Overlawyered » Switzerland http://overlawyered.com Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:11:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 September 29 roundup http://overlawyered.com/2011/09/september-29-roundup-2/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/09/september-29-roundup-2/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:57:37 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24756
  • 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)
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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/09/september-29-roundup-2/feed/ 7     Swiss sledders, skiers seldom sue http://overlawyered.com/2011/03/swiss-sledders-skiers-seldom-sue/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/03/swiss-sledders-skiers-seldom-sue/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:33:51 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=21860 “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).

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/03/swiss-sledders-skiers-seldom-sue/feed/ 5     Swiss vote down lawyers-for-animals proposal http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/swiss-vote-down-lawyers-for-animals-proposal/ http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/swiss-vote-down-lawyers-for-animals-proposal/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:50:33 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=16426 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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/swiss-vote-down-lawyers-for-animals-proposal/feed/ 3     “Swiss to vote on lawyers for animals” http://overlawyered.com/2010/02/swiss-to-vote-on-lawyers-for-animals/ http://overlawyered.com/2010/02/swiss-to-vote-on-lawyers-for-animals/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:10:59 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=16201 “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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2010/02/swiss-to-vote-on-lawyers-for-animals/feed/ 14     “Zurich hospital turns away US health tourists” http://overlawyered.com/2009/09/zurich-hospital-turns-away-us-health-tourists/ http://overlawyered.com/2009/09/zurich-hospital-turns-away-us-health-tourists/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:15:36 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=13799 “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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2009/09/zurich-hospital-turns-away-us-health-tourists/feed/ 2     Legal protection for dignity of plants http://overlawyered.com/2008/10/legal-protection-for-dignity-of-plants/ http://overlawyered.com/2008/10/legal-protection-for-dignity-of-plants/#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:03:33 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=7665 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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2008/10/legal-protection-for-dignity-of-plants/feed/ 6     April 29 roundup http://overlawyered.com/2008/04/april-29-roundup/ http://overlawyered.com/2008/04/april-29-roundup/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:03:00 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/wpblog/?p=6158
  • “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.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2008/04/april-29-roundup/feed/ 4     “Doomsday fears spark lawsuit” http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/doomsday-fears-spark-lawsuit/ http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/doomsday-fears-spark-lawsuit/#comments Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:59:19 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/wpblog/?p=6034 “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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/doomsday-fears-spark-lawsuit/feed/ 8     Quoted in today’s Times http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/quoted-in-todays-times/ http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/quoted-in-todays-times/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:09:25 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/wpblog/?p=6000 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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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2008/03/quoted-in-todays-times/feed/ 0     February 1 roundup http://overlawyered.com/2008/02/february-1-roundup-2/ http://overlawyered.com/2008/02/february-1-roundup-2/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:57:38 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/wpblog/?p=5805
    • Following public outrage, Spanish businessman drops plans to sue parents of boy he killed in road crash [UK Independent; earlier]

    • Scruggs to take Fifth in State Farm case against Hood [Clarion-Ledger] And how much “home cooking” was the Mississippi titan dished out in the Medicaid-tobacco case that made his fortune? [Folo]

    • More critics assail ABC “Eli Stone” vaccine-autism fiction, with American Academy of Pediatrics calling for episode’s cancellation [AAP press release; Stier, NY Post; earlier]

    • Special ethics counsel recommends disbarment of Edward Fagan, lawyer of Swiss-bank-suit fame whose ethical missteps have been chronicled on this site over the years [Star-Ledger]. As recently as fourteen months ago the L.A. Times was still according Fagan good publicity;

    • In past bail-bond scandals, private bond agencies have been caught colluding “with lawyers, the police, jail officials and even judges to make sure that bail is high and that attractive clients are funneled to them.” [Liptak, NYT]

    • Archbishop of Canterbury calls for new laws to punish “thoughtless or cruel” comments on religion [Times Online, Volokh]

    • Another disturbing case from Massachusetts of a citizen getting charged with privacy violation for recording police activity [also Volokh]

    • Abuse of open-records law? Convicted arsonist files numerous requests for pictures and personal information of public employees who sent him to prison; they charge intimidation [AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

    • It resembles a news program on Connecticut public-access cable, but look more closely: it’s law firm marketing [Ambrogi]

    • Judge says Alfred Rava’s suit can proceed charging sex bias over Oakland A’s stadium distribution of Mother’s Day hats [Metropolitan News-Enterprise; earlier on Angels in Anaheim]

    • Crack down on docs with multiple med-mal payouts? Well, there go lots of your neurosurgeons [three years ago on Overlawyered]

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