- Sure, let’s subvert sound mortgage accounting in the name of energy efficiency. What could go wrong? [Mark Calabria, Kevin Funnell]
- California: fireworks shows are “development” and coastal commission can ban ‘em [Laer Pearce, Daily Caller]
- Trial lawyers’ lobbyist: I got Cuomo to bash Chevron in Ecuador case [John Schwartz, NYT]
- Politics of intimidation: “jobs bill” advocates occupy office of Sen. Minority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) [ABC News] Union protesters invade Sotheby’s during big auction [NYObserver] “Occupy Denver protesters try to storm conference of conservative bloggers” [Denver Post] “What’s the matter with Oakland?” [Megan McArdle] Post-’08 downturn, not wealth of the few, at root of economic woes [Steve Chapman] “Bohm-Bawerk forget to include [Ms. Katchpole] in his commentaries on sundry theories of interest.” [Tyler Cowen]
- New breakthroughs in abundant energy aren’t welcome to some [NYT "Room for Debate"] Is GOP wrong to make EPA an issue? [Michael Barone]
- After extracting $450,000 settlement, employee admits falsifying whistleblower evidence in oil filter antitrust case; class action suits continue [Bloomberg, Abby Schachter/NYPost via PoL]
- Least surprising Washington-DC-datelined story of year: “Medical malpractice reform efforts stalled” [Politico]
Tagged as:
Andrew Cuomo,
antitrust,
California,
Chevron,
environment,
labor unions,
mortgages,
whistleblowers
- Manhattan Institute’s “Trial Lawyers Inc.” series looks at cozy relations between state attorneys general and plaintiff’s bar [report, related featured discussion, Copland, Examiner] Report comes down hard on Ohio’s Richard Cordray, nominee to head CFPB [Copland, Gorodetski/PoL] Judge tosses Cordray suit against credit rating agencies [O'Brien/LNL, Krauss/American Thinker] Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller denounces report [IowaPolitics.com]
- “The Tort of Internet Mobbing Is Perfect For Suing The Internet” [Popehat]
- Canada faces challenge to hate speech law [Arthur Bright, Citizen Media Law] Do not put a frog down Her Majesty’s back at the county fair [Lowering the Bar]
- “Markopolos eyes a fortune from BNY whistleblowing” [Felix Salmon] “Bounty hunters in Korea” and closer to home [Alex Tabarrok] “Developments in Whistleblower Laws: Advantage Whistleblower” [Larry Wood & Richard William Diaz, Federalist Society "Engage"]
- As third party liability for crime anecdotes go, the case of Bonilla v. Motel 6 is on the lurid side [Point of Law]
- Prospect of cyberwar: official U.S. response is commando lawyering [Stewart Baker, Foreign Policy]
- Why it’s hard to stimulate manufacturing through product liability reform in one state [Rick Esenberg]
Tagged as:
attorneys general,
free speech in Canada,
Iowa,
Manhattan Institute,
Ohio,
product liability,
third party liability for crime,
whistleblowers
Imagine how puzzling it must be to be an employee of the city of Montreal: the city “has set up a whistleblower hotline to encourage you to expose wrongdoings by colleagues but has also created an explicit policy forbidding you to blow the whistle and is threatening severe penalties if you do.” [Montreal Gazette]
Tagged as:
Canada,
whistleblowers
- “Family sues for $25 million over death of Virginia Beach homeless man” [Pilot Online]
- New paper proposes voucherizing indigent criminal defense [Stephen Schulhofer and David Friedman, Cato Institute, more]
- “Why the Employee Free Choice Act Has, and Should, Fail” [Richard Epstein, SSRN]
- Free-market lawprofs file brief in class action arbitration case, Concepcion v. AT&T [PoL]
- Enactment of Dodd-Frank law results in flood of whistleblower-suit leads for plaintiff’s bar [Corporate Counsel, ABA Journal] “Will Whistle-Blowing Be Millions Well Spent?” [Perlis/Chais, Forbes]
- Sept. 28 in House: “Congressional Hearing on the Problems of Overcriminalization” [NACDL]
- Abusive-litigation angle seen in NYC mosque controversy [Painter, Legal Ethics Forum]
- Snark alert: Mr. Soros does something nice for Human Rights, and Human Rights does something nice for him [Stoll]
Tagged as:
arbitration,
card check,
class actions,
Employee Free Choice Act,
international human rights,
NYC,
whistleblowers
- “Why Do Employers Use FICO Scores?” Maybe one reason is that government places off limits so many of the other ways they might evaluate job applicants [McArdle, Coyote]
- Michael Fumento on $671 million verdict against nursing home in California [Forbes]
- Ted Frank is looking for a pro bono economics expert [CCAF]
- Lester Brickman, “Anatomy of an Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph of Temptation Over Ethics” [Phillips Petroleum explosion; SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum]
- Ice cream trucks return to Niskayuna, N.Y. 34 years after a panic-occasioned ban [Free-Range Kids, Mangu-Ward]
- Galloping trend toward “whistleblower” enactments: this time lawmakers are rushing one on oil workers [Smith/ShopFloor, more, earlier]
- Class action lawsuit filed against Trident Xtra Care gum, marketed as good for one’s teeth [Hoffman/ConcurOp; compare Russell Jackson on Wrigley's settlement of a class action over Eclipse chewing gum]
- EEOC officials urge employers to ban foul language and swearing in workplace [seven years ago at Overlawyered]
Tagged as:
class actions,
Lester Brickman,
nursing homes,
settlement,
whistleblowers,
workplace
A new report in the WSJ quotes a retiring NHTSA official as saying higher-ups are refusing to release the results of the agency’s staff investigation into charges of Toyota sudden acceleration, because those findings are not unfavorable enough toward the automaker. I’ve got more detail in a new post at Cato at Liberty, and Ted covers the story at PoL.
