Archive for July, 2003

“Erin Brockovich’s Junk Science”

“Her new suit against oil companies and Beverly Hills has little scientific grounding” and the one that originally established her fame, over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, Calif., wasn’t much better, argues columnist Leon Jaroff at Time magazine (Jul. 11). We looked into the Brockovich saga a few years ago and came to very similar conclusions (Reason magazine, Oct. 2000); see also numerous posts in this space.

Car-lease liability crisis continues in N.Y., R.I.

Following heavy lobbying by trial lawyers, the lower houses of the New York and Rhode Island legislatures have refused to act to limit auto leasing companies’ currently unlimited “vicarious liability” for their lessees’ crashes, thus apparently ensuring that Ford, Honda and other major automakers will continue fleeing from the two states. We covered the controversy in a Jun. 9 op-ed as well as in earlier posts. New coverage: Ed Garsten, “Firms halt N.Y. vehicle leases”, Detroit News, Jul. 6; Matt Smith, “Auto leasing companies fleeing state”, Ottaway/Middletown Times-Herald Record, Jul. 2; Jeremy Boyer, “Dealers steer way past loss of leasing”, Albany Times-Union, Jul. 3; “Bill Limiting Accident Liability Appears Doomed”, TurnTo10.com (WJAR-TV Providence), Jun. 30 (R.I.). Update Aug. 3: Reform not doomed in R.I. after all, major automakers agree to stay after governor signs one-year fix limiting liability to $300K, leaving N.Y. as only state with unlimited liability.

Race, poverty and tort awards

Who says academics are skittish about pursuing potentially explosive research topics? In “Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards: Evidence from Three Data Sets,” in the Journal of Legal Studies, Eric Helland of Claremont McKenna and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University analyze data on jury awards by county. Their conclusion: “An increase in the black county poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise the average personal injury tort award by 3 to 10 percent. An increase in the Hispanic county-poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise awards by as much as 7 percent although this effect is less well estimated. These effects imply that forum shopping for high-poverty minority counties could raise awards by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Average awards fall with increases in white (non-black, non-Hispanic) poverty rates in two of our datasets, thus making these findings even more surprising.” (JLS table of contents; Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy got there first).

U.K.: “Trio arrested over seaweed theft”

“Three men spent seven hours in police cells after being arrested for ‘stealing’ seaweed from a Sussex beach to feed their pet tortoises.” Two police cars and an officer on motorcycle swooped down on friends Simon Braisby, Tony Sims and Deon Marshall who “were gathering sea kale on Eastbourne beach for Mr Sims’ five tortoises. … The men were arrested, handcuffed and put in the back of different police cars, then locked up in separate cells while Mr Braisby’s home was searched. After six hours in custody the men were interviewed and eventually released without charge.” Authorities told reporters the seaweed was considered protected flora. (Brighton and Hove Argus, week ending Jun. 25, first roundup item; “Arrests after ‘rare’ plant hunt”, BBC, Jun. 24) (via Dr. Weevil who got it from Electric Venom; check out the latter’s comment section for news of a German anthill-protection law).

“Links don’t work”, update

A half dozen readers have now written in responding to our query on this problem (see Jul. 11), and we’re pretty sure we understand it now. It seems to afflict users of older browsers that cannot handle newer implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) such as those used in Movable Type.

In fact, we replicated the problem ourselves by calling up the site on an ancient Netscape 4.79 Navigator browser. Typically, in this kind of failure, the links on the main (left) column are unusable while the links on the right (blogroll, etc.) column will work as usual. Browsers of this vintage will have problems displaying many sites of recent design; for example CorpLawBlog shows the same links-don’t-work problem.

What to do? We begin with reader-side fixes: 1) upgrade to a more recent browser (we assume this is the best advice for most readers); 2) Some noncurrent browser versions (such as Opera’s) have a toggle-view switch by which users can make the links workable, though possibly at the cost of making the display look even more jumbled. 3) At Tantek ?elik’s site there is a “Toggle CSS style sheets” button which you can drag to your toolbar or favorites section, achieving the same effect (sounds promising, but we haven’t tried and can make no guarantees). 4) Another reader writes: “It’s not a major problem for me; I work around it by looking for the entry in the ‘Recent Entries’ section, where the links work.”

Then there are fixes that could be installed on our side. One brute-force method, which we don’t care for, would be to stop displaying in columns altogether, relegating the blogroll and other permanent links to the bottom beneath all the recent blog posts. Another reader suggests that we install the tantek.com “Toggle CSS style sheets” button ourselves in a visible location, which we assume would increase our page size and thus load time. A third reader suggests that we tinker with our own CSS file as follows: “Either delete ‘position:relative;’ or comment it out (replace with ‘/*position:relative;*/’).” But we’re wary of tinkering with the code unless we understand all the effects of doing so.

Right now, we’re inclined to recommend that readers try one of the reader-side methods outlined above if they have this problem, which will have the incidental benefit of making many other sites more usable as well. We’ll try to keep an open mind about the possible fixes to be done on our side, though.

Read On…

Another guest blogger tomorrow; a neglected anniversary

Our experiments with guest-blogging resume tomorrow (Tuesday). This time our editor is not going on vacation; there’ll just be two of us posting instead of one. Come back tomorrow when we unveil the identity of the mysterious stranger.

What with our vacation over the July 4 holiday, we neglected to make note of another milestone for Overlawyered.com, namely our fourth anniversary (we launched on July 1, 1999). We’ve had millions of visitors over those four years, with traffic currently running at around 3000 visitors and 8000 pages-served per weekday (with a big fall-off on weekends). Those curious about how this stacks up against other sites’ popularity may consult N.Z. Bear’s weblog traffic rankings, which cover only those sites using SiteMeter counters (we are not among them). The site’s redesign a month ago does not seem to have affected our traffic volume one way or the other.

Update: intimidating tort reformers

Madison County, Ill. class action lawyer Bradley Lakin has withdrawn his subpoenas aimed at four organizations that had spoken out against lawsuit abuse in the Madison county courts: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Civil Justice League, American Tort Reform Association and Illinois Chamber of Commerce (see Jun. 9). Lisa Rickard, president of the Chamber?s Institute for Legal Reform, called the subpoenas “an illegitimate attempt to silence the critics of lawsuit abuse.” The ICJL, which has filed a sanctions motion against Lakin, has its own press release as well as links. (Further update Jul. 26: sanctions motion dropped)