- Jack Park on Bruesewitz v. Wyeth vaccine preemption case at Supreme Court [Heritage]
- Incidentally happening to assure lawyers more access to work: Harvard’s Tribe devises “access to justice” initiatives for Obama administration [BLT]
- New Haven cops accidentally photograph themselves deleting video of an unlawful arrest [Balko]
- How elite law culture miscomprehends the military [Second Circuit chief judge Dennis Jacobs speech at Federalist Society convention, YouTube]
- “Later, Bad Lawyer”: a blogger heads to prison [Greenfield]
- Reform medical liability? Depends on how badly you want neurosurgeons’ services [Michael Lavyne, NYDN]
- “Cab-rank principle” in legal ethics explained [Lawyers' Lawyer, Australia; via Legal Ethics Forum]
- $3.5 million award to unsuccessful suicide-while-in-custody is one of long series of such cases [six years ago on Overlawyered]
Posts tagged as:
suicide
- “Japanese landlords sue families of suicide victims” [Telegraph via Tyler Cowen]
- Best candidate you’ve never heard of: lawprof Jim Huffman runs for a U.S. Senate seat in Oregon [Weekly Standard]
- “Freedom of culinary expression: Chefs speak out on behalf of salt” ["My Food, My Choice" via Ponnuru, NRO]
- “In-House Counsel Expect More Regulatory Litigation, Survey Finds” [NLJ]
- “Oladiran’s ‘Motion of the Year’ Earns Him Sanctions” [AtL]
- Resisting a music-delivery-system claim: “Patent Trolls and Public Goods” [Julian Sanchez]
- More transparency for New Jersey lawyer/lawmakers? [Philly.com]
- “Ninth Circuit: marine mammals don’t have standing…yet” [six years ago on Overlawyered]
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How litigious can insurance companies be when they find themselves in the plaintiff’s seat during the process known as subrogation? This litigious, per Patrick at Popehat.
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Citing text messages she sent her boyfriend shortly before the incident, Montana prosecutors contend that Justine Winter’s crash at 85 mph into an oncoming vehicle was a deliberate suicide attempt. Winter, who faces trial on homicide charges in the deaths of Erin Thompson, the woman she ran into, and Thompson’s 13-year-old son, has now sued Thompson’s estate as well as the construction company that built the interstate overpass where the accident occurred. [Daily Inter Lake, Siouxsie Law]
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A lab technician in Bolton, Lancashire, U.K. kills himself after an offhand joke at his workplace is denounced as insensitive [Telegraph, Mail]
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- Failure to warn? “Non-Child Sues For Slide-Related Injury” [Lowering the Bar]
- “AG Cuomo Sues Lawyer for Fraud, Says He Sold His Name to Debt Collector for $141K” [ABA Journal]
- Ted Frank on his move to the Manhattan Institute and Point of Law [CCAF]
- “Viacom is becoming a lawsuit company instead of a TV company” [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
- UK: “NHS pays £10,000 to family of psychiatric patient who committed suicide” [Times Online]
- American Cancer Society: federal advisory panel’s chemicals-cause-cancer alarms are overblown [NYTimes] More: Taranto, WSJ.
- “Who Knew Bankruptcy Paid So Well?” [NYTimes]
- Famed sleuth Bloomberg Holmes on the case: was the Pathfinder headed for a vile sodium den? [IowaHawk]
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And then sues would-be suicide over foot injury sustained in the jump. The unusual case reached an Illinois appellate court last year, which ruled that a suit could proceed against the would-be suicide, though not his wife, who had also been named as a defendant on the grounds that she had requested the plaintiff’s help. [Illinois Injury Lawyer Blog]
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A wrongful-death suit claims the TV host’s badgering drove a woman over the brink. [AP/L.A. Times, Brian Cuban; more on Grace, and our earlier coverage of this suit; OnPoint News]
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Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit to block construction. [Santa Barbara Daily Sound via Popehat]
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Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow John Avlon, in Forbes:
New York City spends more money on lawsuits than the next five largest American cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Philadelphia — combined. The city’s $568 million outlay in fiscal year 2008 was more than double what it spent 15 years ago and 20 times what it paid in 1977.
And the odd and extreme cases continue:
A Brooklyn insurance investigator won $2.3 million this year after he tumbled onto the subway tracks with a 0.18 blood-alcohol level and lost his right leg. (”They’re not allowed to hit you just because you’re drunk and on the track,” his lawyer explained.) A corrections officer received $7.25 million after unsuccessfully attempting suicide, on the grounds that the city should not have permitted her to have a gun. (”Ms. Jones could just have easily turned her city-authorized firearm on anyone,” her lawyer said.)
