Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for December, 2003

Newsweek and Weekly Standard cover stories

Newsweek has a new cover story (“Civil Wars”, Dec. 15) on “Lawsuit Hell”, with sidebars on what litigation is doing to schools, medicine, and municipal governance (Chicago), with balance from Sen. John Edwards. The good news to report is that it’s a superior package, no surprise since one of the lead writers is Stuart Taylor Jr. (writing with Evan Thomas). The less good news is that although many of the colorful cases cited will seem, um, familiar to our readers (see Nov. 26), this website wound up not getting mentioned in the final draft. (Maybe someone will recommend us in a letter to the editor). NBC/MSNBC is doing related broadcast features all week, and the authors will be taking part in a live Web discussion on Thursday 12/11 at 11 a.m. EST.

And it’s a busy week on the newsstands, since our friend Bill Tucker has a cover story in the new (Dec. 15) Weekly Standard entitled “In Defense (sort of) of Trial Lawyers”. We disagree with quite a bit of it, as you can imagine, but it does give us a couple of nice mentions, which counts for a lot, no?

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S. 17200 horror stories

Tim Sandefur collects them, too: “[I]n another currently pending case, a trial court hearing a class action lawsuit with class members from across the nation — but suing in California — held that it could simply ignore the choice of law clauses of the contracts from 48 other states, because ?17200 is more broadly written than any other ‘consumer protection’ law, and therefore it violated public policy to require litigants from other states to litigate there even though the contracts they signed required them to do so.” (Dec. 3). See also Oct. 26; Nov. 24; Steven Greenhut, “How California’s Consumer Laws Legalize Extortion”, Foundation for Economic Education, May.

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More on California antispam law

Reason Online (Dec. 8) has now published a longer version of my piece on California’s very bad new anti-spam law, which will spell courtroom trouble for legitimate marketers nationwide unless the federal CAN-SPAM bill, which would override it, is enacted instead. The new version goes into detail about some of the precedents that make the California law scary, including the litigation that has arisen under Utah’s one-year-old law giving individual recipients a right to sue over spam, and the record of junk-fax class actions filed pursuant to a federal 1991 law; these discussions had to be left out of last week’s Wall Street Journal version of the piece (see Dec. 3) for space reasons.

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Main Street’s financial spies

Among its other provisions, the USA Patriot Act enacted into law sweeping authorization for the federal government to require “financial institutions” — which, it turns out, can include auto dealers, jewelry stores and other retailers — to file confidential law enforcement reports when customers display buying patterns that might suggest them to be in possession of illicit funds. (The businesses are also forbidden from telling their customers that they have informed on them to the feds.) “Know your customer” rules, rationalized as part of the ever-widening fight against money-laundering, had previously been highly controversial — see our Mar. 1999 piece in Reason — but after Sept. 11 were dusted off and enacted with an antiterrorism rationale. Recently (Dec. 1) Michael Isikoff reported in Newsweek that in two-thirds of federal law enforcement searches using the confidential reports, there has been no evident connection with terrorism at all. John Berlau has the details, in Reason Online (“Dangerous Deputies”, Dec. 5; “Show Us Your Money”, Nov.).

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New letters to the editor

We’ve posted another batch of letters to the editor, including one from David Giacalone commenting on the recent case in which a Washington state jury hit the state with $8.8 million in damages for not preventing an assault by youths in foster care; a note from an Ontario barrister pointing out that both Canada and Great Britain maintain specialized commercial courts, a trend that is spreading in this country as well; letters on Fox v. Franken and on malpractice insurers’ investments; and, last but certainly not least, a humdinger of a letter from someone who is really, really upset that anyone would have the temerity to write the sorts of things we publish in this space (“Are you even a lawyer?”, he demands to know).

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“Angels in America” reviewed

Almost entirely off topic: HBO’s publicity department and many others have been heralding the arrival of a TV-film production of Tony Kushner’s extravagantly praised two-part drama, Angels in America. We reviewed the play back in 1994, and found Part I to be reasonably entertaining, but were less than enthralled with Part II. (“Winged Defeat”, National Review, January 24, 1994, reprinted at Independent Gay Forum). Update: Tim Hulsey (My Stupid Dog) has more on Kushner’s dramaturgy (Dec. 9)

Tough on mushroom crime

“Stephen Fletcher II tried to grow some psychedelic mushrooms in his Lawrence apartment. Tremain V. Scott shot and killed a man at close range during an armed confrontation, then, according to an eyewitness, took the victim’s gun and shot him with it as he lay on the ground. An autopsy showed the victim had been shot 18 times.

“Both Fletcher and Scott are in their early 20s and have little or no criminal-conviction record, their attorneys say. So who’s facing the stiffer sentence? Fletcher, by double.” (Eric Weslander, “Mushrooms v. murder: Sentences in Kansas don’t all fit the crime”, Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, Nov. 30) (via Free-Market.net)

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Enron examiner: $100 million plus immunity, please

“The $100 million man of Enron’s bankruptcy, court-appointed examiner Neal Batson, is seeking to cut his ties with the case after 18 months. Having produced 4,000 pages of reports outlining the tangled financial partnerships Enron used to mask its dwindling fiscal health, Batson has asked a bankruptcy judge for immunity from any and all subpoenas, permission to shred the documents he has collected and complete protection from any liability.” (Eric Berger, “Examiner has had enough of Enron”, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 4; Anthony Lin, “Enron Examiner Billed Estate for $100 Million”, New York Law Journal, Dec. 5)(see Nov. 26, Jun. 29; more)(& see Jul. 23, 2004).

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