- Lawsuit claim: MERS mortgage system is just a racket to deprive court clerks of recording fees [Baton Rouge Advocate]
- More reporting on hospital and community drug shortages [Washington Post; my post last summer]
- Roger Pilon: How the “judicial activism” debate changed [Cato at Liberty]
- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, spoken of as a future national political figure, has rather a lot of ties to trial lawyers [Political Desk]
- Problems with DOJ e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple [Declan McCullagh]
- One bogus campaign feeds into another: “ALEC Unfairly Demonized Over ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws” [Bader, CEI "Open Market"]
- New Point of Law discussion on class actions with Ted Frank and Brian Fitzpatrick;
- Today’s best spam comment? “With all the thistledown floating almost on the net, it is rare to look over a locate like yours instead.”
Tagged as:
antitrust,
Apple,
class actions,
Louisiana,
mortgages,
politics,
Ted Frank
- Too much of a stretch: US nixes copyright in yoga exercises [Bloomberg, earlier]
- “Know your rights dealing with cops” material construed as probative of criminality [Popehat] Is Justice Scalia really an “unlikely” champion of defendants’ Constitutional rights? [LATimes, Adler] “Overcriminalization: The Legislative Side of the Problem” [Larkin/Heritage, related Meese] When feds spring false-statements trap, it won’t matter whether you committed underlying offense being investigated [Popehat] “‘Clean Up Government Act’ sparks overcriminalization concerns” [PoL]
- Former Attorney General Mukasey on ObamaCare recusal flap [Adler]
- American Antitrust Institute proposals might be discounted given group’s longstanding pro-plaintiff bias [Thom Lambert]
- NYC: “The tour guide said that the way to get rich is to be a zoning lawyer.” [Arnold Kling]
- “Obama’s Top Ten Constitutional Violations” [Ilya Shapiro, Daily Caller] In at least two major areas, “Obama has broken with precedent to curtail religious freedom” [Steve Chapman]
- Ted Frank-Shirley Svorny med mal debate wraps up [PoL, Bader]
Tagged as:
antitrust,
Barack Obama,
constitutional law,
crime and punishment,
land use and zoning,
medical malpractice,
police,
recusals,
Ted Frank
- Big win for Ted Frank against cy pres slush funds [CCAF, Fisher, Zywicki, CL&P, @tedfrank ("Ninth Circuit rules in my favor ... but I still think I'm right".)]
- “Can the Vatican Be Subject to ICC Prosecution?” [Ku/OJ]
- “Tennessee: ATS Sues City Over Right Turn Ticket Money” [The Newspaper]
- “Law firms dominating campaign contributions to Obama” [WaPo]
- Does that mean it’s an entitlement? Punitive damage limits face constitutional challenges in Arkansas, Missouri [Cal Punitives]
- Businessman sues to silence critical blogger, case is dismissed, now files suit #2 [Scott Greenfield]
- Going Hollywood? “The Supreme Court should move to Los Angeles” [Conor Friedersdorf]
Tagged as:
Arkansas,
Barack Obama,
bloggers and the law,
Catholic Church,
cy pres,
Missouri,
punitive damages,
red light cameras,
Supreme Court,
Ted Frank
- Law firm settles with employee who said required high heels led to back injury [ABA Journal]
- Stock listings fleeing U.S. for overseas, legal environment a factor [Ribstein, TotM]
- Partial solution to above? Ted Frank places a stock bet on the Wal-Mart case [PoL, more]
- Wider press coverage of hospital drug shortage [AP, Reuters, my March post]
- Trial judge up north supports certifying as class action unusual suit blaming Newfoundland for moose collisions [Canadian Press via Karlsgodt, earlier here and here]
- Academic revolt against copyright overreach [Chron of Higher Ed]
- Sues deceased grandmother over trampoline injury [Madison County Record]
Tagged as:
animals,
Canada,
colleges and universities,
copyright,
hospitals,
pharmaceuticals,
Securities and Exchange Commission,
Ted Frank,
Wal-Mart
Ted Frank’s class action settlement reform group, the Center for Class Action Fairness, has announced “multiple victories” in ongoing cases arising from settlements by Apple, Classmates.com, Toyota, HP, and gasoline retailers. Among the topics addressed in objection: exaggeration of benefits supposedly provided for the class, excessive attorney fees, and diversion of proceeds to groups unrelated to the class. Details here.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
cy pres,
Ted Frank
“A defense lawyer’s fleeting reference to the ‘uniquely iconic’ McDonald’s coffee case was enough for the Utah Supreme Court to order a new trial in a pedestrian accident lawsuit and allow the plaintiff to seek a larger damages award.” [Matthew Heller/OnPoint News; Jodie Hill/Downtown Lawyer] And Abnormal Use is out with a new interview of Ted Frank, who has written frequently on the hot-coffee case for this site, and who says:
The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.