The piece is adapted from a contribution to a City Journal symposium, “New York’s Tomorrow”, and there’s also an associated podcast (cross-posted from Point of Law). More: Eric Turkewitz talks back from a plaintiff’s point of view (”when you account for inflation, there really hasn’t been much change at all” [compared with 15 years ago)] (& welcome Above the Law, WSJ Law Blog readers)
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San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders discusses the large settlement paid by Santa Clara County to the family of Andrew Martinez, who suffered from schizophrenia and became famous as Berkeley’s “Naked Guy” before taking his own life in jail. She quotes me on the terrorizing effect of suing public managers individually and on the way outside direction of public agencies by litigators often (as consent decrees, court orders and legal avoidance layer one atop another) can add up to “management by no one at all.” [Debra Saunders, "A naked million", San Francisco Chronicle, May 24].
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- Topic we’ve covered before: should the MCAT exam for prospective M.D.s grant extra time to applicants with learning disabilities? [KevinMD]
- Virginia blogger Waldo Jaquith fighting subpoena seeking identities of anonymous commenters [Citizen Media Law, earlier]
- A free marketer’s case for why fired professor Ward Churchill might deserve to win his case against the University of Colorado [Coyote Blog]
- She videotaped cops arresting her son. They took her camera. Could she have it back, please? [Ken @ Popehat]
- Despite Obama campaign hints of Second Amendment truce, lower-level appointees far from gun-friendly [Dave Kopel] And new State Department legal advisor Harold Koh pushed international curbs on small-arms trade [Fonte, NRO "Corner"]
- U.K.: “Man Who Attempted Suicide Sues Hospital that Saved Him” [Telegraph via Lowering the Bar]
- National media jump on Luzerne County, Pa. judicial scandal, some details I hadn’t seen in earlier coverage [NYT, ABA Journal]
- Atlanta jury — of 11 women and one lone guy — awards $2.3 million for circumcision injury [Fulton County Daily Report]
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That’s what the federal government, if not common sense, says. But what if the fall is from the roof?
- In unpublished opinion, California appeals court upholds dismissal of Unruh Act challenge to baseball Angels’ Mothers Day tote giveaway [Lex Icon, earlier]. More: CalBizLit.
- Securities class-action firm Bernstein, Liebhard & Lifshitz perhaps a less credible tribune of fiscal rectitude now that name partner Mel Lifshitz has copped felony plea to lying on federal taxes [NY Post, NYLJ, WSJ law blog] And what’s this about Lifshitz funding one of his firm’s clients? [The Street] P.S. He’s now departed the Bernstein firm, but maybe there’s an opening for him as chairman of House Ways and Means.
- Per one lawyer, “would be a stretch” for website operator to be held liable for teen’s overdose suicide with webcam running [AP]
- Carter Wood finishes up weeklong series of posts looking back on the great 1998 tobacco settlement [ShopFloor links to PoL]
- Eric Holder not a reassuring Attorney General choice for gun rights [Kopel @ Volokh]
- Law bloggers on Twitter: Anne Reed explains what the fuss is about [Deliberations; related, Michelle Golden]
- Compulsory chapel? UC Irvine Prof. Alexander McPherson, who quit supervising students rather than submit to state-mandated sexual harassment training, explains his stand [L.A. Times] Lefty blogs once again empty a bucket over his head [Feministe, Lemieux]
- Presumably unrelated: “Law Grad Accused of Faking E-Mail to Implicate Prof in Harassment” [ABA Journal, Florida Coastal]
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We’ve already aired much dissent from the medical profession about whether or not top-notch hospital care can in fact prevent all instances of patient falls, decubitus pressure ulcers (bedsores), hypoglycemia, deep vein thrombosis, delirium, suicide attempts, c. difficile infection, or iatrogenic pneumothorax. Nonetheless, Medicare has adopted its proposal to deny hospitals reimbursement for the cost of treating such events and complications, with likely consequences both for hospital behavior (refusal to admit some patients at high risk of never events), for private insurer behavior and for the climate of medical malpractice litigation. (Kevin Sack, “Medicare Won’t Pay for Medical Errors”, New York Times, Sept. 30). White Coat Rants, who has blogged extensively on the issue in past months, has some predictions (Oct. 1) of things we can now expect to see more of: more patient transfers between hospitals (since Medicare will not punish the second hospital for the first’s “never event”; underdiagnosis of certain conditions and overdiagnosis of others; and, more remotely but no less alarmingly, pressure on some families to serve as ultimate bearers of risk for supposed never events affecting the frailest and most elderly:
Say hello to the Advance Beneficiary Notices. Medicare won’t cover preventative care, so you are going to have to pay for it out of your pocket. If you’re prone to falls or bedsores, you’ll have to pay for a personal nurse to wait on you hand and foot so you don’t develop these never events. If you don’t pay for a personal nurse 24 hours around the clock to keep a never event from happening, you’re personally responsible for paying the costs of treatment if the “never events” occur. You had the opportunity to prevent the events but you were just too cheap to pay for it. I think that ABNs are less likely to catch on, but eventually I think they will become commonplace.
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