Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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By a 70-30 margin [Telegraph] Earlier coverage is here, and the Wall Street Journal profiled the one cantonal animal public defender in an article last week.
P.S. Ann Althouse, on reading about the “lawyers-for-pets plan”: “I thought: What? Do you turn in your lawyer and get a pet in exchange?”
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“Fish don’t get much sympathy,” laments attorney Antoine F. Goetschel about one of his recent clients. Zurich prosecutors went after an angler whose ten-minute battle with a pike, they said, was unfair to the pike. [AP]
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“Zurich University Hospital has stopped treating North American ‘medical tourists’, fearing million-dollar claims from litigious patients if operations go wrong. Hospitals in canton Valais have also adopted measures to protect themselves against visitors from the United States, Canada and Britain.” [Swissinfo.ch via Mark Perry and Coyote]
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That whole “sober, sensible Switzerland” concept may need to be rethought. (Gautam Naik, “Switzerland’s Green Power Revolution: Ethicists Ponder Plants’ Rights”, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 10).
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“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet. … The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border.” Among the concerns of critics who are suing in federal court in Hawaii: “Could quarks recombine into ’strangelets’ that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?” (Alan Boyle, CosmicLog, MSNBC, Mar. 27; Dennis Overbye, “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More”, New York Times, Mar. 29).
More: Sundries Shack (”For goodness sake, one of the plaintiffs calls himself an ‘author and researcher on time travel’”); Adler @ Volokh. The liberal site Lawyers, Guns & Money, perhaps serving in this instance as a Strange Attractor, attracts a commenter who seems to agree with the lawsuit-filers that it’s better to be safe than sorry — the Precautionary Principle lives! And from our comments, links to the complaint, Ted on jurisdiction, and thoughts on the effectiveness of litigation in obtaining free publicity.
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I’m quoted on the Melvyn Weiss guilty plea, and on the way certain crooks have successfully been passing themselves off as white knights in press coverage of shareholder and consumer litigation. (Jonathan D. Glater, “High-Profile Trial Lawyer Agrees to Guilty Plea”, New York Times, Mar. 21). For more on Weiss’s plea, see yesterday’s post.
More Weiss reactions include a NY Sun editorial:
Mr. Weiss and his partners made their careers, and their fortunes, casting those they were suing — insurance and tobacco executives, Swiss bankers — as crooks. Some of them may have been, though many were not. Now these lawyers are admitting to the court that they are crooks, too. … Congress has already acted to reform the class-action system from the “first-to-file” system that engendered the Milberg Weiss abuses. But until Congress and the state legislatures act further to reform the civil litigation system, the costs of Weiss’s career will be borne by all of us.
Interviewed by the L.A. Times, Columbia lawprof Jack Coffee (who’s done a lot of work for Milberg, right?) thinks Mel Weiss got a “uniquely good deal” in the plea. Similarly: Greenfield.
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Professor Burt Neuborne finally received the $3.1 million he requested for achieving a $1.25 billion tax-free settlement of claims brought by Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks. The controversy isn’t over, however; Neuborne has made a standard request for interest (another $300,000), and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. [Law Blog; NY Sun; earlier on Overlawyered]
Professor Neuborne’s fee request is based on the hours actually spent on seven years of complex international litigation (29 formal proceedings and 16 successful Second Circuit appeals), and amounts to less than 1% of the amount recovered. There is no evidence that Professor Neuborne inflated his hours. If all contingent-fee requests were as reasonable as Professor Neuborne’s, reformers would have a lot less to complain about.
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Ted is on vacation in Europe, and sends the following:
So Slim and I went paragliding in Interlaken, Switzerland, today. As the van takes a group of five customers up to the top of the hill, the leader explains that we’ll each get to pick our tandem pilot.I consulted my inner economist. “I want the one with the gray hair,” I said.