Meanwhile, proponents of a sweeping expansion of federal auto safety law, one that would thrust Washington much more deeply into the operations of the automotive industry, are really in a hurry — a quick, urgent, must-do-now hurry — to pass it, even though many of its provisions have not had much airing in public debate. An editorial today in the New York Times — a newspaper that almost comically underplayed the revelations earlier this month about the NHTSA probe’s pro-Toyota results — flatly asserts that the Japanese automaker’s vehicles suffer “persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration,” and demands that the sweeping new legislation “be passed into law without delay.” It’s almost as if they are afraid of what might happen if lawmakers pause to take a closer look.
Among the many other things the new legislation would do is greatly enhance the legal leverage of automaker or dealership employees who adopt the mantle of “whistleblowers”. But if the new revelations from a responsible career employee of NHTSA are ignored, we will have another confirmation that some types of whistleblowing are more welcome in America’s governing class than others. (& welcome Coyote, Gabriel Malor, Death by 1000 Papercuts, Mark Hemingway/D.C. Examiner (”the indispensable Overlawyered blog”), Allen McDuffee/Think Tanked readers).
Tagged as:
accolades,
NHTSA,
Toyota,
whistleblowers
During the long series of scandals that brought down former tort potentate Richard (”Dickie”) Scruggs, of tobacco-asbestos-Katrina-mass tort fame, no blogger achieved the status of “must” reading more consistently than David Rossmiller of Insurance Coverage Blog. Now Alan Lange of Mississippi site YallPolitics (and co-author of Kings of Tort, a book on the scandal) has posted a massive document dump of emails between the Scruggs camp and its public relations agency, as made public in later litigation (see also). It shows the principals:
* boasting of their success in manipulating major media outlets to inflict bad publicity on the targets of Scruggs’s suits;
* plotting ways of striking back against critics — in particular, Rossmiller — with tactics including going after him with legal process, as well as creating fake commenters and whole blogs to sow doubt about his reporting;
* wondering who they might pay to secure “Whistleblower of the Year” awards, or something similar, for their clients;
* apparently oblivious, just days before the fact, as to how the ceiling was going to cave in on them because of Judge Henry Lackey’s willingness to go to law enforcement to report a bribe attempt from the Scruggs camp.
The whole set of documents, along with Rossmiller’s summary and reaction, really must be seen to be believed. It will easily provide hours of eye-opening reading, both for those who followed the Scruggs affair in particular, and for everyone interested in how ambitious lawyers manipulate press coverage to their advantage — and how they can seek to use the law against their blogger critics. (& welcome readers from Forbes.com and Victoria Pynchon’s “On the Docket” column there).
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
Dickie Scruggs,
Katrina,
legal blogs,
State Farm,
whistleblowers
It seems the Senate-passed financial reform bill includes whistleblower bounties and other legal goodies. [Whistleblower Law Blog] On tax informants, see our post of Wednesday.
Bonus: Amy Kolz at American Lawyer (”Serial whistle-blower Joseph Piacentile makes millions helping the government uncover fraud. That’s how the False Claims Act is supposed to work. Or is it?”). And David Walk at Drug and Device Law assails as “dumb,” credulous, and based upon a biased sample a New England Journal of Medicine feature on whistleblowing in the pharmaceutical industry:
The New England Journal of Medicine bills itself as “the world’s most influential medical journal,” and it unquestionably publishes groundbreaking articles about medicine. But all too often in recent years the NEJM has strayed from what it knows — medicine – into what it doesn’t – law and public policy, particularly tort policy. No longer content with editorials encouraging litigation against anyone but doctors, the NEJM now publishes public policy advocacy pieces dressed up as scientific studies, with the implicit suggestion that those studies should get the benefit of the NEJM’s good name in public policy debates.
Tagged as:
pharmaceuticals,
qui tam,
securities litigation,
whistleblowers
It’s attractive enough to have lured private equity money:
Three years ago, the I.R.S. began offering bigger rewards — 15 percent to 30 percent of whatever money the government recovered — in a move that has turbocharged the agency’s whistle-blower program. …
Among the lawyers, hedge funds and investors who may provide the financing for class-action lawsuits and whistle-blower cases against government contractors, the reinvigorated I.R.S. program has attracted attention.
[N.Y. Times]
Tagged as:
qui tam,
taxes,
whistleblowers
Two Winkler County nurses filed accusations of problematic practices against Doctor Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. before the Texas Medical Board in April; a prosecutor who was friends with the doctor has now charged the two with a felony, “misuse of official information.” Local and national nursing associations have protested and established a legal defense fund. (Kevin Sack, “Nurse to Stand Trial for Reporting Doctor”, New York Times, Feb. 6; KFDA (undated)). It’s possible that the nurses made false accusations maliciously, but that seems something that could be handled through civil suits and then only after the Texas Medical Board adjudicated the complaints. Such overreaching by doctors could backfire, as it would give credence to the proposition that medical malpractice lawsuits are a necessary check to incompetent doctors.
Tagged as:
crime and punishment,
medical malpractice,
prosecutorial abuse,
Texas,
whistleblowers
