re super-equal, enjoying extra job security and other job-related privileges not afforded the average worker.” Quotes our editor (Robyn Blumner, “Laws Aimed at Correcting Discrimination Have Created New Types of Unfairness”, Tribune Media/Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 20). See also Nigel Ashford, “Equal Rights, Not Gay Rights“, reprinted at Independent Gay Forum.

October 25 – “Power lawyers may sue for reparations”. More details about the plans of Willie Gary and other lawyers to file lawsuits demanding trillions of dollars in black reparations (see Letters, Oct. 19). Planned are “a series of suits against the U.S. government, states, corporations and individuals who continue to benefit from slavery’s aftermath.” Participants “met last month in Washington at Transafrica, a lobbying group that monitors U.S. policy in Africa and the Caribbean, and plan to continue meeting monthly until a strategy is formed.” Participants include Richard Scruggs, Johnnie Cochran, Jr., Harvard Law’s Charles Ogletree, author Randall Robinson, “Alexander Pires of Washington, who won a $1 billion settlement for black farmers in a discrimination case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture; … and Dennis Sweet of Jackson, Miss., who won a $400 million settlement in the fen-phen diet drug case last year.” Sweet “also plans to sue history book publishers that give blacks short shrift,” which suggests that he himself may give the First Amendment short shrift. “We are a nation of litigators. That’s what we do. We go to court,” said Harper’s editor Jack Hitt. (Amy Martinez, Palm Beach Post, Oct. 23).

October 25 – “Laptop lawsuit: Toshiba, feds settle”. Piling on the $1 billion-plus class action settlement, the U.S. government is now extracting money from Toshiba over its flawed laptops. Still in very short supply: evidence that the glitch caused data loss in any real-world situations (Reuters/ZDNet, Oct. 13, with reader discussion).

October 25 – South Carolina tobacco fees: how to farm money. Lawyers who represented the state of South Carolina in the Medicaid-recoupment litigation will get a whopping $82.5 million; it wasn’t easy to argue that the mostly pro-tobacco Palmetto State had been instrumental in nailing the cigarette industry, but the lawyers found a golden rationale for large fees in their having been assigned to speak up for the interests of tobacco farmers like those in South Carolina. Since lawyers representing late-to-sue North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee (see May 2) are also reportedly making the we-represented-farmers argument in their own fee quest, the tobacco caper may go down in history as the most richly compensated instance ever of farmer “representation” — with no need for any control of the attorneys by actual farmers, of course. The secretive arbitration panel voted along its now-familiar two-to-one lines, with dissenter Charles Renfrew charging that the award was a windfall and “grossly excessive”, but as usual being outvoted by the other two panel members. (“Panel says $82.5 million lawyers’ fees are fair”, AP/CNN.com, Oct. 24).

October 24 — Turn of the screw. Revealing article in Philadelphia Inquirer magazine tells the story in detail of how lawyers whipped up mass litigation against companies that make screws used for bone-setting in spinal and other orthopedic surgery, alleging that the devices caused all manner of dreadful injuries. As so often the mass client recruiting got under way in earnest after a scary and misleading report on network TV, this time on ABC’s “20/20″, attacked the product as unsafe. Since most orthopedic surgeons continued to favor the screws’ use, lawyers turned for assistance to a Texas dermatologist who had gone to prison and lost his medical license in the 1980s for illegal distribution of prescription drugs, and who after release had set up shop as a go-between for lawyers who needed medical experts. After this physician “attended an organizational meeting with plaintiffs’ lawyers in Philadelphia, about 20 lawyers with bone screw cases enlisted his services,” and he proceeded to locate for them a Florida orthopedic surgeon who then cranked out about 550 opinions for the lawyers’ use — without actually examining the patients on whose behalf they were suing. “Invariably, [he] concluded, with scant explanation, that bone screws caused injury.” Eventually, Judge Louis Bechtle barred all 550 of the Florida doctor’s reports after one of the doctor’s employees testified that she’d been ordered to destroy tapes of telephone calls in which the Texas dermatologist/expert recruiter had dictated the language of the medical reports he expected the doctor to submit.

According to other sworn depositions, plaintiffs who rejected lawyers’ entreaties to sue were surprised to learn that cases had been filed in their names anyway; this happened, for example, to patients from California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota who did not blame the screws for their health problems. “There were no consequences for the lawyers who filed those suits.” Most of the story is told through the eyes of the best-known defendant in the cases, a company named Sofamor Danek, which chose to fight rather than pay; eventually it enjoyed outstanding success in repelling the suits, losing only one of 3,200 cases it faced, that one currently on appeal. But its vindication has come at a steep cost: $75 million in legal expenses, and who knows what unquantifiable costs. No wonder one of its competitors, AcroMed, gave up and agreed to pay $100 million to resolve 5,000 of the actions. (L. Stuart Ditzen, “The bone screw files”, Inquirer magazine (Philadelphia Inquirer), Aug. 27; David F. Fardon, M.D., “President’s Message”, North American Spine Society, Jan. 1997; “Third Circuit Denies Request for Mandamus Relief in Pedicle Screw Suits”, NASS, Jan. 1998).

MORE: The Health Research Group of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen established a clearinghouse for plaintiff’s lawyers suing screw manufacturers, among other clearinghouses it runs for plaintiff’s lawyers, and whose goals include that of “generat[ing] media attention for the pertinent issue”. Among support groups for those who believe themselves victimized by the devices is Pedicle Screw’d. The North American Spine Society, a professional organization, was named as a defendant in many lawsuits because of its educational seminars on the use of screws, which lawyers charged were really a conspiracy to promote the devices.

October 24 – Monitor vote fraud, get sued for “intimidation”. Although ballot box irregularities, 109-percent precinct turnouts and other indicators of vote fraud continue as a very definite problem around the country, “anyone who combats vote fraud comes in for abuse. The Justice Department has become expert at raising cries of ‘voter intimidation’ at any attempt to monitor polling places. Last week Justice dispatched investigators to Fort Worth, Texas, merely because a political activist there distributed leaflets alleging Democrats were casting absentee ballots on behalf of shut-in voters. When the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the fraud in that city’s mayoral election, the Pulitzer jury noted it had been subject to ‘a public campaign accusing the paper of ethnic bias and attempted intimidation.’ Local officials who’ve tried to purge voter rolls of felons and noncitizens have been hit with nuisance lawsuits alleging civil-rights abuse.” (John Fund, “Political Diary: Phantom Voters”, Opinion Journal (WSJ), Oct. 23).

October 23 – Election roundup. “If you’re a swing voter, vacillating between Bush and Gore, here’s one compelling reason to vote for the former: tort reform,” writes New York Press editor Russ Smith in his “Mugger” column. He cites the recent hot-pickle case (see Oct. 10) and says the “simple solution” is loser-pays (“Gore’s Next Move?”, Oct. 16 (see item #2). “If trial lawyers had a dashboard saint, it would be Ralph Nader“, but this time around they’re not giving him money, lest they take votes away from their favorite: despite Gore’s selection of a running mate with strong legal reform credentials, “trial lawyers are so anxious to see the vice president elected, I doubt very seriously if [Lieberman] will make one bit of difference,” says ATLA president Fred Baron. (Bob Van Voris, “The Politics of the Practical”, Corporate Counsel/Law.com, Oct. 19). Governor Bush’s proposal to protect educators against needless lawsuits wins applause from New York Post columnist Arnold Ahlert (“Dubya Stood Up To Parents, Too”, Oct. 20). If Vice President Gore in his current demagoguish attack-mode were handed a big bill for his child’s orthodontia, he might start railing against “Big Dentistry”: “In the end, Gore’s cartoonish view of big business does a disservice both to him and to the American people. He knows life is more complicated than he’s letting on,” write Steven Syre and Charles Stein of the Boston Globe (“Gore proves big on bashing big business”, Sept. 28). And in West Virginia, where asbestos trial lawyer Jim Humphreys had previously been thought a prohibitive favorite for a U.S. House seat after spending an eye-popping $5 million on his campaign, Republican candidate Shelley Moore Capito, daughter of a former governor, is putting up a surprisingly strong race and might pull off an upset in what’s shaping up as an unusually strong year for the GOP in the mountain state (Matthew Rees, “Will West Virginia Go Republican?”, Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, not online).

October 23 – Wheelchair marathon suit. After getting sued last year, the New York Road Runners Club, which organizes the New York City Marathon, agreed to establish a separate division of the race for entrants in wheelchairs, and award trophies to the winners. That wasn’t enough to keep it from being sued again, this time by six disabled entrants who complained that the club violated the Americans With Disabilities Act “by moving the marathon start time for 60 disabled people not in wheelchairs from 8 a.m. to 8:40 a.m.”, a less convenient time for some entrants since it might require them to finish after dark. The man coordinating the wheelchair side of the 26.5 mile event, which will be held November 5, called the new lawsuit “unbelievable” and “truly frivolous.” (“Lawyer Criticizes ‘Disabled’ Suit”, AP/FindLaw, Oct. 19).

October 23 – No breast cancer link. A major federal study recently helped lay to final rest fears of an association between silicone breast implants and breast cancer, yet the federal agency in charge seems to have gone out of its way not to publicize the reassuring results. (Denise Dowling, “Covering up the breast”, Salon.com, Oct. 9). See also Nov. 29; Stuart Bondurant et al, “Safety of Silicone Breast Implants”, Institute of Medicine, 1999; “Off the Lawyers’ Reservation” (profile of Kathleen Anneken), The American Enterprise, Sept./Oct. 1998).

October 20-22 – Product liability criminalized? Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader has called for criminal prosecutions in the Firestone case, where failed tires have been blamed for more than 100 highway deaths. “A Harvard-Brookings Institution study estimates that the downsizing of vehicles caused by fuel economy standards results annually in 2,200 to 3,900 deaths,” notes a Detroit News editorial. “Consumer advocates like Mr. Nader support these fuel efficiency standards and want them increased, which could kill more people. The question becomes: Should certain consumer advocates be accused of criminal neglect?” (“How Many Deaths Are Truly Criminal?”, Detroit News, Oct. 14). Cartoonist Henry Payne, of the same paper, has a similar take on the matter of federal mandating of airbags, which turned out to harm numerous children: Oct. 12 (via Junk Science).

The U.S. Congress has rushed to act before its adjournment on a new federal law criminalizing some product safety matters, but the Federalist Society Criminal Law & Procedure Group earlier this month sponsored a discussion on Capitol Hill which took a dim view of the idea. “Most criminal statutes punish only where there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that a prohibited act was performed with mens rea, the guilty mind. … the proposed legislation is broad in its importation into penal law of the state of mind and knowledge standards of civil products liability law,” argued George Terwilliger (White & Case). Michael Krauss (George Mason U.) pointed out that the increased use of criminal charges in aviation accidents is now seriously hampering investigations after crashes given participants’ reluctance to cooperate and right to invoke the Fifth Amendment against having to testify in cases of criminal (as opposed to civil) jeopardy (see Sept. 6). Legislation to stiffen criminal penalties in product cases has passed both Houses this month, though its terms do not go as far as some of the earlier proposals. (“U.S. House Passes Tire Legislation”, Reuters/FindLaw, Oct. 11). See also Bob Van Voris, “Tire Deaths: Criminal Acts?”, National Law Journal, Sept. 11.

October 20-22 – CueCat’s legal claws. The CueCat is a new little gadget that works on the principle of a personal barcode scanner; its maker has sent it out free to subscribers of Forbes and Wired, Radio Shack catalogue customers, and others, for the purpose of making advertising more interactive (you scan a barcode on the ad, and a related webpage comes up in your browser). Realizing that a working personal barcode scanner would have many uses other than ad-linking, Linux programmers promptly reverse engineered the device and published code which makes the CueCat usable for other scanning tasks, such as keeping inventories. CueCat’s maker, a company called Digital Convergence, objects to the reverse engineering and has also made legal rumblings hinting that in its view ordinary consumers may not have a right to use the device for purposes other than the intended one — even though the general rule is that if someone sends you an item through the mails for free, you’re at liberty to use it as you wish. (Neil McAllister, “The Clause of the CueCat Legal Language Could Shut Down Hardware Tinkerers”, SFGate, Oct. 11).

October 20-22 – Sweepstakes, for sure. Last month class action lawyers extracted a $33 million settlement from American Family Publishers, plus $8 million in legal fees, over allegedly deceptive practices in its magazine-selling sweepstakes. “Refunds will be distributed among the more than 143,000 people who filed claims. The refunds will be allocated in proportion to the claimants’ purchases in excess of $40 per year or ‘their total purchases influenced by the belief that a purchase was either necessary to win or enhanced their chances of winning,’” though it is not explained how it will be possible to verify claimants’ self-reports of having been influenced by such beliefs. Among the plaintiff’s-side law firms expected to split the fees are the Belleville, Ill. firm of Steven Katz (see Nov. 4, 1999) and San Francisco’s Lieff, Cabraser. Time Inc., a defendant in the action and the owner of sweepstakes firm Magazine Associates, will be footing the bill; American Family Enterprises is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Mary P. Gallagher, “Sweepstakes Class Action Settles for $33M, and $8M in Legal Fees”, New Jersey Law Journal, Sept. 19).

October 20-22 – ABA as liberal lobby. Boston Globe columnist Jennifer Braceras says it’s past time to end the American Bar Association’s gatekeeper status in accrediting law schools: “the ABA is not a trade association dedicated to preserving the integrity of the legal profession [but] a political lobbying group that represents the interests of a small, but powerful, liberal elite.” (“Call the ABA what it is: a liberal lobbying group”, Oct. 19).

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September 2000 archives, part 3

by Walter Olson on September 30, 2000


September 29-October 1 – Disabled rights roundup. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the PGA golf tour must bend its rules to allow disabled golfer Casey Martin to ride in a golf cart (“U.S. High Court To Decide Case of Disabled Golfer”, Reuters/FindLaw, Sept. 26; see April 10, our May 1998 take). The government of Great Britain is considering legislation that would compel its armed forces to accept disabled recruits, and pressures are rising to accept handicapped military personnel in front-line as well as auxiliary positions, given the principle of nondiscrimination (Michael Smith, “Disabled want frontline jobs in ‘pc’ Services”, Daily Telegraph (London), Sept. 26; “Forces may have to admit disabled”, Aug. 21; UK Disability Discrimination Act). And a trend that has been well established under U.S. disabled rights law for some time — doctors’ having to hire sign-language translators at their own expense when a deaf patient wishes to call on them for a consultation — is exemplified by a consent decree negotiated by the office of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, requiring an upstate doctors’ group to provide interpreters-on-demand for “all significant medical encounters” (“Spitzer Announces Agreement With Upstate Physician’s Practice To Provide Sign Language Interpreters for Deaf Patients”, press release, June 21; see also May 31).

September 29-October 1 – Annals of zero tolerance: Tweety bird chain. In suburban Atlanta, the Garrett Middle School has suspended 11-year-old Ashley Smith from sixth grade for two weeks on charges of breaking its zero-tolerance weapons policy by bringing a chain to school. It’s a 10-inch novelty chain that dangles from her Tweety bird wallet. “It’s only a little chain, and I don’t think it can really hurt anyone,” said Ashley, a “Tweety fan who publishes her own Web site devoted to the cartoon character.” Earlier, the ACLU successfully represented an Atlanta public school student who was charged with criminal weapons possession after she brought African tribal knives to school for a project (“Girl suspended for Tweety chain”, AP/Salon, Sept. 28; UPI/Virtual New York) (Ashley Smith’s guestbook) (update Oct. 4: school’s explanation).

September 29-October 1 – French crash, German victims, American payout levels? Air France has sued Continental Air Lines to recoup its costs from the July Concorde disaster in Paris that killed 113 people, charging that a strip of metal that fell off a Continental DC-10 caused the incident. The French airline has already offered to compensate survivor families, who are mostly German, but “German lawyers are pushing for a settlement in the United States, where courts order higher payouts.” (“Airline files Concorde suit”, Reuters/CNNfn, Sept. 27).

September 29-October 1 – “Denny’s fights back against false suits”. The restaurant chain, dogged by past charges of racial discrimination, releases more details on how it uses videotapes and other techniques to disprove dubious copycat claims (see Aug. 29-30). In Oakland, Calif., the lawyer son of John S. Harrison Sr. sued Denny’s claiming that a white couple had been served before his father though they had arrived later. “Mr. Harrison conceded he had been a customer for 20 years and ate at that Denny’s counter twice a day for 10 to 12 years with no problems in a store whose clientele was 50 percent black.” He had been happy with the meal and had left a tip. A federal magistrate threw out the suit and gave Denny’s legal fees. (Frank Murray, Washington Times, Sept. 25).

September 29-October 1 – “Supersize small claims”. Prairielaw columnist David A. Giacalone argues for reviving the nearly moribund institution of small claims court by boosting the threshold value of claims handled by such courts to $20,000, a change also endorsed by the HALT legal reform group. Thresholds around $3,000 are now common. Such a shift might relieve some of the docket pressure on regular courts while allowing ordinary citizens to vindicate more claims without lawyers’ assistance, a feature that may help explain why the bar shows little enthusiasm for the idea (undated, but appeared Aug.) (see also Oct. 3).

September 27-28 – Welcome UserFriendly.org readers. We’re picked as the link of the day by the website for the cartoon strip User Friendly, by Illiad.

September 27-28 – “Blind customers want to touch club lapdancers”. In East Sussex, England, the Brighton and Hove municipal council says it will consider a request by the Pussycats Club that its blind patrons be permitted to touch the exotic dancers as a form of handicap accommodation. The club says its vision-impaired customers appreciate the proximity of the lapdancers and their perfume but would get a better idea of what they looked like if they were allowed a hands-on experience, which is currently forbidden by the club’s license. (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph (London), Sept. 26).

September 27-28 – Welcome Toronto Star readers. “One of my favourite Web sites is overlawyered.com, a collection of the most asinine stories from the admittedly ordinarily twisted universe of American law,” writes columnist Jason Brooks. He interviews our editor about a current proposal for Ontario to enact its own law emulating the Americans with Disabilities Act. No one seems to have any very clear idea what such a law would cost, but the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee says “the idea of a total cost figure misses the point.” Uh-oh…. (Jason Brooks, “Will new act go too far for the disabled?”, Toronto Star, Sept. 25).

September 27-28 – “Controversial drug makes a comeback”. A small Canadian firm, Duchesnay Inc., wants to reintroduce to the U.S. market Bendectin, the pregnancy-nausea drug driven off the market by mass litigation claiming that it caused birth defects. “Bendectin was the archetypical case of junk science scuttling a perfectly safe product,” Dr. Michael Greene, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells New York Times science correspondent Gina Kolata. “It was a sad episode in American jurisprudence.” Although ultimately the manufacturer never paid damages, it spent $100 million in defense costs, says Prof. David Bernstein of George Mason University (Sept. 26)(reg).

September 27-28 – Stuart Taylor, Jr. on Gore and Vetogate. Another scathing, must-read column on trial lawyers and politics by the National Journal columnist, written before Janet Reno’s announcement last week that the Justice Department would not pursue an investigation of the Umphrey call sheet affair. Did you know that lawyers as a group have donated nearly ten times as much to the Democrats during this election cycle as the tobacco industry has given Republicans? (“Gore’s Shameless About Posing As A Populist”, National Journal/Atlantic Unbound, Sept. 26) .

September 27-28 – Microsoft wins one. The U.S. Supreme Court has turned down a Justice Department request that it hear the Microsoft case immediately, instead allowing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case, which is what the company preferred; past D.C. Circuit rulings suggest that it may be more sympathetic to Microsoft’s position than was the trial judge. (“High Court Defers to Microsoft”, AP/Wired News, Sept. 26; Declan McCullagh, “Microsoft gets what it wants”, Wired News, Sept. 26). And a number of courts have thrown out statewide consumer class actions against Microsoft based on the sale of Windows, although this doesn’t really come as much of a surprise in the case of states that bar indirect (end-user) antitrust claims, since cases filed in those courts were always long shots (Jonathan Groner, “The Cases Microsoft Is Winning”, Legal Times (Washington), Sept. 18).

September 27-28 – Bank error in your favor. Latest coins- found- under- the- sofa- cushions class action settlement: Wilmington, Del.-based credit card giant MBNA Corp. agrees to pay $3.57 each to current and former customers to settle claims that its ads were misleading in the early 1990s when they promoted a low interest rate for balances transferred from another card, but did not warn that the low rate did not apply to newly incurred charges. Lawyers for the plaintiff class, meanwhile, are set to pocket $1.3 million. Major credit card companies are frequent targets of class action litigation; Chase Manhattan and Providian Financial have recently settled such actions, and Citibank and Bank One/First USA face pending claims (Joseph N. DiStefano, “MBNA settles suit over card ads”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 26).

September 27-28 – Final innings for Kennewick Man. Score stands at archaeologists 0, multiculturalists 1, as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announces that the 9,000-year-old skeleton found along the Columbia River four years ago will be given to local Indian tribes, who intend to bury the remains without allowing a complete examination. “If Babbitt’s ruling stands, the loss to science is beyond comprehension,” writes National Review Online‘s John Miller (“Kennewick Man’s last stand”, Sept. 26; see also Oct. 11, 1999).

September 25-26 – New data on state campaign contributions. Triallawyermoney.org, the project of the American Tort Reform Foundation that tracks plaintiff lawyers’ political contributions, has just expanded its coverage to include local elections in seven key states as well as federal elections. The states include Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Texas; there is also a link to similar data collected by the Civil Justice Association of California (launched Sept. 19 — “State Races“).

