Overlawyered » Switzerland

Free speech roundup

Walter Olson — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:04:15 +0000

“People’s Rights Amendment” paves way for government control of media and trampling of many other rights. Is your Rep a sponsor? [Volokh, more, Somin]
Indian skeptic charged with blasphemy for revealing secret behind “miracle” of weeping cross [Doctorow] “Arab world’s most famous comedian” jailed in Egypt on charges of “insulting Islam” [Volokh]
“Is the Real Intent of Cyber-Bullying Laws to Eliminate Criticism of Politicians?” [Coyote]
Timothy Kincaid: why I oppose the California “don’t say ex-gay” therapy-ban bill [BTB]
More on unreasonable IRS demands of tea party groups seeking nonprofit status [Stoll, Anne Sorock/Bill Jacobson, Houston Chronicle, earlier]
Denmark Supreme Court, 7-0, strikes down conviction of Lars Hedegaard for criticizing Islam in own home [Mark Steyn] Institute of Public Affairs launches campaign to defend free speech in Australia [Andrew Bolt case earlier] Free speech in Britain looking the worse for wear [Cooke, NRO] Belgian court throws out lawsuit seeking ban on allegedly racist “Tintin” comic book [Volokh] Group files criminal complaint against Swiss magazine over cover story on Roma crime [Spiegel]

Tags: Australia, Belgium, bullying, Denmark, free speech, hate speech, India, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Free speech roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

September 29 roundup

Walter Olson — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:57:37 +0000

ABA, NFIB protest NLRB “persuader” disclosure regulations [ABA Journal, Schwartz, earlier] Might regs place replacement workers’ home addresses in hands of unions? [Labor Union Report, Boyle, Daily Caller]
Swiss animal welfare law is catalyst for founding of guinea pig matchmaking service [Spiegel/Cowen]
“Jail time for overdue library books” [Lowering the Bar]
Busybody lawprof (at a different law school) continues to sue Catholic U. demanding coed dorms [WSJ Law Blog, Mystal/AtL]
So does air pollution cause childhood asthma, as the American Lung Association claims in its ads? [Hayward] “Obama’s Smog Standard Capitulation Enrages Environmentalists” [AW]
A look inside the Shell Nigeria Alien Tort cases [Goldhaber, AmLaw]
In the mail: Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (Bryan Garner)

Tags: Alien Tort Claims Act, animal rights, colleges and universities, labor unions, Switzerland

September 29 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Swiss sledders, skiers seldom sue

Walter Olson — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:33:51 +0000

“The tree trunks, exposed banks and other hazards whizzing past represent a cornucopia of potential tort suits under U.S. law, yet somehow the Swiss manage to operate these runs without being sued into oblivion.” Dan Fisher at Forbes has a go at explaining why. More: Bill Childs, TortsProf (many U.S. states relatively protective of winter sports providers).

Tags: contingent fee, Europe, insurance, juries, skiing, Switzerland

Swiss sledders, skiers seldom sue is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Swiss vote down lawyers-for-animals proposal

Walter Olson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:50:33 +0000

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?”

Tags: animal rights, Switzerland

Swiss vote down lawyers-for-animals proposal is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Swiss to vote on lawyers for animals”

Walter Olson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:10:59 +0000

“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]

Tags: animal rights, Switzerland

“Swiss to vote on lawyers for animals” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Zurich hospital turns away US health tourists”

Walter Olson — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:15:36 +0000

“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]

Tags: Europe, medical malpractice, Switzerland

“Zurich hospital turns away US health tourists” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Legal protection for dignity of plants

Walter Olson — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:03:33 +0000

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).

Tags: animal rights, Switzerland

Legal protection for dignity of plants is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

April 29 roundup

Walter Olson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:03:00 +0000

“Dog owners in Switzerland will have to pass a test to prove they can control and care for their animal, or risk losing it, the Swiss government said yesterday.” [Daily Telegraph]
72-year-old mom visits daughter’s Southport, Ct. home, falls down stairs searching for bathroom at night, sues daughter for lack of night light, law firm boasts of her $2.475 million win on its website [Casper & deToledo, scroll to "Jeremy C. Virgil"]
Can’t possibly be right: “Every American enjoys a constitutional right to sue any other American in a West Virginia court” [W.V. Record]
Video contest for best spoof personal injury attorney ads [Sick of Lawsuits; YouTube]
Good profile of Kathleen Seidel, courageous blogger nemesis of autism/vaccine litigation [Concord Monitor*, Orac]. Plus: all three White House hopefuls now pander to anti-vaxers, Dems having matched McCain [Orac]
One dollar for every defamed Chinese person amounts to a mighty big lawsuit demand against CNN anchor Jack Cafferty [NYDN link now dead; Independent (U.K.)]
Hapless Ben Stein whipped up one side of the street [Salmon on financial regulation] and down the other [Derbyshire on creationism]
If only Weimar Germany had Canada-style hate-speech laws to prevent the rise of — wait, you mean they did? [Steyn/Maclean's] Plus: unlawful in Alberta to expose a person to contempt based on his “source of income” [Levant quoting sec. 3 (1)(b) of Human Rights Law]
Hey, these coupon settlements are giving all of us class action lawyers a bad name [Leviant/The Complex Litigator]
Because patent law is bad enough all by itself? D.C. Circuit tosses out FTC’s antitrust ruling against Rambus [GrokLaw; earlier]
“The fell attorney prowls for prey” — who wrote that line, and about which city? [four years ago on Overlawyered]

*Okay, one flaw in the profile: If Prof. Irving Gottesman compares Seidel to Erin Brockovich he probably doesn’t know much about Brockovich.

Tags: antitrust, asbestos, autism, Barack Obama, Ben Stein, coupon settlements, Erin Brockovich, forum shopping, free speech in Canada, Germany, hate speech, jackpot justice, John McCain, Kathleen Seidel subpoena, libel slander and defamation, Mark Steyn, nanny state, parody, roundups, Switzerland, vaccines, West Virginia

April 29 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Doomsday fears spark lawsuit”

Walter Olson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:59:19 +0000

“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.

Tags: France, Hawaii, Switzerland, technology

“Doomsday fears spark lawsuit” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Quoted in today’s Times

Walter Olson — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:09:25 +0000

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.

Tags: Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss, scandals, Switzerland, tobacco

Quoted in today’s Times is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system