I, too, gave a lot of thought to writing up the long controversy over the Liebeck case in my latest book, precisely because academic sources, and not just trial-lawyer publicists, persistently spread distortions and misconceptions about the case. Eventually it seemed like too wide a digression from the book’s main themes — but someone still needs to write up that story.
Tagged as:
hot coffee,
Ted Frank
Ted Frank, who’s challenging the Cobell (Indian trust) class action fees as part of his work with the Center for Class Action Fairness, catches out a lawyer who claims to have worked for more than nine hours a day on the case for 14 years, including a 7-year stretch in which he purportedly worked “an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.” [Above the Law, earlier]
Tagged as:
attorneys' fees,
class action settlements,
Indian tribes,
Ted Frank
- “A conversation with class action objector Ted Frank” [American Lawyer]
- Reviews of new Lester Brickman book Lawyer Barons [Dan Fisher/Forbes, Russell Jackson] Plus: interview at TortsProf; comments from Columbia legal ethicist William Simon [Legal Ethics Forum]
- “Collective Bargaining for States But Not for Uncle Sam” [Adler] Examples of how Wisconsin public-sector unionism has worked in practice [Perry] Wisconsin cop union: nice business you got there, shame if anything were to happen to it [Sykes, WTMJ] “Union ‘rights’ that aren’t” [Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe]
- “Minnesota House Considering Significant Consumer Class Action Reform Measures” [Karlsgodt]
- 10,000 lawyers at DoD? Rumsfeld complains military overlawyered [Althouse via Instapundit]
- “Are Meritless Claims More Prevalent in Copyright?” [Boyden, Prawfs]
- Claim: availability of punitive damages reduces rate of truck accidents. Really? [Curt Cutting]
- Now with improved federalism: “The Return of the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act” [Carter Wood, more, earlier here].
Tagged as:
class actions,
copyright,
labor unions,
Lester Brickman,
military,
Minnesota,
police,
public employment,
punitive damages,
sanctions,
Ted Frank,
Wisconsin
The problem, Ted writes in the Examiner, isn’t that the class action is “too large” — even very large classes can sometimes fit the law’s requirements that each claim be identical in nature and capable of standing or falling together.
But the theory of the Dukes lawsuit is exactly the opposite: the plaintiffs claimed that Wal-Mart’s central office did not exercise enough authority over each of its 3,400 stores; each of the individual managers’ discretionary employment or promotion decisions–whether made by male or female managers–was, on average, discriminatory; and thus Wal-Mart was responsible for a policy that “fosters or facilitates” discrimination. …
The discrimination laws permit Wal-Mart to defend itself by demonstrating that the challenged job decision was made for a reason other than gender. For example, looking at Betty Dukes, the named plaintiff, alone, we learn that she had a female manager and that she was repeatedly disciplined for returning late from lunch breaks. …Wal-Mart is stripped of its defense because the individualized defense would be inconvenient to trying the case as a class action. …
If the Supreme Court rules in Wal-Mart’s favor later this year, it will not be to protect business, but to protect due process.