September 25-26 – “Skier to be tried for manslaughter in Colorado in fatal collision”. Although two county courts ruled that a reasonable person would not have expected skiing too fast to result in another person’s death, prosecutors in Denver have insisted on pressing a manslaughter rap against Chico, Calif. college student Nathan Hall, who in 1997, at the age of 18, headed down Vail Mountain and collided with 33-year-old Denverite Alan Cobb on the slope, killing him almost instantly. (AP/CNN, Sept. 11). Update Nov. 21: Hall convicted of criminally negligent homicide.

September 25-26 – Wal-Mart’s tobacco exposure. Through a little-known subsidiary named McLane Co., the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer is the largest distributor of cigarettes to convenience stores, which makes it the biggest handler of that commodity aside from the tobacco companies themselves. Despite Wal-Mart’s deep pockets, plaintiff’s attorneys seem not to have noticed it yet. (Kelly Barron, “Smoking gun”, Forbes, Aug. 21) (see also July 7).

September 25-26 – A job offer for the judge. Following protests from defendants, Judge Edward Angeletti of Baltimore, Maryland Circuit Court removed himself from a series of asbestos-injury cases over which he was presiding and declared a mistrial after it was revealed that he had received a job offer from plaintiff’s attorney and political kingmaker Peter Angelos (see Oct. 19 and Dec. 9, 1999, March 15, 2000). According to AP/CNN, “Angelos has said that he made a ‘very substantial’ offer for Angeletti to head his office’s pursuit of lawsuits against lead paint manufacturers.” Angelos, who has become immensely wealthy through his handling of asbestos litigation, controls about three of every four asbestos cases in the Baltimore court. (“Job offer from lawyer leads judge to step down from asbestos trial”, AP/CNN, Aug. 1; “Judge removes himself from absbestos [sic] trials”, AP/Prince George’s County [Md.] Journal, Aug. 2)

September 25-26 – Kopel on zero-tolerance policies. Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, & Joanne D. Eisen of the Independence Institute comment on the school zero-tolerance policies under which possession of an obvious toy gun — or sometimes just making a thumb-and-first-finger “gun” gesture — is considered grounds for punishment. (“Gunning for the Kiddies”, National Review Online, Sept. 22).

September 25-26 – Treaties rule. A federal judge in San Francisco has thrown out a lawsuit against Japanese defendants over World War II atrocities. In 1951 we signed a peace agreement with Japan which prohibited exactly these sorts of claims. Now we have to live up to our end of the treaty — period. (Louis Sahagun, “Suit on WWII Slave Labor in Japan Voided”, L.A. Times, Sept. 22; Reuters/FindLaw; see Sept. 20, 1999).

September 22-24 – “N.Y. Lawyer Charged in Immigrant Smuggling”. In a 44-count indictment, federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged the Manhattan lawyer who runs the country’s largest political asylum practice, Harvard Law-educated Robert Porges, with a wide range of offenses including concocting thousands of fictitious stories of persecution by which detained aliens could avoid deportation, advising smugglers how best to avoid detection by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and “helping smugglers detain illegal immigrants until debts were paid.” According to prosecutors, paralegals wrote out longhand accounts of persecution, claiming of women clients, for example, that they had suffered forced abortions under China’s “one-child” policy, and then coached the immigrants on how to carry off the story convincingly. Porges is said to have “collected as much as $13 million in fees for helping to transport as many as 7,000 illegal immigrants from mainland China to the United States”. (Hanna Rosin and Christine Haughney, Washington Post, Sept. 21). Update Sept. 21, 2003: Porges and wife sentenced in 2002 to about eight years.

September 22-24 – RN’s illusions. Ralph Nader campaigns on the theme that anti-business advocates like himself are somehow kept from circulating their message or swaying policy. Is he really so disconnected from reality as to think that? (Sebastian Mallaby, “Victim of His Success”, Washington Post, Sept. 17). Before you get too enthusiastic about the Greens, suggests James Lileks, take a look at their platform: “They want your money, your job, your freedom and your car.” (“A look at Nader and his merry Greens”, San Francisco Examiner, July 14). And since some Nader groups have proposed the setting aside of a new .sucks domain to express discontent with powerful institutions (ibm.sucks, mcdonalds.sucks, etc.) some Seattle libertarians have turned the tables by founding the rudely named but inevitable Nadersucks.org, which bills itself as the largest collection of critical links about him online, outpacing the “Nader Skeleton Closet” feature at Realchange.org.

Other links of note from a Nader-watcher’s scrapbook: Doug Henwood, “1.75 cheers for Ralph”, Left Business Observer, Oct. 1996; discussion on LBO mailing list re RN finances, Sept. 9, 1998; RN denounces tort reform in campaign press release, VoteNader.org, Aug. 11; Robert Bryce, “Naturally Nader”, Austin Chronicle, April 7; Mike Allen, “Nader: The Little Guy’s Multimillionaire” (worth $3.8 million, heavily invested in tech stocks, still refuses to reveal income tax records), Washington Post, June 18; Paul West, “Corporate gadfly turns out to be rich”, Baltimore Sun, June 17; Michael Lewis, “Campaign Journal: The Normal Person of Tomorrow”, The New Republic, May 20, 1996.

September 22-24 – From our mail sack: hyperactive lawyers. Reader Scott Replogle, M.D., writes from Colorado: “I see (Sept. 18) that trial lawyer Richard Scruggs is suing psychiatrists and the makers of the drug Ritalin, alleging they conspired to ‘create’ a disease, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and then overdiagnose it for monetary gain. Which raises the question: when can we sue the people who not too long ago ‘created’ the previously unknown disorders of ‘silicone disease’ and ‘human adjuvant disease’ during the breast-implant controversy, and conspired to overdiagnose those diseases for monetary gain? And does it matter that many of those people were trial lawyers?” (see also April 13, 2001)

September 21 — Missouri tobacco fees. Lawyers stand to make $100 million or more for representing the state of Missouri in the Medicaid-tobacco litigation and the state’s largest newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, says that sum “is out of proportion to the work performed and the risk involved … troubling … grossly overpays the lawyers involved … creates an unholy alliance between the state and tobacco interests” It’s also “a political gravy train” since “the five law firms involved in the case donated a total of more than $500,000 in campaign contributions over the past eight years, mostly to Democrats”; a prominent Republican former judge and Democratic former mayor of St. Louis were also cut in. “An important issue of public policy — the lawyers’ fees — will be determined outside the public forum” given that a secret arbitration proceeding will be employed to set the fees. “…It is private money in the public trough. But that doesn’t make the sight of the lawyers lining up to feed any prettier.” (“All aboard the gravy train” (editorial), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17).

Brent Evans, a state senate candidate in Missouri, has posted extensive documentation on the circumstances surrounding state attorney general Jay Nixon’s hiring of outside lawyers to prosecute the suit. According to Evans, the lawyers’ campaign contributions of $561,000 included $139,000 for Nixon himself and $113,000 for Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan (“The Tobacco Papers“; the lawyers; their generosity; the work they might have done to justify the fees; “Attorneys mum about how much they’re seeking” (fee request “confidential”), Jefferson City News-Tribune, April 26, 1999; Jack Cashill, “Warning: Tobacco Settlements May Endanger The Integrity of Your Elected Officials” (also discusses Kansas fees), Cashill.com, undated 1999; “Appeals court sides with Nixon on legal fees in tobacco settlement”, Jefferson City News-Tribune, May 31, 2000; James Baughn, The Cape Rock webzine (Cape Girardeau, Mo.), June).

Last year Missouri Digital News reported that Paul Wilson, lead attorney on the matter with AG Nixon’s office, “urged lawmakers to pass legislation that will protect the major tobacco companies from a market-share loss once the impact of the tobacco settlement sets in. Off-brand cigarette companies, those not participating in the settlement, could otherwise undercut the prices of the major tobacco companies. Missouri will keep getting its billions so long as the market share of the signatories does not dip below 95 percent. If it were to do so and Missouri had no off-brand tobacco law, explained Wilson, the terms of the settlement let the major tobacco companies stop paying.” (Anna Brutzman, “Legislators Bewildered By Settlement”, April 4, 1999). Update Oct. 5, 2003: Missouri Supreme Court refuses to entertain challenge to tobacco fees.

September 21 – Dangerous divorce opponents. It’s tough enough going through a divorce in any case, but you’d really better watch out if your spouse is a successful lawyer, according to the New York Post. Advice: try for a change of venue. (Laura Williams, “Attorneys’ Wives Court Disaster”, Sept. 20).

September 21 – Eastwood trial begins. Jurors will hear an Americans with Disabilities Act complaint against the actor’s Mission Ranch hotel in Carmel. For our coverage of the Eastwood case and related Congressional hearings, see May 18, March 7, Feb. 15 and Jan. 26. (“Eastwood to Jurors: ‘Make My Day’”, AP/Fox News, Sept. 20; Shannon Lafferty, “Eastwood in the Line of Fire,” The Recorder/CalLaw, Sept. 21).

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April 2000 archives, part 1

by Walter Olson on April 10, 2000


April 10 – “Pilloried, broke, alone”. Canadian journalist’s probe of “deadbeat dad” issue finds some bad guys but also many who “are too impoverished to pay, have been ordered to pay unreasonable amounts, have been paying for unreasonable lengths of time, or are the victims of bureaucratic foul-ups.” (Donna LaFramboise, “Pilloried, broke, alone”, National Post, March 25, link now dead).

April 10 – Verdict on Consumer Reports: false, but not damaging. After a two-month trial, a federal jury found Thursday that the magazine had made numerous false statements in its October 1996 cover story assailing the 1995-96 Isuzu Trooper sport utility vehicle as dangerously prone to roll over, but declined to award the Japanese carmaker any cash damages. The jury found that CR’s “testing” had put the vehicle through unnatural steering maneuvers which, contrary to the magazine’s claims, were not the same as those to which competitors’ vehicles had been subjected. Jury foreman Don Sylvia said the trial had left many jurors feeling that the magazine had behaved arrogantly, and that eight of ten jurors wanted to award Isuzu as much as $25 million, but didn’t because “we couldn’t find clear and convincing evidence that Consumers Union intentionally set out to trash the Trooper”. The jury found eight statements false but in only one of the eight did it determine CR to be knowingly or recklessly in error, which was when it said: “Isuzu … should never have allowed these vehicles on the road.” However, it ruled that statement not to have damaged the company, despite a sharp drop in Trooper sales from which the vehicle later recovered. The magazine sees fit to interpret these findings as “a complete and total victory for Consumer’s Union” (attorney Barry West) and “a complete vindication” (CU vice president David Pittle). (DURABLE LINK)

SOURCES: Consumers Union; its reaction (link now dead); Isuzu; its reaction; Dan Whitcomb, Reuters/Yahoo, April 6, link now dead; “Jury clears Consumer Reports magazine of liability in Isuzu case”, AP/CourtTV, Apr. 7; David Rosenzweig, “Jury Finds Magazine Erred in Isuzu Critique”, Los Angeles Times, April 7, link now dead. More background: Max Boot, “Guardian of the Lawyers’ Honey Pot”, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19, 1996, reprinted at JunkScience.com site, link now dead; Walter Olson, “It Didn’t Start with Dateline NBC”, National Review, June 21, 1993.

April 10 – Lawyers charged with $4.7 million theft from clients. “Two Manhattan lawyers were arrested and charged Friday with stealing $4.7 million from clients, including a widower with two children and a college professor who fractured her skull in an accident.” Jay Wallman and Alan Wechsler, both 60 years of age, “used the money to keep their Madison Avenue law firm afloat and to pay personal expenses, said Assistant District Attorney Doreen Klein”; in Wechsler’s case, that included paying some of his dues at the Willow Ridge Country Club in Harrison, N.Y., where he was president. The two have pleaded not guilty; “Wallman has resigned from practicing law and Wechsler has been suspended, the prosecutor said.” About $2.7 million of the alleged theft was carried out in the handling of an estate, and the rest in the course of representing medical malpractice and other personal injury plaintiffs, some of whom never were given any of the settlements collected on their behalf, prosecutors say. (“Two NYC lawyers arrested”, AP/CNNfn, April 7, link now dead).

April 10 – Diapered wildlife? Large-scale agriculture has come under criticism for its effects on the environment, but researchers are discovering that naturally occurring fauna can be destructive in similar ways. Colonies of seabirds, for example, “are releasing large amounts of ammonia into the atmosphere through their droppings. … Very large emissions of ammonia could have a detrimental impact on the local ecology, and may be just as problematic as intensive farming. Scientists studying a seabird colony on Bass Rock off the east coast of Scotland have already measured ammonia concentrations 20 times higher than those on chicken farms.” Global warming researchers have noted that among the more important contributors to the level of “greenhouse gas” emissions is cows’ natural tendency to emit methane, and controls on bovine flatulence may be necessary in the future if countries like Ireland are to contribute proportionally to world reductions in such emissions. (“The ‘innocent’ polluters”, BBC News (Scotland), March 8; “Don’t forget methane, climate experts say”, CNN/ENN, Nov. 10, 1999; Google search on “bovine flatulence“). (DURABLE LINK)

April 10 – Courts split on disabled golfer issue. “In a 24-hour span [last month], two federal appeals courts gave opposing decisions on whether handicapped golf pros can use motorized carts during tournament play” — that is to say, whether they can do so against the wishes of tournament organizers. In the more publicized of the two cases, the 9th Circuit agreed with Casey Martin’s demand that he be allowed to use a cart in the PGA Tour; but a day later “a three-judge panel with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago amid much less fanfare affirmed a lower court decision denying Ford Olinger similar mechanical assistance.” Circuit splits make it more likely that an issue will eventually be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Mark R. Madler, “Fed Circuits Suddenly Split on Handicapped Golfers”, American Lawyer Media, March 9). “Olinger himself may have made the most penetrating observation, bemoaning that his appeal was heard by a panel of golfers, while Martin’s was not.” (Robert S. Shwarts, “A Good Walk Spoiled”, American Lawyer Media, March 23).

April 10 – 300,000 pages served on Overlawyered.com. Thanks for your support!

April 7-9 – Silicon siege. With Bill Gates down for the count, who’s next? Antitrust officials, having recently nailed old-line auction houses (“dowagers in the paddy wagon”) Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have now begun an investigation of eBay (“eBay Is Subject of Antitrust Probe, Congress Considers Underlying Issue”, E-Commerce Law Weekly, Feb. 9). Trial lawyers are pressing hard against laptop makers, hoping to repeat their nine-digit take from the Toshiba-glitch class action. (Joe Wilcox, “Data-storage suit sends shockwaves through PC industry”, CNet News, March 1). The many pending claims against AOL include those seeking to reclassify volunteers as workers entitled to back wages and those over the tendency of the 5.0 upgrade to interfere with alternative Internet access (“AOL Sued in Federal and State Court”, E-Commerce Law Weekly, Feb. 9). And privacy suits are being launched against all sorts of Internet leaders, from Yahoo on down (Susan Borreson, “Do You Yahoo?”, Texas Lawyer, Feb. 14). Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers, in a piece written before the Microsoft ruling, says high-tech firms will just be asking for trouble if they cuddle up to Washington in search of official favors, and would do better to unite in resistance: “Silicon Valley is an island of capitalism in a sea of collectivism …. an island of meritocracy in a sea of power struggles.” (“Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations With Washington, D.C.”, Cato Institute monograph (PDF format); Declan McCullagh, “Schmoozing: A Capitol Offense”, Wired News, March 20; “It’s All About Capitalism”, March 20).

April 7-9 – Trips on shoelace, demands $10 million from Nike. “A Manhattan orthopedic surgeon sued Nike Inc. on Wednesday for $10 million, saying shoes made by the athletic footwear giant tripped her and caused permanent injury.” Dr. Deborah A. Faryniarz says that while she was jogging last April “the right shoelace hooked around the back tab of the left sneaker, spilling her onto her wrists and knees” and causing a wrist injury that imperils her future career as a surgeon. Nike spokeswoman Cheryl McCants in Beaverton, Ore., said the company hadn’t yet seen the complaint but that people “sometimes don’t tie their shoes properly.” (“Nike Sued Over Shoelace”, AP/FindLaw, April 5, link now dead).

April 7-9 – School safety hysteria, institutionalized. “North Carolina has quietly launched a program that allows students to call in anonymously or fill out a Web-based form to report on classmates who might appear depressed or angry — or who just scare them,” reports Wired News. The Wave America program and website are run by the Pinkerton Corp., of security fame. On Slashdot, Jon Katz says that the site’s criteria for evaluating whether a fellow student is disturbed or depressed are alarmingly vague. The site also invites students to report anonymously about “intensely prejudiced or intolerant attitudes”, possession of weapons or alcohol on campus, or “anything else harmful to you or your school”. (Lynn Burke, “A Chilling Wave Hits Schools”, April 5; “Why call the WAVE line?“; “Early signs of violence“; Slashdot April 4 thread; our “Annals of Zero Tolerance“).

April 7-9 – L.A.’s mystifying jury summons. Think the long-form census is overkill? “The Los Angeles County court system has come up with a new jury summons form so dense that even some judges can’t make sense of it. The form, resembling a cross between a mortgage application and a deli menu, has generated a flood of complaints — including one from a Pasadena resident called to jury duty: Judge Lance Ito. He filled it out incorrectly.” (David Colker, “Jury Summons Is Guilty of Confusion”, Los Angeles Times, April 3).

April 7-9 – OSHA & telecommuters: the long view. Our editor’s April Reason column finds that this winter’s failed OSHA effort to regulate home offices was no fluke, being in many ways the logical culmination of an animus against home-based work that can be traced through decades of federal labor law (Walter Olson, “Office Managers”, Reason, April). The whole episode reminded columnist Joanne Jacobs of the manner of governance of the Emerald City: “I am OSHA, the Great and Powerful. Pay no attention to that clerk behind the curtain. The Great and Powerful OSHA has spoken. … Sorry. Never mind.” (“Work-at-home employees don’t need this kind of help from Washington”, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 12, no longer online)

April 6 – Feds file Medicare recoupment suit over silicone implants. “The federal government wants to recover millions of dollars it spent treating thousands of women allegedly injured by silicone breast implants, and it’s trying to get in line ahead of the women for its money,” reports AP. The operative phrase above is “allegedly”, since by now it’s widely conceded that science didn’t bear out the original implant panic stoked by federal regulators and trial lawyers. But the feds undoubtedly did lay out health care moneys to treat immune disorders and other ailments “allegedly” (if not necessarily in reality) caused by the implants, so now the feds are going to demand compensation from the manufacturers. You didn’t think medical-recoupment lawsuit theories were really going to remain confined to tobacco, just because they kept saying that at the time, did you? (Michael J. Sniffen, “US Sues Over Implant Fund Recovery”, AP/Excite, April 1, link now dead; Yahoo Full Coverage; Professor David Bernstein’s breast implant litigation page; Doug Bandow, “Breast Implant Myths”, Cato Daily Commentary, Feb. 24).

April 6 – Columnist-fest. They keep writing them, and we keep linking them:

* Microsoft‘s $80 billion plunge in market valuation in recent days has directly or indirectly dealt a blow to the retirement security of as many as 80 million investors, and Schroder & Co. chief economist Larry Kudlow predicts a public reaction against the kind of anti-business grandstanding exemplified by attorneys general Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) and Eliot Spitzer (New York), whose ubiquitous appearances on cable news have been “limited only by the available volume of airtime.” Also includes some choice quotes from Gov. George W. Bush (“I’m unsympathetic to lawsuits, basically; write that down. …I have been a tort-reform governor. I’ll be a tort-reform president.”) (“Americans Vote Microsoft”, National Review, April 4; “Microsoft’s Market Value Drops $80B”, AP/Washington Post, April 3, link now dead).

* “No aspect of life is untouched by lawyers,” observes Mona Charen, citing recent cases on employer liability (Hawaiian car dealership case, see March 10-12) and personal responsibility (drunk Honda driver’s drowning, see March 28) and mentioning this website. Also quotes from an elaborate disclaimer presented to Girl Scouts before they go horseback riding (“Society is Oppressed by Litigation”, Omaha World Herald, April 5).

* Cathy Young is troubled by the recent decision of Philadelphia’s police commissioner to give outside feminist groups a big role in deciding which ambiguous incidents should be categorized as rape (“Let’s not forget the rights of accused in rape cases”, Detroit News, April 5; see March 27 commentary).

April 6 – High fee dosage. “Twenty law firms are set to share a staggering $175 million fee award for winning the settlement of a class action against drug manufacturers and wholesalers over their pricing practices.” Much of the booty will go to four veteran class action firms that filed the antitrust charges: San Francisco’s Saveri & Saveri, Chicago’s Much Shelist Freed Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein, Chicago’s Specks & Goldberg, and Philadelphia’s Berger & Montague. (Brenda Sandburg, “They’re in the Money”, The Recorder/CalLaw, Feb. 16).

April 6 – For the legal-definition file. Varying standards of proof, as defined by Slate Supreme Court correspondent Dahlia Lithwick: “The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment requires that each element of a crime be proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ This means that jurors must be pretty darn certain before they vote for a conviction. In contrast, the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard required under the New Jersey hate-crimes statute [now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court] is a standard used in civil trials to mean that the facts in question are more likely true than not. This is the standard used by parents when they smell beer on your breath.” (Dahlia Lithwick, “Clarence Thomas Speaks!”, Slate, March 28).

April 5 – New Hampshire high court blowup. Yes, scandals happen even up there. Associate Justice Stephen Thayer of the New Hampshire Supreme Court resigned last Friday “after prosecutors concluded he broke the law by trying to improperly influence the assignment of judges hearing his divorce case.” Thayer maintains his innocence, but struck a deal with state Attorney General Philip McLaughlin to resign on a promise that he would not face criminal ethics charges. McLaughlin then released a report saying it was an “institutional practice” at the court for judges who’d excused themselves from cases to review and discuss draft decisions in those cases. Calls for the impeachment or resignation of other justices followed, and are being taken seriously in the state legislature.

