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).
Archive for 2003
Award for bad journalism?
The asbestos litigation compromise now pending in Congress may be a good bill or it may be a bad one, but there’s no excuse for the L.A. Times’s absurdly slanted coverage of it, argues Hugh Hewitt today (HughHewitt.com, Jul. 14; David G. Savage, “Asbestos Bill Could Be Windfall for Business”, Los Angeles Times, Jul. 14)(via Southern California Law Blog).
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.
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)
Update: lawyer sues client in souvenir-ball wrangle
Now San Francisco Giants fan Alex Popov’s lawyer is suing him for $473,500 in legal fees. Popov and another fan disputed who caught the record-setting ball, and a judge ordered them to split the auction proceeds, which came in less than expected at $450,000 (see Jul. 1). (“Fan who caught Bonds’ record HR sued”, AP/Sporting News, Jul. 8.)
Update: “Harvard Takes Back Hornstine Admission Offer”
“Harvard has revoked its admission of Blair Hornstine, the prospective member of the Class of 2007 who made national headlines when she sued her school system to ensure she would be her high school?s sole valedictorian.” (Elizabeth W. Green & J. Hale Russell, Harvard Crimson, Jul. 11)(see Jun. 30, May 13, May 3-4).
Motley’s Sept. 11 crusade
Profile of bigshot tort lawyer Ron (“U.S. foreign policy, c’est moi”) Motley, who after ultra-successful runs in asbestos and tobacco and a far less successful run against lead paint manufacturers has embarked on a crusade to sue various rich Saudi Arabians over Sept. 11 because they allegedly had paid off bin Laden over the years, whether from sympathy, fear or other motives. The State Department has repeatedly complained that the suit (with its demands for compulsory discovery of foreign nationals, etc.) threatens to upset the delicate management of U.S.-Saudi relations, but who (aside from the U.S. Constitution) says the executive branch should get to run foreign relations anyway? Quotes our editor (Tony Bartelme, “The King of Torts vs. al-Quaida [sic] Inc., Charleston Post & Courier, Jun. 22). Newsiest nugget to us: according to the article, Motley has hired full time to work on the case a well-connected Washington lawyer named Harry Huge; this is pretty rich once you consider something not spelled out in the article, which is that Huge served on most if not all of the arbitration panels that awarded the Ness Motley firm vast fortunes in the state tobacco litigation. What could be more ingenuous and conflict-of-interest-free than for Motley to turn around and give him a job?
“Links don’t work”
A reader writes: “On the newly designed Overlawyered.com, the links no longer work, at least they don’t every time I’ve tried to use them from my computer on the House of Representatives network. I don’t know if this is a problem on our end or yours, but I thought I might flag the issue, as not being able to link to cited articles unfortunately makes Overlawyered.com much less useful to folks on Capitol Hill.”
Any other readers or sites report this problem? We recently viewed the site with a very old browser (under Windows 95) and while Movable Type didn’t display optimally, the links did work. Any technically savvy readers know what the problem may be here, and whether there’s an easy fix for it on our end? (See update Jul. 14).