The pilot, Robi, gave me a form. “Regulations. Just like any air flight, we need to have the name and destination recorded. The liability is just like Continental Airlines,” handing me a ticket to sign. I read the back, expressly disclaiming that Air Transport laws applied, and stating maximum liability would be 72,500 francs. And since it’s Switzerland, the law of contract is probably respected, so that’s a real waiver. Fair enough — if I do not fly, so much as plummet, my ability to recover in civil court is perhaps the last thing on my mind. My pilot has plenty of economic incentive to land safely such that civil liability does not add much at the margin. And Coase teaches us that the limited liability permits the price to be as low as it is. I accept the benefit of the bargain, and assume good faith that the professional paraglider is just unfamiliar with the nature of the forms rather than trying to snow me.
The fact that I’m writing suggested that I survived. But I’m pretty confident that one is not supposed to bounce on the side of the hill during takeoff. (Slim, whose launch was after mine, reports that one of the other pilots crossed himself at the time.) And, hey, fun.
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Because you were clamoring for one:
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Was high-profile civil rights lawyer and NYU lawprof Burt Neuborne working pro bono in the Swiss banks reparations case? Well, yes and no, it now seems. (William K. Rashbaum, “Lawyer’s $4.1 Million Fee Angers Holocaust Survivors”, New York Times, Feb. 25; Lattman, Feb. 27). Later updates: Jun. 30, Jul. 6, Oct. 6, 2006; Mar. 18, 2007.
A couple of ambitious lawyers have managed to sue the Vatican itself in pursuit of the Catholic Church’s priest-abuse scandals, but it isn’t easy:
…even if a process server could get past the Swiss guards, handing the pope a copy of a lawsuit doesn’t count as service.Because the Vatican is a foreign country, all documents must be translated into its official language.
In this case, that means Latin. And there’s still the major obstacle to get around of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which bars most suits against foreign governments. (Ashbel S. Green, “Suit reaches new heights: the Vatican”, The Oregonian, Dec. 11). See PoL Mar. 10. More on church scandals: this site Sept. 16, 2003, Jul. 11, 2004; Point of Law Aug. 10, Sept. 29, 2004; Aug. 28, Aug. 31, Sept. 1, 2005.
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Kate Coscarelli of the Newark Star-Ledger is covering them:
The brash-talking attorney was the focus of two days of disciplinary hearings that will ultimately decide whether he should be disbarred for mishandling client funds. The sometimes-contentious hearings were held …in a third-floor room at state Superior Court in Hackensack before retired Judge Arthur Minuskin, who is the special ethics master in the case.The state Office of Attorney Ethics has charged Fagan with mishandling almost $400,000 in client funds, including money from two Holocaust survivors: Estelle Sapir, who got a large settlement from the Swiss banks, and Gizella Weisshaus, a Brooklyn woman who was the first survivor to sue the banks.
(”Holocaust lawyer fights his own court battle”, Nov. 17). More on attorney Edward Fagan: Aug. 27, Jun. 4 and many more.
Ducking a heated controversy, the European Parliament has declined to rule on “whether workers such as bare-chested builders should be required by their employers to cover up to avoid excessive sun.” The issue will now be left up to national legislatures. “MEPs found themselves under siege from angry business groups and German building workers, who staged a shirtless protest.” (David Rennie, “MEPs run for cover in ‘tan ban’ dilemma”, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 8). “Socialists and Greens argued EU legislation was vital to cut skin cancer rates among outdoor workers, but the right denounced it as an example of the nanny state running amok and over-burdening business.” (Aine Gallagher, “Builders and barmaids avoid EU tan ban”, Reuters/Swissinfo.com, Sept. 7). More: Jim Leitzel at Vice Squad has the dirndl angle (Sept. 11).
“A former Canadian sailor will not be allowed to sue Swissair for the trauma he suffered following the crash of Flight 111 in 1998, a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge ruled today. Lorne Joudrey, 40, had argued that the airline should compensate him for the psychological damage that resulted from his role in the recovery operation in the days after the jet plunged into the ocean near Peggy’s Cove, N.S., killing all 229 people aboard.” (”Ex-sailor can’t sue Swissair over trauma”, Canadian Press/Toronto Star, Jul. 7). For a similar ruling from a federal judge in New Mexico, see Apr. 1.
Point of Law