However, Chief Justice David Brock says that, Thayer aside, judges have never been permitted to comment on draft opinions in cases where they’d recused themselves because of conflict of interest; and Justice Sherman Horton told a reporter that the sorts of occasions when judges would comment had been when they’d excused themselves for other reasons, such as illness or temporary absence. Accusing the attorney general of grandstanding, Brock said the practice went back decades and that the AG had not given the court a chance to answer the charges before taking them to the press and legislature.

SOURCES: court home page; Holly Ramer, “N.H. Supreme Court Justice Resigns”, AP/Excite, March 31, link now dead; Katharine Webster, “Three N.H. Justices May Be Removed”, AP/Excite, April 1, link now dead; “Whistleblower called hero”, Boston Globe, April 1, link now dead; Norma Love, “Legislators reeling from allegations against justices”, AP/Boston Globe, April 3, link now dead; Brock statement; Kevin Landrigan, “Judge strikes back”, Nashua Telegraph, April 4; Alec MacGillis, “He won’t resign; calls accusations ‘unfounded attack’”, Concord Monitor, April 4; Manchester Union Leader; Foster’s Daily Democrat (Dover). Updates: Brock acquitted at impeachment trial before New Hampshire Senate (Oct. 11); state disciplinary panel gives him admonishment only (May 3, 2001).

April 5 – Update: judge okays “deep linking”. In a much-watched case, Los Angeles federal judge Harry Hupp has ruled that the practice of linking to interior pages of a competitor’s web site does not by itself violate the competitor’s copyright (see our Aug. 13 commentary). The Ticketmaster Corporation had sued California-based Tickets.com, an online tickets service which provides links to the Ticketmaster site for tickets that it does not itself have available. The judge allowed Ticketmaster to proceed with claims that its competitor had breached its copyright in other ways, as by improperly compiling and repackaging information obtained from the Ticketmaster site. (Michelle Finley, “Attention Editors: Deep Link Away”, Wired News, March 30; Brenda Sandburg, “Copyright Not Violated by Hypertext Link”, The Recorder/CalLaw, March 31).

April 5 – Seemed a little excessive. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether it was appropriate for a Chester County court to award $46,000 in legal fees stemming from a dispute over an original $500 legal bill. The case arose in 1988 after Maria P. Bomersbach withheld her monthly owner’s assessment at the Mountainview Condominium Owners Association because of a dispute with the association’s management over her request to inspect its budget documents. The condo association took her to court and the two sides almost settled, but were $300 apart in their offers. Ten years of intensive litigation followed, during which Mrs. Bomersbach, according to judges’ opinions, “engaged in legal ‘trench warfare’ and subjected the association to a ‘pleadings onslaught’ that would render even a competent attorney ‘shell-shocked.’” A dissenting appellate judge called the $46,548 fee “totally unreasonable, and perhaps unconscionable,” and said the condo association shared responsibility for protracting the litigation. (Lori Litchman, “Pa. Supreme Court to Decide Dispute Over $46,000 Fee to Collect $500 Legal Bill”, The Legal Intelligencer, Feb. 28).

April 5 – The booths have ears. In Canada’s National Post, John O’Sullivan writes that his “attention was caught by a small item in the British press: Police in Gloucester are cracking down on local racism by entering restaurants in disguise and listening for racist conversation. In the first week of ‘Operation Napkin,’ one man was arrested for racially aggravated harassment. Another was overheard mimicking an Indian waiter, but the police decided that his behavior did not warrant prosecution.” (John O’Sullivan, “Operation Napkin to the Rescue”, National Post, March 28, link now dead).

April 4 – Microsoft violated antitrust law, judge rules. Competitors gloat: “I think it’s fair to say that the logical conclusion is that the degree to which Microsoft is restrained, that ought to be good for everybody else in tech,” says Sun Microsystems general counsel Michael Morris, henceforth to be known as “Zero-Sum” Morris. NASDAQ investors evidently don’t agree with him, sending the index skidding 349.15 points, or 7.6 percent. “Microsoft has been kept in check by all these antitrust proceedings from doing anything too bold,” says Kevin Fong with Mayfield Fund in Menlo Park; non-boldness has its costs, Microsoft now having slipped behind Cisco in market value for the first time. And Brookings’ Robert Litan calls the ruling “manna from heaven for the private plaintiffs because it basically should eliminate a lot of their need for proof”. (Eun-Kyung Kim, “Judge Rules Against Microsoft”, AP/Yahoo, April 3, link now dead; Dick Satran, “Tech Industry Remains Guarded on Microsoft”, Reuters/Yahoo, April 3, link now dead; Yahoo Full Coverage).

April 4 – Emerging campaign issue: “brownfields” vs. Superfund lawyers. A few weeks ago (see February 26-27 commentary) a report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that Superfund liability fears are among major factors stalling redevelopment of “brownfields” (abandoned or underused industrial sites) in American cities. Now the issue has reached the presidential campaign, with Texas Gov. George Bush yesterday calling for reforms aimed at encouraging brownfield redevelopment, including liability protections for new developers that perform responsible cleanups, an initiative that is anathema to the Superfund bar. “The old system of mandate, regulate and litigate only sends potential developers off in search of greener pastures — literally,” Bush told workers at a plant in Pennsylvania. Vice President Gore has cited the Superfund law as among his proudest legislative achievements, though others have much criticized it as a boondoggle for litigators that slows down actual cleanups. (Patricia Wilson, “Bush on Gore Turf Proposes Environmental Agenda”, Reuters/Yahoo, April 3, link now dead; Bush campaign statement).

April 4 – Progressives’ betrayal. Jonathan Rauch’s new National Journal column argues that the American Left betrayed its principles when it got into bed (much of it, at least) with trial lawyers who have lately pitched their services as ways to bypass the tiresome need for legislation. “Suddenly the American Left is on the side of fantastically wealthy private actors who are accountable to no one.”

“Who elected these lawyers to help legislatures? What will they do next, helpfully, with their billions? If lawyers file and finance lawsuits against an unpopular industry and then channel billions of dollars of booty back into government treasuries, while also channeling millions more into soft-money donations to political parties, how is that any less corrupting than when chemical companies make PAC contributions in exchange for tax breaks? … If the Left ceases to be a counterweight to huge concentrations of unaccountable private wealth and power, of what earthly use is it?” Also, don’t miss the old quote that Rauch unearths from Ralph Nader, about how undemocratic it is for governance to go on in back rooms without informed public consent and participation — this before Ralph’s friends in the trial bar realized they could govern that way. (“Triumphantly, America’s Left Betrays Itself (Again)”, National Journal, March 31).

April 4 – Now it’s hot chocolate. As if the menace of hot take-out coffee were not bad enough, Dunkin Donuts is now being sued over the temperature of the hot chocolate served at one of its outlets in Barre, Vermont. “The suit was filed in Washington County Superior Court by Diane Bradeen who claims her daughter Katrina suffered burns on her lap when the hot drink was spilled.” (“Suit filed over temperature of Dunkin Donuts’ hot chocolate”, AP/Boston Globe, April 3, link now dead).

April 3 – Book feature: “The Kinder, Gentler Military”. “So how did we get from the blood, sweat, and tears version of boot camp, to ‘Bootcamp Lite,’ … ‘battle buddies,’ ‘training time-outs,’ ‘confidence course facilitators,’ and the ‘gender-normed’ grenade throw?…

“Government nineties-style was obsessed with the self-esteem of its citizens and with avoiding injury — psychic and physical. … A doddering kind of hypochondria filled the land. Since so many new kinds of injuries were now validated by the courts and by the culture at large, new classes of victims proliferated, and activities that used to be considered a bit risky (but generally worth it) were treated like virtual minefields of danger …

“It was [also] inevitable that the personal-is-political crowd would get around to the military. They had spent much of the seventies and eighties focusing on the workplace, the home, and schools, but it had been harder to find a way into that monastery standing outside the gates, the preserve of all that was imperialistic, aggressive, violent, hierarchical, uncompromising, authoritarian. … And the military made such an exciting end-of-the-century project. In an era devoted to examining, criticizing, and rebuking masculinity, the armed forces were the last preserve where the species ran free. …

“The new broadly written and subjectively defined infraction [of "hostile environment" sexual harassment] opened up a new frontier for litigation and created a new legal language. A hostile and offensive environment is very difficult to define. … A vague definition combined with lawyers smelling money is a dangerous combination. Wherever there is a possibility for confusion (as between men and women most of the time) there is a possibility for injury, and the law gave us a crude template of victim and victimizer, hurtful act and injury, perpetrator and receiver, to fit over the most complex, the most ambivalent, the most highly charged, of our relationships: between men and women, employer and employee, teacher and student. …

“Nobody really knew where ‘sexual harassment’ began and ended and we were still struggling in the early nineties: Society and the military [are] just beginning to understand that certain behaviors constituted harassment,’ one congressman explained with great earnestness at the time. But while we tried to figure out what sexual harassment was and what it was not, the new law seemed to take on a life of its own. Our half-finished creation began to toddle around the countryside scooping up victims in its large bumbling hands. Even the president could not escape….

“[Quoting military sociologist Charles Moskos:] ‘The Tailhook convention of ’91 was the worst event for the [U.S.] Navy since Pearl Harbor.’”

– from The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? by Stephanie Gutmann, newly published by Scribner (Review: Richard Bernstein, New York Times, March 24; Yahoo full coverage).

April 3 – Update: junk-fax lawsuit rebuffed. In Houston, Judge Harvey Brown has dismissed the lawsuit discussed in this space October 22, which demanded $7 billion from 80 area businesses that had patronized ad services that faxed coupons and other circulars to what the lawyers said were unwilling recipients. Since the suit was filed in 1995, Texas has passed a law prohibiting unsolicited commercial faxing, but the lawyers had come up with the idea of suing in state court under an earlier federal statute providing for penalties of $500 to $1500 per fax sent, which given the class action format added up to billions: one defense lawyer called it “Powerball for the clever”. (Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse-Houston, undated; judge’s order made public March 22).

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March 2000 archives, part 2

by Walter Olson on March 31, 2000


March 31-April 2 – Punished for resistance. Gun-suit organizers were hoping Smith & Wesson’s capitulation would bring about a race among other firearms makers to settle; instead, manufacturers, dealers and buyers are racing to dissociate themselves from the hapless company, formerly the market leader. Now — in a move that counts as heavy-handed even by the standards of activist attorneys general — Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal and New York’s Eliot Spitzer are readying antitrust action against companies in the gun industry for the offense of shunning S&W. Connecticut reportedly issued subpoenas yesterday; among possible grievances bruited in the New York Times‘ account are that some organizers of shooting matches have told S&W that it is no longer welcome, that dealers are dropping its wares, and that other gun companies are unwilling to go on coordinating their legal defense efforts with S&W, which means it will have to find a new law firm. Blumenthal’s and Spitzer’s message to those in the gun business could hardly be clearer: better go quietly, because we’ll crush you if you resist in any organized way. (Fox Butterfield and Raymond Hernandez, “Gun Maker’s Accord on Curbs Brings Industry Pressure”, New York Times, March 30; Peter Slevin and Sharon Walsh, “Conn. Subpoenas Firms in Gun Antitrust Probe”, Washington Post, March 31).

March 31-April 2 – Terminix vs. consumer critic’s website. Pest control company Terminix retreats from courtroom efforts to swat dissatisfied consumer Carla Virga, who put up a website to publicize her unhappiness with its services. After its defamation suit was dismissed, the company tried again on the theory that Ms. Virga was infringing its rights by using the word Terminix itself in “metatags” directed at search engine listings. This succeeded in infuriating many in the Web community, and now the company has backed off that second action as well. Other companies that have gone to court against angry-consumer websites include Bally Total Fitness, Circuit City, and U-Haul. (Craig Bicknell, “Site No Longer Bugs Terminix”, Wired News, Mar. 11; Robyn Blumner, “Welcome to the world of free-speech exterminators”, St. Petersburg Times, Mar. 19).

March 31-April 2 – Employer-based health coverage in retreat? Report in the news-side Wall Street Journal last month suggests more big employers are beginning to “look for an exit strategy from the health-benefits business”, especially since “it’s possible that Congress or a court ruling will expose employers to legal liability in malpractice cases“. Under “defined contribution” models pioneered at Xerox Corp. and elsewhere, employees are given lump-sum health vouchers and told to find the plan that’s best for them. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Kenneth Abramowitz sees the benefits of giving workers choice, but points out the danger that employees will be cut loose with a “Yellow Pages” outcome: “Here’s $5,000 and the Yellow Pages. You figure it out.” “Adding new liability for companies could prompt some to scuttle their health-benefits programs and send employees into the market to fend for themselves. Says Margaret O’Kane, head of a managed-care accrediting organization called the National Committee for Quality Assurance: ‘If employers find themselves in the path of the trial lawyers, I think you can expect a massive bailout’”. (Ron Winslow and Carol Gentry, “Health-Benefits Trend: Give Workers Money, Let Them Buy a Plan”, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, fee-based library).

March 31-April 2 – Welcome Milwaukee Journal Sentinel readers. Overlawyered.com was a featured website earlier this month in Bob Schwabach’s “On Computers” column, which runs in Wisconsin’s leading paper and many others nationwide (March 9).

March 30 – Hollywood special: “Erin Brockovich”. The words “babelicious” and “toxic tort” had probably never been used in the same sentence before, but Julia Roberts’ new flick is finally showing that with the right costume design a litigation movie can ace the box office. Now the Hudson Institute’s Mike Fumento, in an op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal expanded considerably into a piece in yesterday’s National Post (Canada), challenges the premise, taken for granted among most reviewers of the film, that Pacific Gas & Electric was guilty as charged of poisoning the populace of a small California desert town with chromium-6 in the water. Fumento says the levels of contamination found were orders of magnitude lower than those needed to induce health effects in experimental animals; that the lawyers sought to blame on the water a wide assortment of ailments among local residents that science has not linked to chromium exposure; and that health studies found that the plant’s own workers, who were likely exposed to at least as much pollution as neighbors, had a life expectancy comfortably exceeding the California average. (Michael Fumento, “The dark side of Erin Brockovich”, National Post, March 29; Michael Fumento, “‘Erin Brockovich’, exposed”, Wall Street Journal, March 28; official film site; Mr. Showbiz review; Christine Hanley, “Brockovich’s Work Is Just Beginning”, AP/ABC News, March 27).

March 30 – Hollywood special: “The Insider”. Though nominated for numerous Oscars, last season’s portentous litigation epic The Insider got shut out in the actual naming of awards. Were Academy voters bothered by the film’s unacknowledged fictionalizations, or did they just share the views of Adam Heimlich of the New York Press, who last week called the film “preposterously overheated … The title character’s big revelation in this interminable movie — which treats the looting of tobacco companies by trial lawyers with enough gravitas to make Judgment at Nuremberg feel like Oklahoma! by comparison — is that ‘cigarettes are nothing but a delivery system for nicotine.’ … God forbid someone in Hollywood or on the Upper West Side speaks out against the selective demonization, for purposes of state and oligarchic power, of the drugs they don’t happen to use. Philip Morris should fight back with a drama exposing that Starbucks lattes are nothing but a delivery system for caffeine and martinis are nothing but a delivery system for alcohol. If Insider wins Best Picture … it’ll prove that Hollywood is nothing but a delivery system for the propagandistic justification of top-down class warfare.” But it didn’t win. (Adam Heimlich, “Heimytown”, New York Press, Mar. 22).

March 30 – Al Gore among friendly crowd. Last Thursday Vice President Gore attended a $500,000 luncheon fund-raiser at the Cincinnati home of Stanley Chesley, sometimes nicknamed the “Master of Disaster”, one of the country’s most prominent plaintiff’s trial lawyers. The Cincinnati Post says that Chesley, known for air-crash, tobacco and Microsoft suits, “has been a dependable fund-raiser for the vice president and President Clinton.” (Bill Straub, “Gore next to visit Cincinnati to raise funds”, Cincinnati Post, March 22; Sharon Moloney, “Gore bashes Bush tax plan”, Cincinnati Post, March 24); Christopher Palmeri and James Samuelson, “The Golden Leaf”, Forbes, July 7, 1997). For recent fund-raising by Bill Clinton among trial lawyers, see our Feb. 14 commentary.

Forbes Online columnist James Freeman recently took a hard look at Gore’s in-depth support from trial lawyers (“Who’s funding Gore?”, Feb. 28). Gore’s financial backers over the years have included most of the biggest names in the litigation business, including Wayne Reaud (asbestos, Toshiba laptops), John O’Quinn (breast implants, many others), Joe Rice (asbestos, tobacco), Bill Lerach (shareholder lawsuits), etc. Gore hosted Lerach at the White House for coffee in February 1995, Freeman writes, and Chesley was there for coffee that same day.

March 29 — Litigator’s bliss: finding opponent’s disgruntled former employee. “Assume the legal lotus position and imagine a happy place. What greater nirvana could there be than [finding] the disgruntled former employee of an opposing party? Gruntled or not, a high priority of any good discovery plan should be to identify and interview former employees as quickly as possible, before the other side can neutralize or co-opt them.” (Jerold S. Solovy and Robert L. Byman, “Discovery: Ex parte, Brutus?” (practitioners’ advice column), National Law Journal, March 27, not online).

March 29 – Why rush that software project, anyway? California adds to its reputation as a high-hassle state for tech employers with a law taking effect this year, backed by unions and plaintiff’s employment lawyers, requiring that many computer consultants be paid overtime rates if they put in more than eight hours in a day. Many such consultants bill at rates that exceed $50, $100 or even $200 an hour, before the overtime premium is added in. One Bay Area staffing exec says most of his employer clients are unwilling to trigger the overtime entitlement and are instead sending home specialists after eight hours who would previously have worked longer (Margaret Steen, “New overtime law spurs change in tech firms”, San Jose Mercury News, March 22, link now dead; “Hi, OT Law; Bye, Tech Boom?”, Reuters/Wired News, March 2; Margaret Steen, “New law means overtime pay for computer consultants”, San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 29; Kirby C. Wilcox, Leslie L. Abbott and Caroline A. Zuk, “The 8-Hour Day Returns”, CalLaw, Jan. 24).

March 29 – The bold cosmetologists of law enforcement. The New York Times took note this Sunday of efforts in Nevada and Connecticut to enlist beauty-parlor personnel in the task of identifying possible victims of domestic violence for referral to battered women’s shelters and other social service agencies (see our March 16 commentary). Its report adds a remarkable new detail regarding the sorts of indicators that Nevada cosmetologists are being officially encouraged to watch for as signs of household violence (being licensed by the state, they have reason to listen with care to what’s expected of them). “Torn-out hair or a bruised eye may signal abuse, but more subtle warning signs may come out in conversation. One Nevada hairdresser, [state official Veronica] Boyd-Frenkel said, told of a client who said: ‘My husband doesn’t want me to see my friend anymore. He says she is putting bad ideas in my head.’

“‘Emotional abuse, intimidation, control, jealousy, overpossessiveness and constant monitoring,’ she said, can be as sure signs of domestic violence as physical injuries.” Does Ms. Boyd-Frenkel, who holds the title of “domestic violence ombudsman” for the attorney general of Nevada, really deem it “emotional abuse” and potential domestic violence when a husband seeks to warn a wife (or vice versa) away from a friend who’s considered a bad influence? Is such spousal behavior really to trigger the notice of the official social-service apparatus, and its new deputies in the hair and nail salons of Nevada? (Jeff Stryker, “Those Who Stand and Coif Might Also Protect”, New York Times, March 26).

March 29 – Update: advice to drop medication unavailing. As reported earlier, subway-push defendant Andrew Goldstein went off his antipsychotic medication before his recent murder trial on advice of his lawyers, in order to demonstrate to the jury how deranged he was (see Feb. 26-27 and March 2 commentaries). Whatever the ethical status of this tactic, it was apparently unavailing in practice: a New York City jury convicted Goldstein of murder last week. He will probably serve his sentence in a state prison outfitted to give him psychiatric care. (Samuel Maull, “Man Convicted in Subway Shove Case”, AP/Excite, Mar. 22).

March 28 – $65 million Texas verdict: driver at twice the legal blood limit. “A Galveston, Texas, jury has awarded $65 million to the parents and estate of a woman who drowned after her car plunged off a boat ramp and she couldn’t disengage her seat belt.

“The jury found defendants Honda of America Manufacturing Co. Inc. and Honda R & D Co. Ltd. 75 percent responsible for the death of Karen Norman — even though after her death, Norman’s blood-alcohol level measured at nearly twice the Texas legal limit. …

“After the accident, [Honda attorney Brad] Safon noted, Norman’s blood-alcohol level was measured at 0.17. The Texas drunk driving limit at the time of the accident was 0.10; it is now 0.08.” Plaintiff’s lawyers said the salt water in which Norman drowned might have thrown off the blood level reading. (Margaret Cronin Fisk, “Fatal Grip of Seat Belt Results in $65M Verdict”, National Law Journal, Mar. 27)(& update Oct. 13, 2003: appeals court throws out award, which trial judge has previously reduced to $43 million).

March 28 – Call me a fraud, will you? Why, I’ll…I’ll hire you! Last year Big Five accountants Ernst & Young paid $185 million to settle a bankruptcy trustee’s charges that it had mishandled the affairs of the now-defunct Merry-Go-Round apparel chain. Now Ernst has sued its former law firm, D.C.-based Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman, which it says should share the blame. And to prosecute the new suit Ernst has hired none other than the law firm that sued it in the first round, Snyder, Weiner, Weltchek & Vogelstein of Pikesville, Md. “Swidler noted that Snyder Weiner in the earlier suit had accused Ernst of fraud, and now Snyder Weiner in ‘this complaint asserts “E&Y’s innocence of the fraud”‘”. An Ernst executive shrugs off criticism: “Who knows about the case more than the firm that argued the other side?” (Elizabeth MacDonald, “Ernst & Young Sues Law Firm Over Settlement”, Wall Street Journal, March 14 (online subscribers only); James V. Grimaldi, “Accounting Firm Sues Lawyers”, Washington Post, March 14).