Tagged as:
class actions,
Ted Frank,
Wal-Mart v. Dukes
But Ted Frank explains why creating a new entitlement to taxpayer-paid civil lawyers is a bad idea [New York Daily News, PoL]:
As any economist would tell you, if you lower the price of something, you get more demand for it. If it becomes completely costless to bring suit, we will see many more meritless suits.
That’s no small problem in New York, where courts are already overloaded.
If a dispute over shelter entitles a cantankerous tenant to a free attorney on the government’s dime, it will be much easier for people to fight evictions when they violate a lease in ways that threaten other tenants or intentionally refuse to pay rent. Landlords, in turn, will have to hire their own attorneys and raise rents and costs for their honest tenants.
Not unrelated: U.S. is granting asylum requests far more often than formerly. Why might that be? [Ted's answer]
Tagged as:
civil gideon,
immigration law,
New York,
Ted Frank
- Representing Prof. Michael Krauss, Ted Frank will file objection to Classmates.com class action settlement [CCAF]
- Not without condescension, Harvard historian/New Yorker writer Jill Lepore asks why Woodrow Wilson’s so disliked these days; Radley Balko offers some help [The Agitator, NYT "Room for Debate"]
- China needs true private property rights, according to Charter 08 document, which helped Liu Xiaobo win Nobel Peace Prize [Tyler Cowen]
- Axelrod “foreign funders under every rug” demagogy might be turned against his own allies [Stoll; New York Times refutes earlier Obama talking point; Atlantic Wire; Sullum]
- R.I.P. influential class actions and mass torts scholar Richard Nagareda [Vanderbilt Law School]
- “Web Seminar Makes Case for Patent Troll Lawsuit Targets to Fight Back” [Washington Legal Foundation Legal Pulse]
- Contrary to WSJ report, if Congressional staffers are profiting in stock trades by way of insider knowledge, they probably do face some risk of legal liability [Bainbridge; a not entirely unrelated inside-trading controversy]
- Underpublicized: “California’s Proposed ‘Green Chemistry’ Regulations Move Forward” [Wajert]
Tagged as:
California,
campaign regulation,
class action settlements,
patent trolls,
Senate,
Ted Frank,
U.S. House of Representatives
- “Mark Lanier, Marie Gryphon and Ted Frank debate if a free market can protect consumers as well as lawyers.” [John Stossel's Fox Business show last week; Point of Law (Lanier has kind words for loser pays); Bob Dorigo Jones]
- Corner-cutting document prep proves costly to mortgage lenders at foreclosure time [NYTimes; related, Felix Salmon and more] Connecticut AG Blumenthal orders 60-day halt to all foreclosures, whether or not paperwork-impaired, conveniently carrying him through Election Day [WaPo]
- High court grants cert on a bunch of business cases [Beck, WLF, WSJ Law Blog, Fisher, PoL on Scalia stay in tobacco class action]
- The myth of the sabotaged streetcar system [Market Urbanism]
- Another big Title IX casualty: Cal Berkeley kills varsity rugby [Saving Sports and various followups; gymnastics; related on Boston Globe coverage]
- “N.J. Bill Proposes Use of Screening Panels to Thwart Frivolous Suits Against Public Entities” [NJLJ]
- Cop informs on cop’s misbehavior, what happens next isn’t pretty [Greenfield; Kansas City, Kansas]
- There’s money in glass-eating, son [three years ago on Overlawyered]
Tagged as:
John Stossel,
loser pays,
Mark Lanier,
mortgages,
on TV and radio,
police,
Ted Frank,
Title IX
It’s the 2010 Ted Frank law-school-speaking tour!
September 9: Louisiana State
September 15: New York University
September 16: Columbia
October 6: Texas Wesleyan
October 7: St. Mary’s (San Antonio)
November 9: Ohio State
November 10: Toledo
It’s not too late to get on the calendar if your school’s Federalist Society is interested.
Tagged as:
Federalist Society,
law schools,
Ted Frank
