I’ll be speaking at Duke Law Monday about the Grand Theft Auto and other class action settlements. Come say hi.
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Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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I’ll be speaking at Duke Law Monday about the Grand Theft Auto and other class action settlements. Come say hi.
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In 1992, Diana Maychick drove her mother’s Oldsmobile back to Washington Place in Greenwich Village, and got out. Her mother, the 74-year-old Stella Maychick, slid over from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat, readying herself to return to Yonkers. Maycheck, a shorter-than-average woman, suddenly took off in the car, which sped up, ran two stop signs, and tore through Washington Square Park, killing five and maiming several others.
Diana Maychick is now Diana Foote, a restaurant reviewer for a Palm Beach newspaper, and recently recounted the accident, claiming the recent Toyota troubles exonerated her mother.
Which I found fascinating, because I worked on that litigation—and the evidence that Maychick hit the gas instead of the brake was so strong that the plaintiffs’ lawyers abandoned the standard specious “mysterious gremlins caused the car to accelerate” theory and replaced it with a “General Motors knew that drivers were hitting the wrong pedal but didn’t do enough to warn them” theory. I took issue with Foote’s column in a letter to the newspaper.
As for the lawsuit itself, the judge excused everyone in the voir dire who expressed the remotest skepticism about plaintiffs’ theory, and GM settled shortly after the start of trial. One certainly marvels at the chutzpah of the theory of the case, given trial lawyers’ role in trying to persuade the public that driver error couldn’t possibly be to blame.
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My Toyota op-ed is going viral, with dozens of retweets, and listings on the front pages of Hot Air and reddit—not to mention an Instalink. And Alex Tabarrok tests my numbers at Marginal Revolution.
Update: Don’t miss Megan McArdle’s comprehensive take.
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I expand on my earlier post in today’s Washington Examiner, including my skepticism of the conventional reporting on the James Sikes incident.
Michael Fumento is also on the case on his blog and in the LA Times; see also Richard Schmidt in the New York Times on the last generation of sudden acceleration.
Update: Fumento goes farther on the James Sikes story than I did. I also found the idea that Sikes reached for the accelerator while driving implausible after trying to repeat the experiment in a (parked!) Prius.
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I’ll be on KOGO-600 AM’s Top Story with Chris Reed tonight at 6:35 pm Pacific discussing recent CCAF cases and the problem of bad class action settlement cases generally.
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I give an interview to KALW on the question, a question I’ve written about at length.
Stephanie Mencimer suggests that 11% of Alaskans would have switched their votes to Obama in 2008 if they knew that the eeeevil author of this op-ed was in Anchorage helping Governor Sarah Palin address the politically-motivated “Troopergate” investigation. Color me skeptical.
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Eric Turkewitz, noted plaintiff’s-lawyer blogger, teams up with Ted Frank, noted Overlawyered.com blogger, to object to a Yahoo! class action settlement.
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California has enacted the nation’s first “civil Gideon” law, providing free counsel to litigants in child custody and eviction cases. I’m quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s article, saying why that may not be such a good idea.
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In an op-ed in the Examiner last week, I express curiosity why the trial bar continues to insist that the infamous McDonald’s coffee case came out correctly decided, to the point that trial lawyer blogs express excitement that a documentary is going to be made about the subject. Of course, if the movie just parrots the urban legends trial lawyers have spread about the case, that would be something else—the fact that the filmmaker was fundraising at the AAJ convention but hasn’t shown her face around any of the tort reform conventions suggests a certain direction about the film.
Speaking of McDonald’s, I’ll be in the Bay Area next week at a couple of law schools giving a presentation called “The Law of McDonald’s: Hot Coffee, Obesity, and Prank Phone Calls” : Golden Gate University Law School on September 10, and UC-Davis on September 11. I’ll also be at UC-Berkeley Law on September 8, and Santa Clara University Law on September 9 talking more generally about tort reform and patent reform specifically.
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The Sep. 21 issue of Forbes magazine, now on newsstands, has a lengthy profile by Dan Fisher of my founding of the Center for Class Action Fairness, complete with a photo of my ugly mug gracing the story.
Of interest is a new revelation in the infamous Toshiba class action:
After few consumers availed themselves of a $2 billion settlement over supposedly defective laptop computers in 2000, for example, Toshiba America handed $353 million to a Beaumont charity whose chairman was plaintiff attorney Wayne Reaud, the lawyer on the case. Six years later the charity was still sitting on $250 million and the Texas attorney general sued for breach of fiduciary duty, including paying its president, W. Frank Newton, $560,000 in 2004. Newton is the former president of the State Bar of Texas.
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Larry Ribstein and Alexandra Lahav comment favorably, as does the pseudonymous “Kat”, and Scott Greenfield semi-snarks about my new job.
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I may have a new job as what David Lat calls the “Class Action Avenger” and a new blog to go with it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be speaking about more general legal reform issues. A Heritage Foundation panel on preemption, featuring Kyle Sampson, former NHTSA and DOT general counsel Jeffrey Rosen, and myself is now viewable online. It’s only fair to note that I cribbed a lot from Michael Greve’s Bradley Lecture on federalism (video), which I can’t recommend enough.
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