March 28 – Annals of zero tolerance: don’t play James Bond. A fifth-grade “model student” at Sutton Elementary School in Tecumseh, Michigan faces expulsion for up to a half year for bringing a plastic toy gun to school because he wanted to “play James Bond”. “You could see it was plastic,” said school superintendent Rich Fauble. “If you looked at it, you could tell it wasn’t a gun.” “I just wanted to play with it at recess,” said the boy, in Fauble’s account. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I play with it at home.” Sutton principal Debra Langmeyer said the board’s recommendation of expulsion “might seem extreme” but is intended to “send a message” about guns. (“Toy gun may cause student’s expulsion”, Toledo Blade, Mar. 16).

March 28 – From the labor arbitration front. The Connecticut Supreme Court, over dissents from two of its members, has upheld an arbitrator’s order that David Warren be reinstated to his municipal job in the town of Groton, from which he was dismissed in 1997 after pleading no contest to charges of larceny. Warren was accused of stealing money from the town by selling dumping permits and pocketing the proceeds himself, but the court saw no reason to disturb an arbitrator’s reasoning that his no contest plea might have reflected a wish to avoid the cost and inconvenience of trial, rather than actual guilt. (“‘No-contest’ not guilty, Supreme Court says”, New Haven Register, March 21). And the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review an arbitrator’s order that a West Virginia mining company rehire a heavy machinery operator fired after he twice tested positive for marijuana use. The Fourth Circuit upheld the reinstatement, noting that courts “overwhelmingly” defer to the results of arbitration in the unionized workplace. (AP/FindLaw, “Supreme Court to clarify when lower courts can overrule arbitrators”, Mar. 20; Eastern Associated Coal Corp. vs. United Mine Workers, 99-1038).

March 28 – Another visitor record set. Last week was the busiest yet for visitors since Overlawyered.com was launched nine months ago … thanks for your support!

March 27 – Welcome Arts & Letters Daily readers. The best weblog in the world for coverage of essays and history, biography and belles-lettres, is put out for a worldwide audience by philosophy professor Denis Dutton of the University of Christchurch in New Zealand. We get a featured link today (see right-hand column after link to Sullivan piece, for which itself see below).

March 27 – Another S&W thing. “We want to do a Smith & Wesson-like thing with DoubleClick,” Michigan attorney general Jennifer Granholm said Thursday, referring to restrictions on Web data collection that she and attorneys general from New York, Connecticut, and Vermont have been negotiating with the biggest online ad-placement company. We suppose this means that she and her colleagues want to invent far-fetched legal theories to attack business practices that have long been regarded as lawful; file a great flurry of suits in multiple courts so as to overwhelm the designated opponent; use the threat of bankrupting legal expense to muscle it into submission with no need to reach a decision on the merits; and instill fear into other businesses that the same thing could happen to them unless they cooperate with the dictates of ambitious AGs. After all, that’s what was done to S&W. (“AGs Eye Privacy”, Reuters/Wired News, March 23; “DoubleClick in settlement discussions”, Bloomberg News/CNet, March 23).

March 27 – Philadelphia: feminist groups to be consulted on whether to classify incidents as rape. As several high-profile cases in recent years demonstrate, authorities sometimes charge men with rape or sexual abuse in cases where there’s conflicting or ambiguous evidence as to whether there was nonconsensual sexual contact (see, for example, the case of Columbia University grad student Oliver Jovanovic, whose conviction was overturned by a New York appeals court in December). Now Philadelphia police commissioner John Timoney has announced that “he will let women’s organizations help police decide when to believe sexual-assault complaints and how to classify them.” Barbara DiTullio, who heads the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women, called the plan “wonderful” and said it could become a model for police departments across the country. “We’re putting together a committee of women . . . and [will] actually, quite literally, let this women’s group be the final say on our classification [of cases]” said Timoney in an interview, though the women’s groups themselves expressed doubt as to whether their say would be final. (Mark Fazlollah, Craig McCoy, and Robert Moran, “Timoney to allow sex-case oversight”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 21) (via Freedom News).

March 27 – Microsoft Windows downgrade. Be prepared for the Justice Department’s anticipated “remedies” in Reno v. Gates by visiting this parody site (Bob Rivers, KISW, Seattle).

March 27 – Social engineering by lawsuit. Yale law professor Peter Schuck “doubts [that Smith & Wesson] would have lost a court case,” according to this New York Times “Week in Review” piece, which also quotes the editor of this website concerning the evils of litigation as an end run around democratic process (Barry Meier, “Bringing Lawsuits to Do What Congress Won’t”, New York Times, March 26). Cato Institute fellow Doug Bandow wonders why undemocratic lawmaking-by-lawsuit hasn’t become a bigger election issue: “Politics is a bad way to make policy. Litigation is worse.” (“Litigative vs. Legislative Democracy”, Cato Daily Commentary, March 20). And Andrew Sullivan warns Britons that unless they watch out, their country’s trend toward “empowerment of lawyers” will lead them to the state of “hyper-litigation” typified by the U.S. (“A brief warning: soon lawyers will have Britain by the throat”, Sunday Times (London), March 26).

Also: we’ve now put online our editor’s op-ed from last Tuesday on the Smith & Wesson settlement, which expanded on the arguments made earlier in this space (Walter Olson, “Plaintiff’s lawyers take aim at democracy”, Wall Street Journal, March 21).

March 27 – Kessler rebuked. Last week the Supreme Court ruled that former Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler had made an improper power grab when he claimed for his agency “broad powers that had somehow gone unnoticed for more than half a century” to regulate tobacco, writes Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman: “This was a startling revelation indeed. In 1964, the FDA said it had no authority to regulate tobacco. In 1965, it said it had no authority to regulate tobacco. In 1972, it said it had no authority to regulate tobacco. Ditto in 1977, 1980, 1988, and so on — until four years ago, when Kessler checked the attic and was pleasantly surprised to find this prerogative stashed in a box crammed with eight-track tapes and copies of Look.” (“On Target: A Setback for the Anti-Tobacco Jihad”, March 23; Tony Mauro, “For ‘Better or Worse’ FDA Can’t Regulate Tobacco”, American Lawyer Media, March 22).

March 24-26 – “Trial Lawyers Pour Money Into Democrats’ Chests”. The article everyone’s talking about: yesterday’s New York Times shines some overdue light on the trial lawyers’ frantic shoveling of vast sums into this year’s federal election races. “‘It would be very, very horrifying to trial lawyers if Bush were elected,’ said John P. Coale, a Washington lawyer involved in the tobacco litigation, who has given over $70,000 to the Democrats. ‘To combat that, we want to make sure we have a Democratic president, House and Senate. There is some serious tobacco money being spread around.’” “What’s different this time around,” said Michael Hotra, vice president of the American Tort Reform Foundation, “is that everyone recognizes that the stakes are higher. We have a candidate who is making legal reform a core issue and we certainly applaud Bush for that.” Also discusses the website ATRF has set up to monitor trial lawyer campaign spending (Leslie Wayne, “Trial Lawyers Pour Money Into Democrats’ Chests”, New York Times, March 23).

March 24-26 – Who wants to sue for a million? A group of disabled Miami residents has filed a federal lawsuit against Disney and ABC under the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming that the screening process for the hit TV show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” requires the use of a touch-tone telephone and does not make alternative provision for deaf applicants. “The group is seeking class-action status for themselves and others who are deaf, blind or paralyzed and have problems using the phone or hearing the instructions.” (Jay Weaver, “Disabled 4 sue to try for TV million”, Miami Herald, March 17). Update Nov. 7: federal judge dismisses case.

March 24-26 – Next: gender-blind stage casting? A federal jury in Nashville has returned a sex discrimination verdict against a pair of historical theme restaurants that hired only male food servers as a part of attempting to convey the atmosphere of 1800s-era riverboats. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Cock of the Walk restaurants in 1996 after a woman named Susan Mathis carried a secret tape recorder in her purse while applying for a server’s job (more on the curious lack of outrage over this practice). “The servers had to represent the legendary fighters who brawled for the privilege of steering the riverboats, which netted them the best-of-the-best title: ‘Cock of the Walk’,” a group that historically did not include women.

In 1997 the EEOC came under criticism for its crusade against the “Hooters” sexy-waitress chain, which paid $3.75 million in a settlement in hopes of not having to hire “Hooters Boys”. However, the agency’s contention that entertainment value is an improper basis for sex-casting in the hiring of food servers “has never been applied [by a court] to a more mainstream restaurant such as this, which does not have sexual titillation as part of its theme,” said a lawyer for the restaurants. (Stacey Hartmann, “Restaurants’ male-server policy loses in court”, The Tennessean (Nashville), March 16).

March 24-26 – Slip, fall, head for court. Roundup of recent Chicago gravity mishaps, as reported in the Sun-Times and relayed in Jim Romenesko’s irresistible Obscure Store: “Debbie Jacques was forced to wear paper booties when she tumbled. Monica Beeks walked in deep, loose grass, and fell. John Incisi tripped on a Kleenex box left on the stairs. They’re all hanging out in civil court, hoping to get some cash.” (Tim Novak, “Health worker blames paper booties for slip”, Chicago Sun-Times, Mar. 21).

March 24-26 – Welcome visitors. A sampling of the websites that have linked to Overlawyered.com recently: the distinguished literary and arts monthly, the New Criterion; ABC News correspondent John Stossel‘s site; the Capital Research Center, which keeps an eye on politicized philanthopy; Pat Fish’s Luckyfish.com; the Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom; Pickaway County (Ohio) Sportsmen, known for their shooting competitions; and Turkey’s Association for Liberal Thinking (Liberal Düsünce Toplulugu).

March 23 – Baron’s judge grudge. Dallas asbestos-suit czar Fred Baron may or may not have added another notch to his belt with the GOP primary defeat this month of Texas 14th District Court judge John Marshall. In 1998 Judge Marshall was presiding over asbestos litigation filed by Baron & Budd when evidence surfaced that the firm had engaged in extensive witness-coaching (see “Thanks for the Memories“); Judge Marshall referred the matter to a grand jury for possible prosecution, but the charges were eventually quietly buried without indictments. Baron, who now claims vindication, “made no secret of the fact he wants Marshall’s head,” according to alt-weekly Dallas Observer in a report just before the primary. “As early as last spring, Baron was casting about, looking for a candidate to back. ‘I talked to half a dozen people. We were looking for any candidate we could get who would be qualified to run against John Marshall’”. It had to be in the Republican primary, though, which is nowadays tantamount to election in Dallas County. First-time candidate Mary Murphy of Jenkins & Gilchrest, the one who eventually stepped forward to challenge Marshall, “insists she’ll be a fine Republican judge even though she wrote a $1,000 check to the Democratic party four years ago” among other past Democratic ties. “I had nothing to do with getting Mary Murphy to run. That’s a lie, a complete and absolute lie,” Baron told the Observer. Murphy says Baron did try to talk her into running but that it was others who convinced her. Promptly assembling an ample campaign chest, she went on to defeat the incumbent Marshall, obtaining 52 percent of the vote. (Thomas Korosec, “Bench Press”, Dallas Observer, March 9; Todd J. Gillman, “Republican judge questions challenger’s party loyalty”, Dallas Morning News, Feb. 19; Holly Becka, “Voters sent message by ousting three judges, experts say”, Dallas Morning News, March 16 (links now dead)).

Baron, whom we believe holds the title of president-elect of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (we apparently jumped the gun recently in awarding him the title of president), has in the past been touchy about criticism. In 1998, when the Dallas Observer ran a cover-story exposé on his firm, columnist Julie Lyons said Baron had “bullie[d] the Observer’s every effort to investigate his firm’s practices, even taking the newspaper to court to discover sources, in a pattern of intimidation and paranoia such as the Observer has never experienced before.” (Patrick Williams, Christine Biederman, Thomas Korosec, Julie Lyons, “Toxic Justice”, August 18, 1998; Julie Lyons, “The Control Freak”, August 12, 1998. See also earlier Baron coverage on this website: Feb. 14, Jan. 8).

March 23 – Update: mistrial in bank robber’s suit, more litigation expected. By a vote of 9 to 3, jurors in their deliberations were of the view “that the civil rights of Emil Matasareanu, armed criminal, shooter of cops, were not violated on Feb. 27, 1998, by officers who didn’t get an ambulance to poor Emil quickly enough” after his bloody shootout with police following a North Hollywood bank robbery (see Feb. 23 commentary). A federal judge declared a mistrial, and an L.A. Times columnist writes that “the attorney for Matasareanu’s survivors is expected to bring the case against the city and two retired LAPD officers to court again. By survivors, I mean the dead man’s family, not the people he didn’t kill.” (Mike Downey, “A World With No Bad Guys, Just Topsy-Turvy Juries”, Los Angeles Times, March 17, link now dead).

March 23 – Let them sue us! In the recent media boomlet over “medical mistakes”, it’s been easy to forget that hospitals currently must anticipate years of expensive litigation if they move aggressively to withdraw practice privileges from perceived “problem doctors”. Consider the now-celebrated “Dr. Zorro” case, in which Dr. Allan Zarkin is alleged to have carved his initials into a patient’s body at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. The hospital’s chairman, Morton P. Hyman, “vowed he would make it harder for doctors to maintain their privileges at Beth Israel and would see that hospital procedures were tightened further. … Doctors disciplined by the state will be automatically dismissed from the hospital, he announced, even if their firings leave the hospital liable. ‘Let them sue us,’ he said, pounding the table.” (Jennifer Steinhauer, “At Beth Israel, Lapses in Care Mar Gains in Technology”, New York Times, Feb. 15, not online).

March 22 – Next on the class-action agenda: liquor? Public Citizen, whose campaigns against American business often closely parallel those of the organized plaintiff’s bar, has for a while been grouping alcohol and gambling companies with tobacco and gun makers as “killer industries” in its distinctively shrill propaganda. (“Killer Industries Fund Congressional Champions of “Family Values’”, press release, Dec. 28, 1998, “Family Values, Killer Industries”, undated; both on Public Citizen website). And the pro-hospitality-business Guest Choice Network thinks it has evidence that the previously long-shot idea of mass litigation against alcoholic beverage makers may be getting to be less of a long shot:

“* The Minnesota DWI Task Force called upon their state’s criminal justice system to initiate class action litigation against makers of adult beverages.

“* MADD’s [Mothers Against Drunk Driving's] year-end press conference closed with a comment from president Karolyn Nunnallee that initiating litigation against alcohol and hospitality companies ‘will be an issue of discussion’ at an upcoming meeting. Although MADD did not have plans to sue ‘at this time,’ she added, ‘but never say never!’” (“They’re Bellying Up to the Bar!”, Guest Choice Network, undated). Martin Morse Wooster examines the evolution of MADD’s views in a new paper for Capital Research Center (“Mothers Against Drunk Driving: Has Its Vision Become Blurred?”, Feb. 2000).

March 22 – Rise of the high school sleepover disclaimer. Before having some of his daughter’s tenth-grade classmates out for the weekend to the family home in East Hampton, a parent at Manhattan’s tony Brearley School had his attorney draft a 765-word “liability waiver and indemnification agreement” for the other parents to sign and return. It describes the students’ impending visit to the “house and surrounding property at the above address (the ‘premises’) without charge on or about Saturday, November 20, 1999 and Sunday, November 21, 1999 during their weekend trip to East Hampton, NY (such use of the premises, the ‘visit’).” Several dense sentences later, it gets to the point: “Student and parent hereby waive any and all present and future claims related to or arising out of or in connection with the visit or any losses they, any other family member or any third party may suffer in connection therewith…” Apparently enough parents signed and the trip came off with no problem. (“Gotham: In Loco Parentis”, New York, Dec. 6; portions of disclaimer appear in printed magazine but not online).

March 22 – Newest disabled right: audio TV captioning. Decision expected this summer on Federal Communications Commission proposal that TV networks be compelled to provide at least four hours of programming a week with “secondary audio” descriptions of filmed action (“…Rhett takes Melanie in his arms and carries her to safety as Atlanta burns around them”) in hopes of giving blind viewers an “equivalent experience” to what sighted viewers are getting. Hollywood types “say descriptions will stifle creativity and jack up programming costs by about $4,000 for an hour of airtime”; audio captioning is considerably more expensive than closed-captioning for the deaf, mandated since 1998, because descriptions of filmed action call for a modicum of editorial judgment as opposed to mere transcription. And the National Federation of the Blind reports that many of its constituents have mixed feelings about the technique, finding it “irritating, overdone, and full of irrelevant information” and switching it off after a trial. (FCC captioning page; Nat’l Fed. Blind comments; Jonathan Aiken, “FCC proposes descriptive audio to help blind enjoy TV”, CNN, Feb. 24). See also our Feb. 19-21 commentary, on the ADA suit filed by deaf moviegoers in Oregon seeking to compel theaters to install closed captioning for films.

March 21 – Smith & Wesson’s “voluntary” capitulation. Today’s Wall Street Journal carries our editor’s op-ed on the Smith & Wesson settlement, adapted and expanded from yesterday’s commentary on this site. The piece asks: why aren’t Republican members of Congress and business people expressing more outrage? “It would surely make a symbolic difference if a few CEOs of companies outside the gun industry chipped in personal checks to start a legal defense fund for small gun makers being bulldozed by the cost of litigation, to give them at least a hope of surviving to fight the suits on the merits. Or if they let it be known that mayors who’ve signed on to the gun-suit jihad should stop passing themselves off as ‘pro-business.’ Not long ago the mayor of Bridgeport, Conn., Joseph Ganim, a gun-suit mastermind who’s considered ambitious for statewide office, was feted by a Chamber of Commerce in his local Fairfield County. Hey — it’s someone else’s industry he’s working to destroy, right?” (Walter Olson, “Plaintiffs Lawyers Take Aim at Democracy”, Wall Street Journal, March 21 (requires online subscription)).

March 21 – Ability to remain conscious not obligatory for train dispatcher, EEOC argues. “In the case of a former Consolidated Rail Corp. employee with a heart condition that can cause him to lose consciousness, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission told a federal appeals court in Philadelphia that ‘while consciousness is obviously necessary to perform’ train-dispatcher tasks, ‘it is not itself a job function.’” The worker had sued Conrail under the Americans with Disabilities Act and lost in federal court; on appeal, the EEOC argued that the railroad could have accommodated his condition and that he was not a ‘direct threat’ to others, which is the standard employers must meet under the ADA if they wish to exclude disabled employees from jobs on safety grounds. “The employee was denied a dispatcher’s job that involves directing trains and taking emergency action to prevent crashes.” (“Employment Briefs: Worker denied promotion sues”, Detroit News, March 18).

March 21 – Furor just one click away. Outcry over Amazon.com’s patent of “one-click” shopping method rumbles on. Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos says the company did it in self-defense; he’s now proposed an across-the-board reduction in the length of patent protection for software and business-method patents. Some veteran intellectual-property lawyers take issue with that scheme and are also upset at a New York Times Magazine article by science writer James Gleick questioning some of the patent system’s fundamental assumptions. Until recently it was widely assumed that business methods — the discovery of a superior method for laying out the aisles of a supermarket, for example — couldn’t be patented at all. What would stores be like today if the idea of a “checkout counter” had been locked up for twenty years by the first company to file for it?

SOURCES: Victoria Slind-Flor, “The Biz-Method Patent Rush”, National Law Journal, Feb. 28; Chris Oakes, “Another Amazon Patent Furor”, Wired News, March 2; Boycott Amazon site (Free Software Foundation); Chris Oakes, “Bezos: Patents Were Self-Defense”, Wired News, Mar. 3; Chris Oakes, “Patently Absurd”, Wired News, Mar. 3; Bezos open letter, Amazon site; Dugie Standeford, “Book Publisher Launches Cybercampaign Against Amazon.com”, E-Commerce Law Weekly, March 8; James Gleick, “Patently Absurd,” New York Times Magazine, March 12; “The Harm of Patents”, O’Reilly Network, March 13; Omar Perez, “Amazon.com Patents Cast Giant Shadow Over Affiliates”, March 20; Miami Daily Business Review, March Victoria Slind-Flor, “Bar Reacts To Bezos Patent Reform Plan”, National Law Journal, March 20.

March 21 – Whether they meant to hurt anyone or not. How harsh can the legal environment become for drunk drivers? North Carolina seems to have pushed things to the ultimate extreme: its prosecutors seek to execute them when they cause fatal accidents. (Paula Christian, “Supreme Court to decide if drunk drivers get death penalty”, Greensboro News & Record, Mar. 12).

March 21 – New subpage on Overlawyered.com: Canadian corner. Finally! A page for our many readers north of the border who’ve noticed the nuggets of Canadian content we periodically slip in and would like them gathered in one spot for convenience. As befits the differences between the two legal systems, there isn’t so much “overlawyering” apparent in most of the stories we relay from Canada; but with regard to most other types and varieties of human folly, the two nations seem to be are in a neck-and-neck race.

March 20 – Liberty no longer insured by Smith & Wesson. In an ominous triumph for brute litigation force — and a setback for both democratic governance and Second Amendment liberties — the Clinton Administration and lawyers representing city governments on Friday bullied the nation’s largest gun maker into agreeing to a variety of controls on the distribution of its products, controls that the Administration had not been able to obtain through the normal legislative process. The company said its capitulation would preserve the “viability of Smith & Wesson as an ongoing business entity in the face of the crippling cost of litigation.” As the New York Times reports, the deal has “opened a new avenue for regulating the firearms industry without action from Congress, where partisan gridlock has stalled even modest gun-control legislation in recent months” — “partisan gridlock” being here employed by the Times as a pejorative synonym for the normal democratic process, which when working properly does not result in the speedy enactment of measures passionately opposed by a large constituency within the majority legislative party.

At this point it would make sense for the Republican Congressional leadership to rise up in unmistakable disapproval of the Clintonites’ invasion of their legislative prerogatives, and announce that –whatever one’s personal position on the details of gun control proposals — the use of litigation as an undemocratic end run around the legislative process is categorically wrong and must be fought with appropriate means at Congress’s disposal, such as funding cutoffs. And yet the first round of wire service stories quotes only one GOP Congressional leader, J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, as reacting to the news, and his quoted words, incredibly, are favorable: “we hail Smith & Wesson for taking a pro-active approach to the problem of violence”.

Advocates of gun-control-through-litigation — not to mention trial lawyers looking for an eventual payday from gun suits — view Smith & Wesson’s surrender as a harbinger of more victories ahead. “The legal fees alone are enough to bankrupt the industry,” boasts John Coale, one of the lawyers masterminding the city suits. “The pressure is going to be on”. Why are so few elected officials standing up to say that what’s going on is wrong?

SOURCES: Agreement text at HUD website; Smith & Wesson statement; Clinton Administration press release; “U.S. Drops Legal Threat Against Smith & Wesson”, Reuters/Excite, Mar. 17; Knut Engelmann, “U.S. Drops Legal Action Against Gun Maker”, Reuters/Excite, Mar. 17; David Ho, “Officials Praise Smith & Wesson”, AP/Excite, Mar. 17; Amy Paulson, “Smith & Wesson agrees to landmark gun safety settlement”, CNN, Mar. 17; Brigitte Greenberg, “Smith & Wesson Gets Preference”, AP/Excite, Mar. 18; Edward Walsh and David A. Vise, “U.S., Gunmaker Strike a Deal”, Washington Post, March 18; James Dao, “Gun Maker Agrees to Curbs in Exchange for Ending Suits”, New York Times, March 18 (requires free registration).

March 20 – “Study Shows Breast Implants Pose Little Risk”. “An analysis appearing in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine suggests silicone breast implants are safe, despite widespread perception that the controversial devices cause health problems” — not to mention a trial-lawyer-led campaign that drove the devices off the market and reaped a settlement totaling billions of dollars from manufacturers. Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, performed a combined analysis of 20 earlier studies and concluded that “‘the elimination of implants would not be likely to reduce the incidence of connective-tissue diseases’ such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or other illnesses caused by the misfiring of the immune system”. (Reuters/ FindLaw, Mar. 15).

March 20 – Do as we say, cont’d. Disabled-rights laws are feared by many private business owners who face the prospect of heavy fines and lawsuit settlements for noncompliance. As for the judicial branch, charged with enforcing these selfsame laws? Well, they’re often a wee bit less mindful of ‘em. Howard County, Maryland Circuit Judge James B. Dudley, who isn’t disabled, concedes that his desire to stick close to the courthouse so he could answer jurors’ questions during a trial was “probably not a justification” for his having chosen to park in a clearly marked handicapped space, a practice also engaged in by local sheriff’s deputies. (Del Quentin Wilber, “Judge parks in hot water”, Baltimore Sun, Mar. 11). And in Massachusetts, following on the revelation that Boston’s opulent new courthouse lacks wheelchair access to its jury boxes and witness stands (see July 17-18, 1999 commentary), the Cape Organization for Rights of the Disabled sued over the disabled-unfriendly state of the Plymouth County courthouse; Barry Sumner couldn’t get over the threshold to divorce his wife and had to ask her to help lift his chair. (Paul Sullivan, “Suit seeks access for disabled at Plymouth court”, Boston Herald, Sept. 10, 1999). Aren’t these courts lucky they’re not private businesses?

March 20 – Costs of veggie-libel laws. Talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey keeps winning in round after round of litigation filed by cattlemen after a February 1998 show she did on mad-cow disease. “Ironically, the more she wins, the more she loses,” observes First Amendment specialist Paul McMasters. Aside from our lack of a loser-pays rule, the culprit is “agricultural-disparagement” laws enacted in 13 states, which menace media producers if they knowingly broadcast false and disparaging statements that harm the salability of perishable farm products. (“Shut up and eat everything on your plate”, Freedom Forum Online, Feb. 21; Ronald K.L. Collins and Paul McMasters, “Veggie Libel Laws Still Out to Muzzle Free Speech”, Texas Lawyer, March 30, 1998). Last year the Texas legislature turned back an attempt to repeal that state’s ag-disparagement law, though the Abilene Reporter-News pointed out that the law is hard to square with the state’s successful efforts under Governor Bush to curb excessive litigation. (“‘Veggie libel’ law Texas can live without” (editorial), April 13, 1999; “House lets ‘veggie libel’ law stand; Bill seeking repeal voted down 80-57″, AP/Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1999).

March 20 – 250,000 pages served on Overlawyered.com. Thanks for your support!

March 17-19 – Holiday literary selection: Irish squire’s litigious ways.“Then there was a bleach yard near us, and the tenant dare refuse my lady nothing, for fear of a law-suit Sir Murtagh kept hanging over him about the water course. With these ways of managing, ’tis surprising how cheap my lady got things done, and how proud she was of it. … [The tenants] shamrockknew her way, and what with fear of driving for rent and Sir Murtagh’s law-suits, they were kept in such good order, they never thought of coming near Castle Stopgap without a present of something or other ­ nothing too much or too little for my lady ­ eggs ­ honey ­ butter ­ meal ­ fish ­ game, grouse, and herrings, fresh or salt ­ all went for something. … [H]e made a good living of trespassing cattle ­ there was always some tenant’s pig, or horse, or cow, or calf, or goose, trespassing, which was so great a gain to Sir Murtagh, that he did not like to hear me talk of repairing fences….

“As for law, I believe no man, dead or alive, ever loved it so well as Sir Murtagh. He had once sixteen suits pending at a time, and I never saw him so much himself ­ roads ­ lanes ­ bogs ­ wells ­ ponds ­ eel-wires ­ orchards ­ trees ­ tythes ­ vagrants ­ gravel-pits ­ sandpits ­ dung-hills and nuisances ­ every thing upon the face of the earth furnished him good matter for a suit. He used to boast that he had a law-suit for every letter in the alphabet. How I used to wonder to see Sir Murtagh in the midst of the papers in his office ­ why he could hardly turn about for them. I made bold to shrug my shoulders once in his presence, and thanked my stars I was not born a gentleman to so much toil and trouble ­ but Sir Murtagh took me up short with his old proverb, ‘learning is better than house or land.’ Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes ­ but even that did not pay. He was a very learned man in the law, and had the character of it; but how it was I can’t tell, these suits that he carried cost him a power of money ­ in the end he sold some hundreds a year of the family estate ­ but he was a very learned man in the law, and I know nothing of the matter except having a great regard for the family. I could not help grieving when he sent me to post up notices of the sale of the fee simple of the lands and appurtenances of Timoleague. ­ ‘I know, honest Thady,’ says he to comfort me, ‘what I’m about better than you do; I’m only selling to get the ready money wanting, to carry on my suit with spirit with the Nugents of Carrickashaughlin.’” — from Chapter 1, Castle Rackrent, subtitled An Hibernian Tale Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, Before the Year 1782, by Maria Edgeworth (1800) (biographies: Edgeworth family site, E-Search Ireland, WritePage, Morley’s) (e-text at Carnegie-Mellon; alternate e-text location, Creighton U.) (passage is from fourth long paragraph of text).

March 17-19 – Letterman sign suit. Anna Soares, 79, who lives near the Manhattan studio where David Letterman tapes his show, filed a lawsuit last month demanding $12 million from CBS because the network has declined to remove a giant illuminated sign of Letterman’s likeness which shines into her apartment’s window. Network officials say they believe they have the proper permits for the sign. Reader Gregory Kohs of American Cynic comments: “what I find preposterous is the $12 million sum the lady decided would be fair.” If the sign does not violate code, how about asking for the costs of relocating to a less-commercial neighborhood? “I think a wee bit less than $12 million would be sufficient to get her belongings into a moving truck.” (“People in the news: Woman files lawsuit over Letterman sign”, Boulder Daily Camera, Feb. 19) (second item).

March 17-19 – Go ahead and comment — if it’ll do much good. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s proposals on ergonomics “may be the single most costly employment policy regulation in U.S. history,” according to the Employment Policy Foundation. Now OSHA has thrown open a period for public comment on the rules, but the Clinton Administration has already signaled that the option favored by most organized employers — not proceeding with the rules at all — is unlikely to be considered, no matter what volume of critical comments may come in. (Alice Ann Love, “Public dialog opens on new workplace safety rules”, AP/Fox News, March 14; Michael D. Towle, “OSHA pushing for new regulations aimed at preventing repetitive motion injuries”, CNN, March 9).

SOURCES: OSHA proposed standard; Yahoo Full Coverage; Ron Bird and Jill Jenkins, “Ergonomics Regulation: Vague, Broad and Costly”, EPF Backgrounder, Jan. 12; National Coalition on Ergonomics (employer alliance); Matt Labash, “Hooked on Ergonomics”, Weekly Standard, Feb. 28; “OSHA Unveils Ergonomics Standard To Ire of Congress, Employer Groups”, Employment Law Weekly, Nov. 29; comments of Mercatus Center, George Mason U., National Association of Manufacturers; (via Junk Science :) Robert Hahn, “Bad Economics, Not Good Ergonomics,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24; David Saito-Chung, “What Price Workplace Safety? New Rules Spark Debate Over Science, Business Costs”, Investor’s Business Daily, Nov. 30; “New OSHA regs need rethinking” (editorial), Boston Herald, Nov. 26; “OSHAme on them!” (editorial), New York Post Nov. 24; “Repetitive Bureaucracy Syndrome” (editorial), Chicago Tribune, Nov. 24.

March 16 – Dave Barry on tobacco suits, round II. The humorist, who wrote a priceless column on the federal tobacco suit last fall (see Oct. 26) now offers an update reflecting on the news that “so far the states are spending more than 90 percent of the tobacco-settlement money on programs unrelated to smoking, such as building highways. … This is good, because we need quality highways to handle the sharp increase in the number of Mercedes automobiles purchased by lawyers enriched by the tobacco settlement.” Then there’s the new round of class-action suits contending that smokers themselves deserve money from the states, which if successful will establish the following cycle:

“1. SMOKERS would give money to THE TOBACCO COMPANIES in exchange for cigarettes.

“2. THE TOBACCO COMPANIES would then give the money to THE STATES (and their lawyers).

“3. THE STATES would then give the money to SMOKERS (and their lawyers).

“4. THE SMOKERS would then presumably give the money to THE TOBACCO COMPANIES in exchange for more cigarettes.”

But isn’t this inefficient, you may ask? Wouldn’t it be easier to order the tobacco companies to give smokers free cigarettes directly? “The trouble with that idea is that it would defeat the two main purposes of the War on Smoking, which are (1) to provide the states with money; and (2) to provide lawyers with, well, money.” Don’t miss this one (“War on Smoking always has room for another lawyer”, Miami Herald, Feb. 18).

March 16 – Judges can’t charge cost of corruption defense to insurer. “Three former San Diego Superior Court judges convicted of corruption charges can’t parlay judicial liability insurance into coverage for their criminal defense, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.” In one of the biggest judicial scandals in California history (see our editor’s 1996 piece on the case), Michael Greer, James Malkus and G. Dennis Adams were found to have accepted gifts from prominent trial lawyer Patrick Frega in exchange for favorable rulings in cases. (Jason Hoppin, “No Coverage for Judges Convicted of Corruption”, The Recorder/ CalLaw, March 2).

March 16 – Your hairdresser — and informant? Hairdressers “are often confidantes for many people,” says Veronica Boyd-Frenkel, who holds the post of “domestic violence ombudsman” in the state of Nevada. All this is by way of explaining why her office, working with the state attorney general’s office, has launched a program to train cosmetologists to recognize signs of domestic abuse, the better to steer suspected victims to approved anti-domestic-violence groups. “They may hear things even someone’s best friend may not hear,” says Ms. Boyd-Frenkel, of the hair stylists. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, in an editorial, thinks it all rather smacks of the enlistment of ever wider circles of the citizenry as official informants (Angie Wagner, “State asks hairdressers to help domestic abuse victims”, AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Feb. 28; “Down the wrong path” (editorial), Feb. 29; Vin Suprynowicz, “The Libertarian: Watch what you tell your hairdresser” (expanded version of editorial), March 1; “Training would not make informants of cosmetologists” (letter to the editor from Ms. Boyd-Frenkel), March 5).

March 16 – Prof sues for right to flunk students. The University of Michigan describes as “utterly without merit” a lawsuit filed by Dental School associate professor Keith Yohn challenging the university’s refusal to fail two sophomore dental students. Yohn charges that the school bent its academic rules to allow the two to remain, and that an assistant dean sent him a belligerent email informing him that poor grades he and three other professors had given the students would be disregarded. Acting as his own attorney, Yohn went to federal court to charge the university with “deprivation of ‘freedom of speech’” and disregard of the ‘health care interest’ of the public and their children”; he also asks $125,000 for emotional distress. (David Shepardson, “U-M sued over dental grades”, Detroit News, Dec. 30; Hanna Lopatin, “Dental Prof. Sues U. Michigan for Refusing to Fail Students”, Michigan Daily/ StudentAdvantage.com, Jan. 5).

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August 1999 archives, part 2

by Walter Olson on August 31, 1999


August 31 — Death by mainstreaming. Had safety been the primary concern, Joshua Smurphat of Sunnyvale, Calif., 12 years old and mentally retarded, would probably not have been allowed onto the Drop Zone Stunt Tower ride from which he fell to his death August 22 at the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara. Mechanical failure has been ruled out, and ride designers say that once patrons have been strapped in, it’s physically impossible for them to fall out — provided they obey instructions to remain in their original posture. Even if Joshua’s harness was insecurely fastened, a possibility investigators are still checking into, an ordinary 12-year-old would be apt to notice the problem, but as Jeffrey Lewis, a director of the local United Cerebral Palsy organization, cautions: “in many cases, a consequence of mental retardation is the lack of danger awareness.”

However, both the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California disabled-rights law prohibit amusement parks from “discriminating” against persons with mental incapacities by turning them away from rides, or attaching special preconditions to their participation, so long as they meet otherwise applicable requirements such as height and chronological age. “Certainly they couldn’t say that somebody who had a cognitive disability couldn’t participate in a ride,” Sacramento disabled-rights attorney Eric Gelber told the San Jose Mercury-News, apparently well pleased with that result. “We take our obligation to accommodate all of our guests, regardless of disability, very seriously,” said a park spokesman, in what might serve as an epitaph for the unfortunate young man. (Aug. 26; related follow-up, Aug. 28; links now dead).

August 31 — New Overlawyered.com page: Unsafe on any docket. “Crashworthiness” cases have made big headlines this summer, with two California juries voting awards of $5 billion against GM (Chevy Malibu) and $290 million against Ford (Bronco) and the Massachusetts high court upholding a $19.2 million verdict against Chrysler for a Plymouth minivan accident that the plaintiffs blamed on brake locking. We’ve accordingly devoted the ninth in our series of topical surveys to the area, assembling some historical background and links about the Audi 5000 and its supposed penchant for sudden acceleration, the 1993 episode in which Dateline NBC producers got caught practicing what you might call sure-fire journalism, and similar controversies, not neglecting the case that litigation advocates would much prefer to talk about, that of the Ford Pinto.

August 31 — The “we sue Microsoft” business plan. A Bridgeport, Connecticut jury on July 17 returned a verdict in favor of Microsoft in a private antitrust suit brought by a small company named Bristol Technologies. Interviews afterward indicated that jurors had been angered by internal Bristol emails and memos revealing the smaller company’s not-exactly-reluctant attitude toward litigation. A May 1998 message from a company director to Bristol chief executive Keith Blackwell referred to the approaching lawsuit as “the ‘We sue Microsoft for money’ business plan.” Meanwhile, “[a] memo from a Manhattan public relations firm hired by Bristol described a $75,000-plus ‘David v. Goliath Strategic Communications Game Plan’ to attack Microsoft in the press,” reports Karen Donovan in the August 2 National Law Journal. “Then came an e-mail from Keith’s wife, Jean, days after the suit was filed in August. Its subject: ‘Extend the Story, Increase the Pain.’” “The whole scenario was kind of disgusting,” said juror Robert LaBella of Stamford (followup — Thomas Scheffey, “Microsoft, Bristol and Money”, Connecticut Law Tribune, Aug. 23). Update Nov. 30, 2000: judge increases verdict to $1 million, Bristol requests new trial.

August 30 — Do as we say (I). Latest employer to face a big class action under the antediluvian Fair Labor Standards Act for not paying overtime to some of its highly responsible employees (lawyers, in this case): the U.S. Department of Justice. (San Jose Mercury-News, Aug. 25; AP/Mpls. Star-Tribune, Aug. 26). Don’t miss the Detroit News editorial (Aug. 28). Update Jul. 18, 2004: court rejects case.

August 30 — Do as we say (II): gun-suit hypocrisy in Detroit. The Motor City’s police chief confirmed last week that just before suing private gun makers for allegedly not doing enough to curb distribution of their wares, the city itself sold an astounding 13-plus tons of used police weapons to a private dealer. That puts Detroit ahead of even New Orleans and Boston (see Aug. 25 entry, below), in the tonnage and perhaps also the hypocrisy competition when it comes to weapons distribution. Should the city be liable each time one of those surplus guns gets used for a criminal or suicidal purpose? (Detroit Free Press, Aug. 25).

Since its filing, letters to the editor from local residents have flayed Detroit’s gun suit for “holding an innocent party responsible for someone else’s criminal activity” and have suggested that, if the city is going to endorse that sort of logic, “victims of crime in the city of Detroit should file suit against the city for its failure to protect those in the city” (Free Press letters, Jan. 8, May 1). More than one letter-writer has suggested, by way of trying to come up with a reduction to absurdity, that the logical culmination would be to hold Detroit’s own hometown industry, the automakers, liable for the activities of drunk drivers. But as July’s Chevy Malibu verdict shows (see August 27, below, and July 10) that’s exactly what the trial lawyers are already doing with considerable success. It’s not easy to think up a reduction to absurdity of our litigation system that isn’t already well on its way to being implemented in all seriousness.

August 30 — “Tort reform spurs lawsuit filings”. Alabama courthouses work overtime as lawyers file suits in droves to beat the deadline for the application of legislated limits to punitive damages and forum-shopping (Huntsville Times, Aug. 24).

August 30 — Taco Bell not liable for Ganges purification pilgrimage. A judge in Lancaster County, Nebraska has declined to order the Taco Bell restaurant chain to pay for trips to India for Siva Rama Krishna Valluru and his wife, Sailaja. Devout vegetarians as part of their practice of Hinduism, the couple was dismayed to discover that a rice side dish they had been eating contained meat. They had argued that swallowing flesh constituted a sin the expiation of which required them to bathe in the Ganges River as part of a purification ritual, but Judge Jean Lovell said such expenses did not count as reasonably foreseeable (Lincoln, Neb. Journal-Star, Aug. 27; AP/Bergen County, N.J. Record, Aug. 28).

August 30 — “Scholar’s shift in thinking angers liberals”. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe upsets colleagues by concluding that the Constitution’s Second Amendment may not, after all, be a meaningless inkblot. Instead he “posits that it includes an individual right, ‘admittedly of uncertain scope,’ to ‘possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes.” Heresy! (Tony Mauro, USA Today, Aug. 27).

August 28-29 — Speech police go after opinion articles, editorial cartoons. Columnist Stephen Chapman writes that the faculty union at Daley College was recently hauled before the city of Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, which has the power to levy fines and issue injunctions. Its sin? Publishing an article critical of affirmative action in its newsletter. The college’s Board of Trustees, which filed the complaint, accused the author of the offending piece, Prof. James Bell, of jeopardizing “the rights of students and staff at Daley to equal access” by “mak[ing] students uncomfortable in an institution where comfort is essential for learning.” In June, after two years, the commission finally dismissed the complaint on the grounds that Daley College was not a “public accommodation”. Also in June, however, Chapman reports, the Department of Human Rights in St. Paul, Minn., filed a complaint against the local newspaper accusing it of racial discrimination for having run an editorial cartoon on college athletics that offended many local blacks. After a public outcry, it backed off (St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 10; AP/Freedom Forum, Jun. 23). Chapman quotes UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh warning that such complaints are only too logical a consequence of today’s “hostile-environment” law, a topic on which Volokh maintains a highly informative website. (column link now dead)

August 28-29 — Weekend reading. Pixels to take out on the canoe or Airstream:

* What goes around comes around: the estate of the famously litigious inventor Jerome Lemelson gets hit with a suit from his former employer saying that it actually owns the rights to many of his patents. Critics accused the late Mr. Lemelson of specializing in “submarine” patents whose applications would lie dormant in the Patent Office for years, then suddenly surface when other companies had made progress on the technology in question. (Victoria Slind-Flor, National Law Journal, August 24; see also lemelsonpatents.com, a website put up by lawyers who’ve tangled with the Lemelson estate.)

* “Why, why, would the American Bar Association honor a scandalous leader who has just been found in contempt of court, and whose disbarment is being considered even now?” Or Webster Hubbell, convicted of stealing from his clients? “What kind of advertisement for the profession of law is that?…[Y]ou can’t embarrass an honest profession. Seduced by the glitz of high office and maybe its own partisan prejudices, the bar got what it deserved” — Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (full column). Meanwhile, Judge Richard Posner’s An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton sounds like the book to read in the coming month, to judge from reviews by Stuart Taylor Jr. (National Journal) and James Stewart (New York Observer).

* Time for social conservatives to get off their coercive, government-infatuated Culture War kick: “The problem with cultural conservatism is that it despairs not of culture, but humanity. Its votaries consider us all a bunch of suggestible imbeciles, and they view capitalism as a scam…As it turns out, though, people are pretty reasonable….We’re not in danger of ‘an accelerating descent into barbarism and the destruction, sooner or later, of free society itself.’ …Censorship merely would bollix things up by inviting censors to abuse power and everyone else to become dependent and lazy.” — columnist and Fox News host Tony Snow (link now dead).

August 27 — L.A. judge cuts award against GM to $1.2 billion. From the automaker’s motion for a new trial, we finally learn what the other driver’s name was (Moreno), how drunk he was (“.20 several hours later”), and what happened after the plaintiff’s lawyers succeeded in getting the judge to exclude from the trial any mention of Moreno’s intoxication or the fact that he’d been convicted and imprisoned for felony drunk driving over this crash (“Having moved to exclude it, plaintiffs told the jury, falsely, that his guilt consisted of ‘five seconds of bad judgment’,” whereupon the jury allocated to Moreno only 5 percent of the guilt for the injuries) (GM statement) (earlier Overlawyered.com commentary)(auto-safety litigation generally).

Plaintiffs also successfully fought to exclude evidence that the federal government’s real-world highway statistics show the Malibu among the safest cars of its time in crashes, and that testing had raised safety concerns about the alternate placement of the gas tank sought by the plaintiffs. Reuters now quotes GM as saying that 98 percent of American cars in the 1970s had their gas tanks in the same position as the Malibu’s. (“Judge Tells GM To Pay Record $1.2 Bln Liability”, link now dead). The company also says (Wall Street Journal news report today by Frederic Biddle, online subscribers only) that “there was absolutely no difference in cost” between the two designs.

While Reuters (link now dead) fairly summarizes many of the above facts, you’re in trouble if your local paper relies on the Associated Press. AP correspondent David Germain’s dispatches make it hard to figure out why GM thinks it has a case, merely depicting the automaker as trying to “be let off the hook” (link now dead) and quoting plaintiff’s attorney Brian Panish as saying, of the gas tanks, that “[t]he only people in the whole world who think they’re safe are General Motors and their lawyers” (link now dead), a temptingly checkable assertion left unchecked. Incidentally, Yahoo features Overlawyered.com‘s July 10 commentary as a resource in its Full Coverage feature on the case.

August 27 — Best little forum-shopping in Texas. Two more stories illustrate why lawyers appreciate the Lone Star State for a kind of shopping not found at Neiman-Marcus. Mark Ballard in the National Law Journal relates how plaintiffs have brought a long succession of high-stakes cases to sleepy Texarkana, Texas “for only one reason: Judge David Folsom. The 52-year-old Clinton appointee is the only federal judge in Texarkana. Thus, every suit filed here goes before him.” Find a local resident or institution to stand in as your named plaintiff, and you’re home free: Folsom says he can’t recall ever granting a change of venue, though they’re often requested by defendants who wonder why they’ve been dragged to rural northeast Texas when neither they nor the subject matter of the litigation have any particular connection to that part of the world. An old pal of Bill Clinton’s from Arkansas days, Folsom presided over the $17.3 billion settlement of Texas’s Medicaid class action against the tobacco industry. That case certainly pepped up the local economy: the Texarkana Chamber of Commerce estimates that tobacco lawyers and their staffs spent $6.1 million during the proceedings. (Aug. 26).

Meanwhile, lawyers have obtained a $30 million settlement in a Mexican bus-crash case, much more than what such a case would have brought if filed in Mexico, because they were able to find a Texas judge willing to impose not only a Texas forum but also Texas law. (To get some idea of the asymmetries involved, imagine a Mexican court applying that country’s law to a Texas accident.) AP quotes the plaintiff’s lawyer as openly boasting of having foiled the Mexican legal system’s duly considered policy of not handing out money as readily as ours does. The presumption of those other countries, thinking they can apply their law to accidents on their roads! (AP/Washington Post, Aug. 16; Texas Lawyer, Aug. 23).

August 27 — Company to settle 36,000-plus Norplant suits. The Dallas Morning News reports that American Home Products has agreed to pay what could exceed $50 million to buy partial repose (some suits will remain) from lawyers suing it over the silicone-implant contraceptive. The per-claimant sums aren’t very large ($1,500), but nuisance value multiplied by 36,000 gets into substantial money. For more details, see our August 11 commentary and today’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal (online to subscribers only). (Dallas Morning News, Aug. 26; Yahoo/Reuters).

August 26 — Playing rough in Alabama. Last week a Mobile grand jury indicted former Alabama Trial Lawyers Association president Garve Ivey Jr., of Jasper, and a private investigator who has worked with Ivey, Wes Chappell, on charges of bribery, witness tampering and criminal defamation. The charges arise from an episode last year in which a former prostitute named Melissa Myers stepped forward to accuse Republican lieutenant governor candidate Steve Windom of raping her. Windom was elected anyway, Myers’s story soon fell apart, and she began cooperating with authorities looking into the question of whether she had been backed by others in making the allegations. Windom had come under heavy fire from organized trial lawyers for having taken a leading role in support of tort reform; in Alabama, as in other Southern states, the lieutenant governor’s position is a powerful one in blocking or approving legislation. Ivey and Chappell deny the charges and say they look forward to their day in court, and Ivey has sued Windom personally as well: “We are filing our lawsuit in Walker County, my home, not Mobile.” (“Ivey refuses to testify before grand jury”, AP/Daily Mountain Eagle (Jasper, Al.), Oct. 21, 1998; John M. Sandlin, “Ivey sues Windom, indictment reported in Mobile”, Daily Mountain Eagle, Aug. 17; AP/Washington Post, Aug. 19) (see update Sept. 1). Update: a jury in June 2000 acquitted Chappell, acquitted Ivey of the felony bribery charge, and convicted Ivey of the two misdemeanor counts of witness tampering and criminal defamation; appeal planned (see Aug. 31, 2000). Further update: in July 2001 the Alabama Supreme Court reversed these convictions and ordered Ivey acquitted of the charges (see July 7, 2001).

August 26 — Rolling the dice. With Ralph Nader on the warpath against the gambling industry, can the lawsuits be far behind? Wait a minute — here they are! David Rovella in the August 2 National Law Journal reports that class action lawyers in Alabama and Wisconsin have filed suit against credit card companies for allowing their customers to run up debts at offshore Internet casinos. David T. Maple of Birmingham, Ala. lost $49.95 at one such game site but stands to recover a lot more than that as “name plaintiff”, which might mean he is off to a profitable betting career after all. Lawyers say they are hoping to recover billions of dollars in refunds, interest “and even damages” (full story). In a policy analysis for the Cato Institute, Chapman University School of Law assistant professor Tom W. Bell calls Internet gambling “Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventually) Legal“.

August 26 — New feature debuts on Overlawyered.com site. Today marks the launch of our fledgling library of online articles, originally published elsewhere and now reprinted by permission of their authors, discussing some of the problems of the U.S. legal system. The opening line-up includes 28 articles by Michael Fumento, Peter Huber, Jonathan Rauch and Overlawyered.com editor Walter Olson on topics ranging from employment law to medical malpractice litigation, from toxic-tort scares to free speech. We expect to add more authors and articles in the weeks ahead.

August 25 — Gun-suit hypocrisy, Boston style. Last week officials admitted that they failed to follow their own procedures when they disposed of surplus police guns with no strings attached, which leaves the city resembling a Rum-denouncing cleric caught bootlegging on the side, given that it’s suing gun makers for not making an effort to control what happened after guns left their hands (see July 14). “Somebody dropped the ball,” acknowledged Police Commissioner Paul Evans. Why not just end the embarrassment by dropping the suit? (Boston Globe, Aug. 17; link now dead)

August 25 — Calif. state bar improperly spent dues on politicking. The Pacific Legal Foundation had brought suit on behalf of 40 members of the bar in the Golden State. In the 1990 case of Keller v. State Bar, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state bars with compulsory membership must offer a refund to members of moneys spent on politicking to which they object. The California bar proceeded to announce that of the $450.00 dues it charged in 1989, a bare $3.00 was spent on ideological and political activities, a figure it arrived at by designating much of its Washington and Sacramento legislative effort as merely one of “advising” lawmakers which bills to pass. We don’t think so, rules Sacramento County superior court judge Morrison England Jr. after eight years of litigation (AP/Freedom Forum; Aug. 20).

August 25 — Lawyers grabbing too much of Swiss bank settlement, charge Holocaust survivors. Yes, it’s one of the sadder headlines of 1999, and no, it’s not one of the more surprising to many who’ve followed the issue. “Gizella Weisshaus, one of the first to sue the banks, said she no longer wanted to be associated with the lawsuit because it would leave too little money for survivors.” (AP: Washington Post, CNN (links now dead)).

August 25 — “Employee lawsuits increasing”. Survey of 353 companies by Society for Human Resource Management and law firm of Jackson Lewis finds slightly more than half have faced employment-related lawsuits, with nine of ten suits coming from former employees. “Another 37 percent of the companies responding to the survey were sued by a current employee, while 8 percent were sued by unsuccessful candidates for employment.” Partner George Wilkins of Cincinnati’s Dinsmore & Shohl says labor and employment is the fastest growing area at his firm. (John Eckberg, Cincinnati Enquirer, August 22; SHRM June 27 press release)

August 24 — The dream verdict. On July 12, three days after a Los Angeles jury voted $5 billion against GM in the Malibu case, a jury in Ceres, Ca. voted $290 million against Ford in a case where several members of Juan Romo’s family had been killed in a rollover accident in their Ford Bronco. Ford’s motion for a new trial, filed last week, sheds light on how such cases are tried in today’s American courtroom.

Plaintiff’s counsel had railed against the “giant,” “wealthy” Ford with its “lawyers back east in Dearborn.” (“I talked about this case was about…corporate greed and arrogance…It’s also about this. It’s about Mrs. Romo’s purse….She didn’t have furniture for crying out loud, and she’s giving money to the church and she’s putting it [in her purse] to provide for the education of her children.” Damages? “You’ve got to say a number that gets on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

How to deal with the inconvenient circumstance that the Bronco design more than exceeded the standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Keep hammering away at the idea that federal standard-setting (presumably in contrast to jury persuasion) is a “political” process (“that political report called the Federal Register”; “NHTSA has…political appointees”; “You got a reading from a Federal Register as it goes out to the politicians.”)

California law allows affidavits to be taken from jurors after a verdict. According to Ford’s motion, these affidavits revealed that one of the jurors acknowledged she had prejudged the case and told fellow jurors they did not have to follow legal instructions because the case allowed them to “save the babies”. Of one attorney, she said he “really was trying to do something good, and that what he said should be considered as evidence.” And, several jurors testified, the same juror told them at great length about a gruesomely detailed dream she’d had — which she described, not without mystical overtones, as an “omen” — in which a Bronco repeatedly rolled over and killed all the jurors’ children, while the company’s line-up of attorneys and witnesses — armed with guns, no less — “stood by taunting the jurors by chanting ‘Where’s the proof, where’s the proof?’”

The juror affidavits also suggested that the panel was strongly influenced by crash exposés that had aired on “60 Minutes” and similar programs, attacking other Ford models that trial lawyers were suing over, which a second juror saw as proving that Ford had acted in bad faith in such cases. One of these shows, watched by more than one juror, was aired by CBS on May 19, only weeks before the verdict, and included material prejudicial to Ford that the court had excluded from evidence in the Romo case. The apparent influence of the TV coverage helps explain why trial lawyers have gone to such extraordinary lengths over the years, behind the scenes, to shape the coverage on such shows.

After the trial, Ford says, while it was in the process of interviewing jurors to gather affidavits in connection with this new trial motion, plaintiff’s lawyer Larry Drivon was thoughtful enough to send the jurors a free gift, consisting of his own book inveighing against big business (“The Civil War on Consumer Rights“), which happened to feature a whole chapter devoted to attacking none other than the Ford Motor Company. Included was a note and personal inscription to the jurors: “for all us who care.” Update Aug. 27, 2002: appeals court reinstates verdict, Ford seeks review by California high court. More developments; further update Nov. 26, 2003 (appeals court reduces verdict in light of U.S. Supreme Court guidance).

August 24 — Beyond the hired-gun syndrome. Good op-ed in Sunday’s (8/22) Washington Post by David L. Faigman of Hastings College of the Law discussing the Court Appointed Scientific Experts project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Faigman’s book “Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law” will be published in October by W.H. Freeman & Co.

August 23 — Fertilizer manufacturers not liable for World Trade Center bombing. The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld the dismissal of a suit by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which had demanded that manufacturers be made to pay damages for the 1993 terrorist bombing of the twin Manhattan towers on the grounds that the misuse of their wares to make fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bombs was “objectively foreseeable”. The appeals court found the lower court had correctly ruled that the manufacturers’ conduct could never be the “proximate cause” of the bombing: “The terrorists’ actions were superseding and intervening events breaking the chain of causation,” writes Judge Jane Roth. If applied consistently, such logic could be helpful to other manufacturers sued over criminal misuse of their products, such as gun makers. Also rejected was a theory that the fertilizer companies were negligent for not having instituted “know-your-customer” controls on buyers of their product — again, an issue that finds its parallel in the gun litigation. (Legal Intelligencer, Aug. 19) A press communiqué (link now dead) from the clearly bewildered government of Norway describes how two of that country’s leading industrial companies became defendants in the World Trade Center litigation, referring to “the Americans’ so-called product liability law”.

August 23 — You may already not be a winner. A Canadian court has turned away prisoner Allen Crawshaw’s lawsuit asking $10,000 of Corrections Canada for failing to mail his entry last year to the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes, which had a first prize of $1.4 million. Prison officials conceded they should have mailed the entry but denied that the loss of a chance of winning should entitle him to damages: “Did you ever see the odds of those?” said spokesman Dennis Finlay. Crawshaw, a former shop steward for the United Food and Commercial Workers at a British Columbia food plant, was convicted in 1994 of killing his boss after being angered by a one-day suspension over heated comments he’d made criticizing management; Crawshaw was “known [locally] as a peace activist”. (National Post, Aug. 11)

August 23 — Political Site of the Day. We’re pleased to announce that Overlawyered.com is today’s Political Site of the Day, an award service that has been picking daily sites for more than four years, practically as long as there’s been an Internet. A stroll through PSoD’s library of past sites is a good way to appreciate the spectacular diversity of the Net: within the space of two weeks we ran into the home sites of the Serbian/Yugoslavian royal family, PostalWatch (a watchdog group on behalf of those regulated by the Postal Service), How To Win a High School Election (“It doesn’t matter whether you’re popular or not…”), and Libertarian Rock, which will send you free stickers to protest curfew laws.

August 23 — “Beating up on ‘deadbeat dads’.” “Those who decry judicial tyranny and family destruction should pay more attention to family courts, for they are the arm of the state that routinely reaches farthest into the private lives of individuals and families,” notes Howard University political scientist Stephen Baskerville in an American Spectator article sharply correcting the usual let’s-lynch-’em view of “deadbeat dads”. The night after Bobby Sherrill came home from spending five months as an Iraqi hostage, the Washington Times reported, the sheriff was there to arrest him for not paying child support during his captivity. A Texas janitor wrongfully convicted of murder and then exonerated after ten years on death row was presented on release with a $50,000 bill for child support he didn’t pay while in prison.

Officials push through ever-more-punitive regulations against delinquent pops, then hop over to for-profit private collection firms, hired by their former agencies, that grow fat on the resulting business. It’s hard to go along with Baskerville in dubbing the deadbeat-dads problem a mere “myth”, but hard not to join him in worrying about “mass incarcerations without trial, charge, or counsel; an apparat that has systematized the invasion of private homes and the confiscation of children to a bureaucratic routine; [and] political leaders [who use] their public office as a platform to vilify private citizens who have been convicted of nothing and who have no opportunity to reply” (full story).

August 21-22 — The Marie Antoinette school of public relations. The June issue of George featured a lavish photo spread (“Puff Daddies”) of six lawyers who “have raked in more than $5 billion for their firms from tobacco litigation“. The backdrops weren’t the usual stuffy law libraries, either. They included the racing boat, conspicuously labeled “Gunsmoke”, of Pascagoula’s Richard Scruggs, brother-in-law of Senate majority leader Trent Lott (more than $1 billion in fees for representing Mississippi and other states); the twenty-horse equestrian estate of Charleston’s Joseph Rice (somewhere between $1 billion and $10 billion); the private putting green on the Pensacola estate of Fred Levin ($325 million); a foundation endowed by politically ambitious Michael Ciresi of Minnesota ($440 million; “some of the fees are excessive”, he cheerfully agrees); and the opulent bathtub where South Florida’s Robert Montgomery ($678 million), posed, fully clothed, under what the Palm Beach Post called “English artist David Jagger’s painting of a naked woman”. (Montgomery describes as “outrageous” Florida’s move to accept an $11.3 billion settlement without forking over a full one-quarter of it to lawyers as agreed). An ostensibly less material note was struck by Seattle’s Steve Berman (roughly $2 billion), who previously made it big filing shareholder class actions, and who says, “I got the notion in the ’60s that you can protest by growing your hair long or you can get trained in the methods of the establishment and use their own tools to beat them. There’s nothing better than beating them at their own game.”

Addressing an Americans for Tax Reform audience earlier this summer, Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund said he marveled at the willingness of the legal tycoons to rub their critics’ noses in their taxpayer-leveraged success by cooperating in such displays. “Even the robber barons in the Nineteenth Century knew better than to do it that way. Is it that they don’t have anyone giving them p.r. advice? Or do they just think at this point they’re invulnerable?”

August 21-22 — Weekend reading. Pixels to take to the cabin or island:

* Next on the identity-politics agenda: “Partly due to the flurry of judicial and legislative activity pursuant to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, disability studies, once an arcane field of literary theory, has begun to attract attention from both the media and the academy,” reports Norah Vincent in the August 18 Salon. Brown University professor Carol Poore asserts that “disability is actually preferable to ability in that able-bodiedness ‘is the precondition for being a tool of the ruling class.’” Some in the disabilities movement “maintain that, even if they were presented with a cure for their disabilities, they wouldn’t take it” (full story).

* Overlawyered.com‘s editor devotes his latest Reason column to the legal background of the Supreme Court’s Davis v. Monroe decision in May, the one that allowed schools and universities to be sued for not remedying “student-on-student” harassment. No federal law in fact creates a right to sue over sexual harassment in education; it’s an “implied private right of action”, which means basically that the courts get to make it up as they go along. (“Title IX’s Invisible Ink“, August/September).

* From the north comes word that the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council has declined to take action against Global Television for its July 1998 broadcast of a 45-year-old Bugs Bunny cartoon. A feminist complainant had hauled Global before the tribunal over an episode of the “Bugs Bunny and Tweety” show, alleging that the wascally wabbit had uttered remarks demeaning to women (National Post, Fox News/Reuters, Boston Globe (links now dead))

August 20 — The long march through the courtrooms. From Counterpunch.org, the webzine of left-wingers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair: “Hardly had she [Hillary Rodham] raised her foot to step over the threshold of radicalism than she turned back. She declined to go with the SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee], turned down an offer to work with Saul Alinsky as a community organizer in Chicago. Anderson quotes her political science prof at Wellesley, Alan Schecter, as saying that by the late 1960s his pupil had decided that the best radical strategy was to ‘”use the legal system” as an agent of change.’ She wasn’t alone in that calculation. The long march of the left through the courtrooms was under way: the world would become a better place, courtesy of courtroom briefs, complaints and class action suits.

“And so what we have seen, across the last three decades, is the left vanishing into the quicksands of regulation. All society’s problems could be fixed by a statute, a rule, a waiver, a program. Much of the antiwar left vanished into the consumer movement, the environmental movement and legal fixitry. The mass movement died and litigation — often successful — flourished amid the ruins” (“The First Lady Syndrome”, August 11 — full story)

August 20 — “Three insurers sued for $100 million”. $300 million, actually, since a Prince George’s County, Maryland court is being asked to mulct Allstate, GEICO and State Farm nine digits’ worth apiece for the offense of applying managed-care-style guidelines to limit policyholders’ personal medical claims after auto mishaps. This AP story commits a few of the usual journalistic sins: 1) it signals no awareness that the dollar demands in such cases can be arbitrarily picked for shock/news value, our legal system putting no price tag on exaggeration; 2) it ignores the probable role of the lawyers as parties-in-interest (though it does report that many of the individual policyholders’ claims are for less than $100); 3) it finesses the purely circular process by which anyone deems such filings newsworthy (the seven named customers would normally have had trouble getting even back-page local coverage, but instead scored big national headlines. Why? Because their lawyers asserted a right to speak for a large class of policyholders nationwide. Why would a court accord these particular lawyers that right? Well, they did get all this national publicity…) Best detail: “All of the plaintiffs have maintained their coverage with the companies despite the disputes.” Mad enough to sue, in other words, but not mad enough to switch companies (Yahoo/AP; link now dead).

August 20 — New Overlawyered.com pages: tobacco tycoons, litigation in the workplace. Two more newsworthy topics get their own subpages, bringing the number of topical pages to eight. Seven weeks old, this site has now served more than 15,000 pages, with our traffic rate nearly doubling this month from last. Thanks!

August 19 — Plus extra damages for having argued with us. In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Ignatius calls global warming a potential “plaintiff’s lawyer’s dream”, quoting former deputy energy secretary Lynn Coleman as saying that if doomsayers’ predictions prove accurate, lawyers could file trillions of dollars in claims against utilities, oil companies and others for weather-related effects. Significantly, Ignatius suggests (“the best analogy may be tobacco”) that future juries will be angered by some companies’ current boldness in debating the issue by way of counter-studies and newspaper ads. Apparently one “lesson of tobacco” is that it’s henceforth going to count as an independently punishable offense to defend one’s business in public controversy (link now dead).

August 19 — Click here to sue! Seattle-based Bendich, Stobaugh and Strong, P.C. specializes in employee class actions arguing that temp, freelance and independent-contractor employees were really “misclassified” and deserve retroactive raises and benefits, no matter what the two sides may have thought they were bargaining for at the time. Taking advantage of the Web, the firm makes it really easy to join its suits against Microsoft (see also Jan. 11, 2000 commentary), Arco, King County (Seattle) and Los Angeles County.

August 19 — NAACP’s “ludicrous” anti-gun suit. Ninety percent of murders of blacks are committed by other blacks, David Horowitz observes, but now litigation offers a handy way to blame the toll on distant white-owned gunmakers, advancing “a fantasy in which African-Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves”. (Salon, August 16 — full column).

August 19 — Another scare starts to fizzle. “For three years now, organizations ranging from environmental groups to Consumer Reports have been proclaiming the existence of a deadly wave of endocrine disrupters that cause cancer, infertility, and personality abnormalities,” writes Gregg Easterbrook in the August 30 New Republic. Now the National Academy of Sciences has studied the issue of environmental residues of these synthetic hormones and found much less than meets the eye in the scare reports. (full article). Score another one for skeptics Mike Fumento and Ron Bailey, as well as for the New York Times‘s much-hatcheted Gina Kolata, whose refusal to hype the endocrine-disrupter scare was a chief count in the campaign against her typified by Mark Dowie’s article in the July 6, 1998 Nation.

August 18 — Undislodgeable educators. Tenure laws make it hard in many states to remove even a badly underperforming teacher from the classroom, but hopes for reform rose when Bob Chase became president of the National Education Association with an agenda that included “peer review” methods like those pioneered by NEA’s Columbus, Ohio affiliate. “The goal of peer review is to help people succeed,” Chase has said. “But it could also speed up the process of dismissing a teacher who is not successful….We know that it sometimes takes five or six years to get rid of a teacher, and that is too long.”

But can peer review work if it’s just an overlay onto, rather than a substitute for, the laggard teacher’s right to challenge a dismissal by every current legal means? That question is posed by the case of Ivy Featherstone, a 25-year-veteran teacher in the Columbus schools whom administrators often observed reading the paper in class with his feet up on the desk while students snoozed. Two years of intensively applied peer review, followed by 16 days of hearings, led to the conclusion that Featherstone should be given a “negative release”, and he was suspended without pay. Duration of the process up to that point: three years, and it turned out things were just getting started. Featherstone was soon off to federal court to charge that the dismissal was racially discriminatory, and it’s taken four more years for a judge to dismiss that case — not on the merits, but on the grounds that Featherstone failed to take the procedural steps needed to preserve his rights to sue. (If he had, presumably, the case might still be in progress). The case gets written up in this week’s communiqué (week of August 16) from Mike Antonucci’s invaluable Education Intelligence Agency; subscriptions are free, and highly recommended to anyone with an interest in how schools work.

August 18 — Ohio case fallout. In a blistering editorial (no longer online), the Columbus Dispatch calls the state high court’s striking down of tort reform (see item for August 17, below) “an act of arrogance and an affront to the doctrine of separation of powers”. Meanwhile, furious business groups vow to make the next set of judicial elections a referendum on the court’s activism. Though with a nominal Republican majority, “the current seven-member tribunal has gained a reputation as a ‘plaintiffs’ court.’ Two Republican justices, Andrew Douglas and Paul E. Pfeifer, have become frequent swing voters with decisions endearing them to labor unions and trial lawyers.” (Joe Hallett, Columbus Dispatch, Aug. 17).

August 18 — “Dieters still want fen-phen”. The hazards of the drug are frightening; so are those of obesity, and Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Susan Vela found many local residents wishing the system still permitted them a choice. “It calmed the monster in my body,” said one woman who was able to get down to 136 on fen-phen but has gone up to 210 without it. “Who do I sue to get it back on the market? I’m suffering without it.” (Aug. 16; full story). An August 14 Washington Post editorial calls the recent Texas $23 million award against the drug’s manufacturer “a terrible signal, almost guaranteed to bring thousands more plaintiffs to court on flimsy evidence”.

August 17 — Ohio high court says forget tort reform; should unionists be cheering? By a one-vote margin, the Ohio Supreme Court basically notifies the state’s lawmakers that it won’t tolerate any attempts by them to say how the state’s liability law should operate. “Ohio legislators might as well shut up shop and go home,” said Linda Woggon of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The decision is the 90th in which a state court has invalidated efforts to curb litigation, according to sources at the American Tort Reform Association, which keeps the dismal count. (Columbus Dispatch (link now dead), Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Enquirer coverage). Overlawyered.com intended to give the Ohio constitution a look-through to see whether it in fact contained a provision prohibiting legislatures from legislating, but found that as of this morning the state’s engine for searching the Ohio constitution was broken and returning error messages, which seemed kind of appropriate, actually.

The statute had been challenged not only by the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers (which argued its members would lose business) but also by the state AFL-CIO, whose president William A. Burga, quoted in the Columbus Dispatch, said “anyone who has been harmed or injured” deserves “their day in court and…a fair decision from a jury”. That’s kind of ironic, since unions themselves long ago procured for themselves a series of tort reforms far more favorable than anything being asked for by the business community, insulating them from the risk of unbounded jury awards at the hands of complainants who’ve been (say) roughed up by union pickets. In California, for example, state law already pointedly says that citizens’ “right to be free from any violence, or intimidation by threat of violence” does not apply in a context of “otherwise lawful labor picketing” (gee, thanks, guys!) and AB 1268 (Kuehl), now moving toward enactment in the labor/trial-lawyer-friendly state legislature, would curtail unions’ civil liability yet further, curbing the application of exemplary (punitive) damages and vicarious liability even if acts of violence are committed by unionists for the organization’s benefit.

So here’s the net effect: it’s just dandy and highly constitutional for legislators to immunize unions from the danger of adverse jury verdicts for acts of deliberate violence, but it suddenly becomes an unconstitutional invasion of jury prerogatives when they try to set any limits at all on the award of “noneconomic” damages, for categories like pain and suffering and emotional distress, in cases where businesses are charged with responsibility for accidental injuries. What do you think Mr. Burga of the Ohio AFL-CIO would say if someone “harmed or injured” crossing a picket line in Akron or Youngstown decided to claim a constitutional right to “their day in court and…a fair decision from a jury”? Would he still insist that legislatures have no constitutional power to limit liability?

August 17 — New Overlawyered.com page: The case for loser-pays. Despite continuing strong Main Street interest in the loser-pays idea, there’s been precious little in the way of Web resources on it, so we’ve made it the subject of the sixth and latest in our series of topical links pages. It’s the most basic, the most indispensable, and the most overdue of all legal reforms; if we can bring it even a little closer to enactment, our time will have been well spent.

August 17 — Correction. In the August 6 item, “Courts actually begin to define harassment“, summarizing a recent Chicago Tribune report on the ripple effects of last year’s Oncale decision, we erroneously reported that the Tribune article did not mention the Oncale Court’s unanimity. In fact, it did mention it. Our apologies.

August 16 — Think I’m too litigious? I’ll sue! (I). In Bakersfield, Calif., the developer of the Fairway Oaks community won’t sell new houses to attorneys because it considers them too likely to get into disputes. Attorney Timothy Liebaert said he was “shocked” and “very mad” to be turned away on the basis of such a generalization, so — how better to disprove it? — he’s suing them. However, occupation is not among the list of categories covered by California housing discrimination laws, and a Kern County judge proceeded to rule that there are legitimate business reasons for a developer to prefer non-lawyer customers. Fairway’s sponsors had previously sold to two attorneys among 500 home buyers and had gotten into a protracted dispute with one, though it had not gone to litigation. Liebaert has filed an appeal and plans to keep the case going on new theories, such as a claim that a developer, if it wants to pursue a policy of not selling to lawyers, is legally obliged to announce that policy in its ads. (Reuters/Fox News; Los Angeles Times, July 25)

In 1986 it was reported that two medical groups practicing obstetrics and gynecology in Brunswick, Ga., had refused to accept as patients attorney Amanda Williams, who had filed what the doctors considered meritless malpractice suits against some of their number, or her law clerk Sheryl Jolly. Williams said she found the policy “offensive” but said “they no doubt take it personally when I file a suit on behalf of a client”.

August 16 — Think I’m too litigious? I’ll sue! (II). Remind us to stay on the good side of attorney Michael Bidart of Claremont, Calif.’s Shernoff, Bidart, Darras & Arkin, who garnered big headlines in January when he convinced a San Bernardino County jury to vote $120.5 million against Aetna U.S. Healthcare for delaying approval of a bone-marrow transplant that he argued might have saved the life of patient David Goodrich. Aetna CEO Richard Huber, angered by the verdict, blamed it in part on the efforts of “a skillful ambulance-chasing lawyer”. And Bidart responded to this dastardly insult by…suing Huber last month for defamation in Los Angeles Superior Court. Legal correspondent Reynolds Holding comments in the San Francisco Chronicle (August 8) that Bidart is “apparently more adept at dishing publicity than taking it”.

August 16 — To restore individual responsibility, bring back contract principles. In this recent Policy Analysis from the Cato Institute, Professor Michael Krauss of George Mason U. School of Law says one major reason liability law has fallen into disrepute is that courts have supplanted contract with tort principles; it doesn’t matter whether you foresaw a risk and agreed to bear it, they’ll let you sue anyway. Formerly, the law sought to secure parties’ rights to shape their own relationships, the role of tort law being to secure persons against unconsensual invasion. Now reliable law has given way to “a general social insurance scheme”, particularly in areas like product liability and medical malpractice, with lamentable consequences: “our rights have been given increasingly less respect by government”. (Full paper)

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August 1999 archives, part 1

by Walter Olson on August 16, 1999


August 14-15 — The stuffed-grape-leaf standard. “Ellen Vargyas, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said the $300,000 in damages, per incident, awarded to victims of sexual harassment, as specified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act, ‘are not exactly what I would call a pot of gold.’…To me, $300,000 is not only a pot of gold, but it equals the bottom-line value of approximately 480,000 grape leaves, stuffed and rolled. When you roll and stuff grape leaves for a living, or toss pizza crusts for ten hours a day, money has a way of taking on new meaning. ‘Let’s see, you mean if I lose this lawsuit, I will have to roll and stuff grape leaves nonstop from now until I’m 68?’” — Sarah J. McCarthy, Pittsburgh restaurant owner (reprinted in Voice of a Few Americans/Common Sense webzine; originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune April 3, 1995). (full story)

August 14-15 — Our award-winning errors. The “404 Not Found” message, or error page, is the one you encounter if you try to enter a misspelled, obsolete, or otherwise non-working address on a website, such as http://overlawyered.com/sue_for_fun.html. We’re pleased to announce that ours won the Cool 404 of the Day award (August 5) (link down at last check) from Cool404.com and also found its way into the 404 Research Lab‘s listing of Great 404s of the Web.

August 14-15 — ABA delegates defeat measure aimed at curbing “pay-to-play”. In something of a surprise, delegates narrowly (by less than 20 votes) turned down a proposed addition to the non-binding Model Rules of Professional Responsibility which would have declared it improper for lawyers or law firms to donate or raise funds for elected officials in exchange for legal work (see August 11 entry below). “‘It’s very, very tough [to change things] because lawyers are effectively the source of money for judicial campaigns’ and the campaigns of other state officials, including state treasurers,” according to Geoffrey Hazard, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and chairman pro tem of an ABA commission on ethics rules changes. Edward W. Madeira Jr. of Philadelphia’s Pepper, Hamilton is disappointed because the practice reinforces, in a reporter’s words, “public perception that judges favor the individuals and groups that contribute to their campaign funds.” (Janet Conley, Fulton County Daily Record — full story).

August 13 — “Somebody might trip.” At 80 St. Mark’s Place in New York’s East Village, in front of a locally famed repertory film theater, is a stretch of cement where stars like Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy have left their hand prints, shoe prints and signatures over the years in a mini-homage to L.A.’s Hollywood Boulevard. Last year city inspectors decided the stretch of sidewalk was out of code compliance, and demanded that theater owner Florence Otway pave it over or remove it to be replaced by a conventional sidewalk. City spokesman Mark Patterson pointed out that its surface was uneven: “Somebody might trip,” he said, adding, “We don’t want people to trip and fall. The city might be liable.” (James Barron, “A Walk of Fame’s Melodramatic Turn”, today’s New York Times — link now dead). New York City, which pays out hundreds of millions a year in injury litigation, for many years has been the target of a huge number of sidewalk slip-and-fall claims; Richard Miniter wrote in 1996 that trial lawyers have fingered nearly 90 percent of the city’s blocks as having sidewalks that are in their view hazardous.

August 13 — Don’t link or I’ll sue! In a notorious 1997 episode, the Ticketmaster company asserted a legal right to forbid other websites from “deep linking” to order forms that resided on interior pages of its site, a practice that allowed visitors to bypass introductory pages containing ads Ticketmaster wanted them to see. Taken seriously, the notion of requiring linkers to come in only through a site’s front door would eviscerate much of the usefulness of the web (including sites like this); for example, unable as a routine matter to point to particular news stories, we’d have to point instead at the publisher’s top page and advise readers to start a cumbersome search for the content. So it’s worrisome that legal complaints over deep linking have reportedly led to a series of out-of-court settlements in which defendants have agreed to link only to a site’s top page.

The equities might seem to shift when a link points not to a integral page on the foreign site, but to just one of the resources composing that page, such as a graphic or an audio/video clip. If BigWebCo pays a composer to develop soothing background music for its site, can I really obtain the same background music for my site gratis by pointing at their audio file, imposing more work on their servers while I’m at it? The latest dispute, between Universal Pictures and a site called Movie-List that features trailers of forthcoming movies, may now have been resolved after either a clarification or a rethinking of Universal’s position, depending on how you read the correspondence between the parties that Movie-List’s proprietor, Jean-Pierre Bazinet of Ottawa, has posted. Universal litigation counsel Carolyn Hampton alarmingly wrote Bazinet that “you are not permitted to link to other sites that contain our copyrighted material without our authorization”. However, in later correspondence, Hampton said the company objected only to Movie-List’s linking directly to the video clips of trailers on its servers, and that it was free to link to the full webpage from which the clip was accessible, a resolution that Bazinet accepted. A noteworthy feature of the correspondence was the terrified attitude of Movie-List’s internet service provider, Simple-Net, which didn’t want to risk itself getting sued by the giant studio: “The situation is now that you must abide WHATEVER Universal insists upon,” it wrote Bazinet. “If not, we will have no choice but to suspend your site.” (see July 21 entry).

In his weekly column yesterday, Salon’s Scott Rosenberg warned against developing “a climate in which every Web author needs to check with every link target before putting up a page,” asking, “What about individual users — is “deep bookmarking” to become a problem too? How about passing around a “deep link” on a mailing list?” Other coverage and commentary on the issue has appeared in Wired.com, IT-Director.com, and from attorney Jeffrey Kuester.

August 12 — Age-bias law expands. It’s already easy to violate age-discrimination law without meaning to, and it keeps getting easier. California Gov. Gray Davis has signed a bill that makes it unlawful to target more highly compensated workers for layoffs — baldly rational though that policy may often be as an economic matter — on the grounds that high compensation is often a proxy for age. (AP, Aug. 4, link now dead). And the August 16 Time (not online) reports that trial is expected to begin soon on Michael Sisler’s suit against the Bergen Commercial Bank in Paramus, N.J., for discriminating against him based on his youth (he was given a vice presidency at the tender age of 25, but things didn’t work out). Most age-bias laws cover only workers over 40 and are “one-way”, providing a right to sue over preferences shown to younger but not older rivals, but New Jersey’s high court ruled in February (opinion) that the more ways to sue the merrier. (AP/Phila. Inquirer, Feb. 25, link now dead). Time’s John Cloud writes that eighteen other states have statutes that could be construed the same way as New Jersey’s: “next time you tell the new kid down the hall that he needs to pay his dues, you could end up paying them for him”.

August 12 — Even the chance of loser-pays helps keep ‘em honest. It happened in response to some contempt of court that the judge found fairly egregious, and in a bankruptcy setting, where judges have unusual leeway, but it still reminds us that there’s nothing inevitable or foreordained about our being the one Western democracy that refuses to make litigants pay when they inflict harm on their opponents: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath of Wilmington, Del. has ordered the pilot’s union to pick up Continental Airlines’ legal fees for having tried to relitigate claims settled in the airline’s 1993 reorganization. The pilots had rolled the dice in hopes of a $1-billion-dollar back pay bonanza based on seniority claims. (Delaware Law Weekly, July 28 –full story)

August 12 — Leave the Scouts alone. As happens often, the Chicago Tribune runs the most sensible editorial on last week’s New Jersey high court ruling, urging the Scouts to reconsider their policy of barring gays from membership but saying in the mean time the law’s role is to respect their freedom of association. Overlawyered.com‘s editor is quoted making similar points in Wendy Davis’s New Jersey Law Journal write-up.

August 11 — “Your perfect birth control…blocked?” Highly recommended: the September Glamour, which hit the stands yesterday with a major article by Leslie Laurence on trial lawyers’ devastating assault on Norplant, the long-lasting contraceptive that consists of tiny hormone-releasing rods inserted under the skin of a woman’s upper arm. Despite health professionals’ widespread view that the device is a valuable one whose risks are low, lawyers using billboards, TV ads and media scare campaigns have recruited an astounding 50,000 women to sue the manufacturer, concentrating originally on silicone-disease theories (since the device contains that substance) and then, after the collapse of the scientific basis for those theories, switching to claims based on side effects common to all hormonal contraceptives, such as weight gain and irregular bleeding. Glamour reports that many plaintiffs sued based on vaguely described side effects they’d never reported to their doctors, and that some, even after signing up to sue, continued to recommend the device to friends, said they were glad they’d used it, and went back to their doctors to have another set put in.

Norplant litigation has gone badly for the plaintiffs — “It was like she just wanted to hit the lotto” said a juror in Brownsville, Texas, after one verdict for the defense — but the legal success has come at devastating cost to the manufacturer, American Home Products, which might still at some point find their best option to be buying out the suits for some large sum despite their flimsy basis. One result, says the magazine, is a continued departure of capital from the contraceptive field; few firms will invest in researching new birth-control methods when it’s so easy to get caught up in a legal catastrophe. Leading entrepreneurial firms on the plaintiff’s side include Charleston, S.C.’s Ness, Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole, with 17,000 cases, and Houston’s O’Quinn and Laminack, with more than 3,500 (see item for August 4, below) “If his side wins,” the article concludes of O’Quinn associate Arturo Gonzalez, “millions of women will lose.” The article is not online, but you can read a related piece by Fordham law professor Marc Arkin.

August 11 — Cited in Andrew Tobias’s online column. After starting with a classic list of wacky warning labels (“Warning: contains nuts” on a package of peanuts is one favorite; then there’s the packaging on an iron, “Do not iron clothes on body”) the personal-finance expert observes that “one reason for all this obsessive labeling is fear of lawsuits” and suggests this site as a resource for those who think things might have gotten out of hand. It’s only fair to point out in return that few have made a greater contribution toward public understanding of the absurdly overlawyered area of auto insurance than Andrew Tobias himself: see the discussion in his recent book My Vast Fortune, and don’t miss his devastating article in the October 1996 Worth on the politically fateful entanglements between trial lawyers and some well-known consumer advocates.

August 11 — No comparison. Speaking of which, an article in today’s New York Times (link now dead) on Japan’s famed sokaiya corporate shakedown-artists reports that they’re attempting to refurbish their image. The sokaiya have long been known for gathering dirt about business practices and publicizing it at shareholder meetings and elsewhere, a threat companies can avert only by making handsome payments to their syndicates. Now veteran sokaiya Kaoru Ogawa is trying to recharacterize his activities: “I’m the Japanese Ralph Nader,” he says. Times reporter Stephanie Strom calls the comparison “a stretch”.

August 11 — ABA thinks it can discourage “pay-to-play”. The vote, slated for the Atlanta meeting, was on a model rule aimed at curbing lawyers’ practice of contributing to politicians in exchange for official work. [The proposal was narrowly defeated in a delegate vote; see entry for August 14-15]. “[Currently if outside counsel] are going to be considered for legal work they have to be counted among the campaign contributors,” said Richard Phillips, head of the ABA’s business law section. “It’s a poor way to compete for legal work and it’s very destructive of the integrity of the government process”. One question is whether there’s hope of enforcing such a standard now that contingency fees for government work can turn lawyers into overnight billionaires — an immensely more lucrative and thus more tempting kind of patronage than the hourly-fee transactional work that raised the original concerns. (Reuters, link now dead)

August 10 — Like calling the Orkin man to talk about bugs. Descending further into self-parody at its annual convention in Atlanta, the American Bar Association summons O.J. Simpson defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran for a panel discussion on truth in the legal profession, as well as potential disbaree Bill Clinton to lecture Senators on the perils to the administration of justice of not confirming his nominees to the bench as promptly as he’d like. Cochran impresses attendees by sending an 18-page biography that “lists everything from a soap opera appearance to being named one of the most glamorous men in history”, Reuters reports. By contrast, Harvard law professor David Wilkins, who directs the law school’s Program on the Legal Profession, submitted a three-paragraph bio. (Fox News (link now dead)/New York Times).

In other convention news, ABA head Philip Anderson publicly compared city gun suits to the civil rights cause of the 1950s (overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, scoring a payday with help from the mayor’s trial-lawyer friends — hey, what’s the big difference?). (Fox News — link now dead). The present state of tort law gives municipalities no claim against gun makers, but lawyers have lately made up a variety of new theories they’d like to present to courts that would hold gun makers retroactively liable. Anderson criticized efforts by state lawmakers to interfere with this process, suggesting the emergent new maxim that now seems to hold sway at places like the A.B.A.: any lawyer should be able to concoct any new theory that allows for the extraction of money from anyone else, and whether such a new theory succeeds will be resolved by way of interactions between the Third Branch (the judiciary) and the Fourth (the trial lawyers) This diverges sharply from the traditional separation-of-powers precepts still preserved in musty library stacks, under which legislators counted as a surprisingly important authority on what was and was not to be made legal.

August 10 — You made me defame myself. Even plaintiff’s employment lawyers can get a bit sheepish explaining the theory behind the “doctrine of compelled self-publication,” which works as follows: the employer takes every conceivable step to avoid liability for “workplace defamation”, including not breathing a word to co-workers about the reasons it’s letting an employee go, and successfully forbidding any discussion of the circumstances afterward with reference-checkers or other outsiders, who instead get fobbed off with blandly neutral formulas. But it still loses the ensuing defamation lawsuit, on the grounds that the employee himself spread the allegedly false rumors about his bad performance, having felt forced to do so in order to explain his situation in later job applications. “If you’re the one spreading false information, it looks strange” to turn around and sue a former employer for defamation, concedes Hartford practitioner Jonathan Gould. But the theory has worked for complainants, including a hospital security guard who got $200,000, and Danbury, Ct. lawyer Christine M. Ellis predicts it will be a “wonderful tool” in suing for employees. (Scott Brede, “When Candidness Is a Catch-22“, Connecticut Law Tribune, July 7).

August 9 — More things you can’t have. Latest food items to become unavailable due to fears of liability, according to Wall Street Journal news articles in July: parents’ care packages of food to kids at camp (“[c]amps worry about getting sued should a child get sick from an allergic reaction or from rotten brownies,” as well as raising other objections; July 28); burgers cooked medium-rare in restaurants (diners at establishments in San Francisco and Carnegie, Pa. were recently allowed to obtain pink burgers by signing written liability releases, but other restaurants won’t make even that concession, though E. Coli poses relatively little risk to adults in good health; July 15). (New York Press editor Russ Smith commented on the summer-camp report; scroll down to near bottom of his column.)

August 9 — How to make it as a litigious NYC tenant. “The writer of this book lived rent free in New York City and was paid $55,000 from his landlord!!!”. That’s the pitch from the pseudonymous author (“Tenant X”) of an 88-page booklet entitled Tenant Power, which for $15 will offer advice on how to make life unhappy for someone so unwise as to have rented you an apartment (have the walls of your apartment drilled to test for asbestos; if finally evicted, tell the judge you need to get back in to retrieve medicine). The August 4-10 Village Voice has qualms about the booklet but not on any moral grounds; instead it’s upset that much of the advice isn’t fully accurate. (Full story).

August 9 — Hate-crime laws: why they aren’t liberal. Heidi M. Hurd, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday (8/4) that such laws “revolutionize” traditional criminal-law mens rea standards in order to convey society’s disapproval of hateful character traits and beliefs. That goal is distinctively non-liberal, she argues: “Political liberals allow that the State may use its power to make us act in ways that are right; but they generally insist that the State may not use its power to impose a particular conception of the good life on its citizens. It may not legislate virtue or suppress vice. It may not invade the realm of private beliefs, desires, hatreds, biases, hopes, ambitions, etc. In short, it may make our actions good, but it may not make us good actors.

“Those who favor hate crime legislation, and its implicit license to use the power of the state to suppress vice and encourage virtue, have to admit that they are not liberals. They are, rather, ‘political perfectionists,’ who view the legitimate power of the state as extending to legislation that will nurture in us charitable, kind, courageous dispositions, and eliminate selfish, cowardly, cruel dispositions. Political perfectionism is not without impressive defenders. But the power that it bequeaths to the State is breathtaking….such legislation suggests that the state has abandoned the constraints of liberalism and extended its power to affect not only what we do, but who we are.” (Full testimony)

August 7-8 — Weekend reading. Pixels to take to the beach or cottage:

* Alex Beam in the August Atlantic takes a look at “the extreme sport of First Amendment law” — litigation by celebrities who sue tabloids like the Enquirer and the Globe for libel, invasion of privacy and sundry other torts. Sign of the overlawyered times: some tabloid-haunted celebs insist their wedding guests sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want to be admitted to the ceremony. “That’s so tasteful,” scoffs Gerson Zweifach of Williams & Connolly, who represents tabloid defendants. “You open up the Tiffany invitation and this contract falls out of the envelope.”

* Aside from their professional interest to writers and editors, word counts carry significant consequences for litigators because of the rigid limit on the length of their briefs. Lawyers for a man fighting extradition to Canada on kidnaping charges recently faced possible sanctions for having filed a brief before the Seventh Circuit which they said was 13,824 words long, just under the 14,000-word limit for appellate briefs set by Fed. R. App. 32(a)(7), but which in fact contained 15,056 words, well over the limit. The judges looked into the question and found that Microsoft Word, unlike its competitor WordPerfect, fails to count footnotes when asked to give a word count for a block of highlighted text. Microsoft is promising a fix, Declan McCullagh reports in the August 4 Wired, and in the mean time the court agreed the lawyers didn’t merit sanctions.

* Overlawyered.com‘s editor devoted his July Reason column to the question of why American attorneys are so unpopular these days: was it unsporting for Jurassic Park audiences to burst into applause when the dinosaur ate the lawyer?

August 7-8 — Not so uncontroversial. Who could be against the proposed “Victims’ Rights Amendment” to the Constitution? Plenty of sensible people, it seems, including Beth Wilkinson, a member of the prosecution team in the Oklahoma City bombing case, who writes in yesterday’s Washington Post (August 6; link now dead) that following the procedures prescribed in that amendment could have substantially impaired the chance of getting convictions against bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman (July 22 column; link now dead) points out that many crimes (such as a bank robbery where there are many customers present) place a large number of bystanders in harm’s way, “each of whom [under the proposal, apparently] has to be kept informed, allowed to make his views known, and invited to attend every public proceeding related to the case until the perpetrator has been released from prison, which could be five or 10 years later….If you want a bureaucrat’s full-employment act, here it is.” The measure has been endorsed by Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Al Gore, among many others.

August 6 — Courts actually begin to define “harassment”; activists in shock. Proponents of expansive harassment law publicly hailed last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services as a victory for their side because it allowed workers to sue over misbehavior by co-workers of their own sex. But Justice Scalia’s opinion also took pains to clarify for the first time what does and does not qualify as harassment: the complained-of conduct must be directed at the worker “because of” his or her sex, ordinary horseplay isn’t enough, and the role of the courts isn’t to enforce a general civility code in the workplace. This report by the Chicago Tribune‘s Jan Crawford Greenburg (reprinted in St. Louis Post-Dispatch; link now dead) quotes Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund legal director Beatrice Dohrn as saying her colleagues were aware the latter language might be significant but decided to focus on portions of the decision “we hoped would be picked up on,” a franker-than-usual acknowledgment of the way advocacy groups try to spin the coverage of high court cases. But many lower federal courts noticed Scalia’s language and, it seems, are taking it seriously by screening out cases that fail to meet the standard. That trend meets with peals of outrage, recorded here, from plaintiff’s-side attorneys who liked things better when the question of what constitutes harassment was more poorly defined, since that improved their chances of getting every case to a jury. Notable background fact: Scalia in Oncale spoke for a unanimous Court.

August 6 — News judgment. Last week it was announced that arbitrators had awarded more than $2 billion in legal fees to tobacco lawyers representing just two of the fifty states, Mississippi and Massachusetts. Mississippi’s $1.4 billion award is slated to cram nearly $340 million into the pockets of Pascagoula attorney Richard Scruggs, brother-in-law of U.S. Senate leader Trent Lott, while on Tuesday the Boston Globe‘s Brian MacQuarrie reported that a preliminary analysis of that state’s $775 million fee award “indicates attorneys may be paid nearly $5,000 per hour for their work”.

How has the New York Times, newspaper of record, chosen to cover these revelations? Its total coverage of the arbitration awards has consisted of a 150-word Associated Press dispatch that ran on page 25 of Sunday’s edition, which itself included nothing critical of the awards except to note at the end that tobacco companies found them excessive. Perhaps the Times was too busy preparing to let fly with another round of advocacy from its reporter William Glaberson, who’s argued that public concern about the power of trial lawyers is based on mere “myth” and “fantasy” concocted by conspiratorial tort reformers.

August 6 — The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of prison litigation. Twenty-eight years after the episode from which it arose, the wrangling over corrections officers’ actions during the Attica uprising drags on, with the Second Circuit sending Blyden v. Mancusi back for a new trial. (New York Law Journal, August 4 — full story)

August 6 — Michigan high court upholds malpractice reform. Not all state supreme courts are looking for ways to frustrate legislators’ efforts to bring litigation under control. (Detroit News editorial).

August 5 — “Settlement bonds”: are guns next? When trial lawyers started lining up pliant mayors to sue the gun industry, everyone kept insisting that the big issue wasn’t money: this was really a public-spirited endeavor aimed at changing the industry’s practices. In Monday’s (August 3) issue of The Bond Buyer, however (online to subscribers only), editor Kieran Beer says a number of Wall Streeters are now seriously talking up the prospects for the issuance of “bonds backed by gun-settlement payments to municipalities,” on the model of the tobacco-settlement bonds that are expected to be floated soon. The idea behind settlement bonds is to allow the politicians and lawyers — who, according to the settlement’s facial terms, would be entitled to receive a stream of payments spread out over decades — to scarf down billions immediately in exchange for signing over the flow of future payments to the financiers.

Bond Buyer editor Beer is somewhat skeptical about the chances for gun bonds to work in practice. He points out that there’s bound to be far less money in guns than in tobacco, and also doubts that the settling parties “will agree to a healthy trade in gun sales in order to insure a revenue stream for gun-settlement bonds,” which is, he notes, the “kind of deal that was struck with big tobacco” (in itself an observation which virtually none of the backers of the tobacco deal have been willing to admit for the public record). On the gun round, attorney Ken Bond of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey says that for optimal results “[t]here should be capital markets people holding the hands of the litigation people so that settlement payments are picked up at the point of sale” rather than having to be extracted from corporate treasuries — another telltale sign that what is being negotiated here is more akin to a new tax than to a damages settlement (see July 29, below).

In the old days, Wall Street earned its commissions by arranging financing for productive enterprise; now it chases the fast buck by facilitating the expropriation of the industries it once helped build.

August 5 — Spreading to the U.K. “Martin Holdgate, chairman of the Royal Geographical Society, had some harsh things to say about our new litigation or ‘blame’ culture last week. He argued that our children were becoming softies as teachers no longer dared take them on adventure expeditions, for fear of parental lawsuits in the event of an accident. ‘Blame culture and an eagerness for litigation have trickled down to the children themselves,’ he said.” (Auberon Waugh in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph (London); full column).

August 5 — Progress of the Overlawyered.com site. As we complete our fifth week, word continues to spread about this site, and traffic continues to grow. One of the first larger sites to link to us was About.com (formerly The Mining Company), which selected us as a resource in its category for Current Events — Law. Not long afterward we were picked as a resource on FindLaw/LawCrawler, one of the most widely used legal search tools, as part of their Litigation category.

August 4 — No spotlight on me, thanks. As one of the wealthiest and most successful plaintiff’s lawyers ever, Houston’s John O’Quinn (breast implants, tobacco, politics) has been known to call press conferences at which he’s leveled charges highly damaging to his opponents’ reputations, accusing them (for example) of conspiring to “remain silent, conceal or suppress information” about problems with their products and operations. So what happened June 4 when O’Quinn was himself sued by a group of unhappy former breast-implant clients seeking class-action status against him? As Brenda Jeffreys reported in the June 14 Texas Lawyer, O’Quinn “didn’t hesitate before pummeling the class action lawyers with a libel suit” charging the lawyers with “encourag[ing] the news media to disseminate false, slanderous and libelous comments about Plaintiff” — said encouragement consisting of their press release about the lawsuit, and the press conference they were planning that would have explained it further.

Had the lawyers challenging O’Quinn succeeded in holding their press conference, interesting questions might have been aired. Their suit charges that a group of women numbering at least 2,000 were wrongfully overcharged tens of millions of dollars in claimed expenses, and that the firm of O’Quinn and Laminack breached its fiduciary duty to them; it sought a fee forfeiture totaling $580 million. But O’Quinn’s firm rushed to court to ask for a temporary restraining order to prevent the lawyers from holding a press event, and on June 7, while a judge was considering that motion, they agreed to a gag order and called off the conference they’d scheduled for that day. The whole process — from the first public notice of the suit to the gag order in hand — had taken only three days. “O’Quinn’s quick action may have prevented a firestorm of public attention to the class action suit,” writes the Texas Lawyer‘s Jeffreys. It is not recorded whether any of the defendants O’Quinn has sued have ever tried, let alone succeeded in, such a tactic against him.

August 4 — For your own good. Boone County (Ky.) High School, in suburban Cincinnati, has added new clauses to its dress code prohibiting students from wearing clothing that it deems unsafe, such as sandals without back straps that might increase their chance of tripping in a stairway or corridor, yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer reports. Also banned are excessive jean lengths, again because students might trip on them. “We’re not trying to take away anyone’s personal freedom,” declared assistant principal Ken Spurlock. Seventeen-year-old Malia Novak said she could live with the new rules though they would mean dropping many favorite pairs of shoes from her school wardrobe, but said, “I think people probably trip because they’re clumsy, not because of their shoes”.

The rules will serve students as good training for life in a broader society whose institutions, whether from sheer paternalism or for fear of being sued, are ever more anxious to suppress behavior by which people might hurt themselves. Boone also bans the carrying of book bags and backpacks unless they are made of mesh or a transparent material, thus following the example of many other schools which treat their students as perpetually under suspicion of being little Dylan-Klebolds-in-training.

August 3 — No need for speed. The state courts in New York have a reputation as among the nation’s slowest, and apparently some local lawyers like things that way. Matt Fleischer writes in the August 2 New York Observer (link now broken) that a plan by the state’s top administrative judge to speed up case resolution is meeting with heated resistance from bar associations and legal practitioners. Some lawyers worry about logistical snafus, but others — well, others just seem to like to keep the option of dragging things out. Managing attorney Poppy Quattlebaum at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft warned that faster resolution of cases might be more stressful on parties and result in higher lawyers’ bills. Veteran plaintiff’s attorney Harvey Weitz called the scheme “a needless intrusion into our offices” and pointed to lead-paint suits as the sort of area where he did not necessarily want to move to trial quickly. “You want to take those cases to trial when the injuries begin to manifest themselves; it’s almost the later the better,” he said. (A cynic might see the same process as holding an inventory of client kids, aware that a certain percentage will develop troubles in their lives, such as poor grades or behavioral problems, that can be retrospectively blamed on paint exposure.)

Meeting with equal resistance is a plan by Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman to eliminate the current case assignment system, which often shuffles cases from judge to judge, in favor of assigning each case from the start to one jurist who will be responsible for it through resolution. “In the federal system,” explains Fordham law professor Matthew Diller, “the litigants always know they have to answer to the same judge, so when they engage in shenanigans, they know they’re going to be right in front of the same judge.” “They prefer judge-shopping, that’s what it’s all about,” Ross Sandler, who directs the Center for New York City Law at New York Law School, told Fleischer.

Court-watchers sometimes use backlog figures as a way of getting a handle on the delay problem, but judges have their own ways of gaming those numbers. “Inventory can be worked down in many wonderful ways,” said Judge Elliot Wilk. “I have between 500 cases and 1,500 cases. I can get my inventory from 1,500 to 500 in a week. How? I trust other judges know this: You mark ‘presumed settled.’ You haven’t heard from the parties, they probably settled but didn’t call.”

August 3 — All have lost, and all must have damages. From the July 20 Texas Lawyer comes this tale (“Strange Days Indeed“, by Janet Elliott) of the state of personal responsibility in today’s courts: Crown Life Insurance Co. of Canada was one of numerous insurance companies tarred by the “vanishing-premium” fiasco of the 1980s, in which a speculative form of insurance predicated on the continuation of high interest rates was pitched to unwary prospects but quickly lost its value when rates plunged instead. Litigation on behalf of 22,000 U.S. policyholders eventually resulted in a $27 million settlement. But a separate suit against Crown was wending its way forward in Texas courts, on behalf of William Casteel, one of its own salesmen who maintained that he, too, was a victim. Why? Because he’d sold so many of the policies in his local community that he became a local pariah when they blew up. His lawyer argued that Casteel “became suicidal and was treated for depression” after friends and fellow churchgoers, upset over his role in sweet-talking them into purchasing the policies, ostracized him. A Texas jury proceeded to order Crown to pay Casteel $36 million, a figure built up from $6 million in mental anguish and $1.5 million in lost income, subject to trebling under the state’s consumer-fraud statute, prejudgment interest and attorneys’ fees.

In other words, one of the salesmen who carried out the alleged deception was judged to deserve more from the parent company than all 22,000 victimized customers rolled together. The verdict did not last long, at least in its full $36 million plenitude: a district judge overrruled it on grounds Casteel had no standing to sue as a victimized insurance “consumer”, an appeals court reinstated it but threw out its emotional-damage component, and the Texas Supreme Court last month ordered an entirely new trial. Much to the frustration of the defendants, however, it left intact the new right of Lone Star State insurance agents to sue for “deceptive practices” they themselves helped implement.

August 2 — Polly in Margaritaville. The St. Petersburg Times reported last month (July 2) that Theodore Nobbe had won acquittal from felony charges that could have sent him to prison for five years. The offense he was charged with? Dunking the head of a friend’s parrot in his tequila-based drink several times, allegedly to see if it would get drunk. The incident took place in August of last year at the local Bombay Bicycle Club when a fellow patron reported she’d seen Nobbe and a friend engaging in the psittacine abuse. Nobbe denied it, and the evidence was not the strongest: no one besides the complainant witnessed the alleged plying of the bird with liquor, but a police officer said the creature’s upper portions seemed damp when he was called to the scene, and a Humane Society officer said that when the bird was later brought into the shelter it ate voraciously, a pattern consistent, she averred, with its having the “drunken munchies”. Animal-rights advocates jammed prosecution switchboards demanding that the book be thrown at Nobbe, a 27-year-old Clearwater resident who’d had no previous problems with the law. Prosecutors said they had to charge him with felony as opposed to misdemeanor animal abuse because that’s what the law specifies for “repeated” acts of abuse — and multiple dunkings counted as that. In recent years, to little organized protest, animal-rights advocates have successfully lobbied for criminal statutes on animal abuse to be made more and more stringent.

August 2 — Our first month; new site improvements. Thanks to the many repeat visitors who’ve brought our total pages-served to more than five thousand in our first month. Two more new features debut today, along with some new navigational and cosmetic odds-and-ends. First, there’s an easy-to-use form on the left side of the front page which lets you recommend this site to a friend. Just enter your name, your email and your friend’s, press “send”, and a message is on its way. The form works not only for general recommending of the site as a whole to people who might enjoy it, but also for calling your friends’ attention to a particular entry — just use the added-comments box to say, “Check out today’s parrot story”, or “I told you you couldn’t make me mow the lawn — see July 26″.

In addition, we’ve now put up a page with an explanation of Overlawyered.com‘s format to help newcomers figure out more quickly how to get the most out of the site, paired with some more technical notes for those who want to cite us, link to us, or link to us with graphics. Repeat visitors may also notice that the site now incorporates a pink-rectangle-with-black-letters logo button which usually when pressed will return you to the top page. Real devotees may also notice other differences in the “navigational bar” to the left of the main text, which has been streamlined for some pages and made more detailed for others.

July 31-August 1 — Weekend reading. Pixels to take to the beach or cottage:

* The Boston Globe‘s July 26 article (link now dead) on how the practice of asking people to sign liability release forms is “creeping into nearly every aspect of American life”, even things like the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned New England barn-raising. Reporter Bruce Mohl quotes lawyers who’d like to ban many such liability disclaimers or say that courts should just not enforce them (translation: how dare people try to escape from the system we’ve made for them?).

* Jonathan Rauch’s new National Journal column (July 23) based on his interviews with a forensic psychiatrist, a specialty in much demand these days thanks in part to all the harassment and discrimination suits in which “your damages go way up if you can show emotional distress, incapacitating trauma, or other psychological injury”. After hearing a series of case histories, Rauch concludes that “a lot of workplace disputes that belong in the sandbox are winding up in the courts”.

* LawNewsNet‘s June 17 account of how the Utah law firm of Snow, Nuffer, Engstrom & Drake went to the execution sale of a former client — the forced sale of his assets to satisfy creditors — and bought up his right to sue it for legal malpractice (a judge later struck down the deal).

July 31-August 1 — Personal hell. How common are false charges of sexual abuse, and how often do they succeed in ruining the lives of innocent targets? Two powerful items from the July 26 New York Post leave you wondering. An editorial (alternate URL) tells of New York state psychologist Mark Komlosi, charged by a malicious co-worker with sexually abusing his mentally retarded patients. The story eventually fell apart, but Komlosi went through a personal hell in which the ruin of his career — he wound up putting in time as a doorman and a salesman — was only the start. In an unrelated column, the Post‘s Steve Dunleavy casts fresh doubt (alternate URL) on the credibility of the accuser in 1998′s famous “cyber-sex” rape case, where defendant Oliver Jovanovic was convicted and given 15 years to life; he’s served a little more than a year so far. (update Dec. 23: appeals court overturns Jovanovic’s conviction).

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