Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for December, 2004

The Graphing Calculator Story

It’s heart-warming enough to be a Christmas tale:

Greg and I still had to sneak into the building. The people in charge of the PowerPC project, upon which [Apple’s] future depended, couldn’t get us badges without a purchase order. They couldn’t get a purchase order without a signed contract. They couldn’t get a contract without approval from Legal, and if Legal heard the truth, we’d be escorted out of the building.

Ron Avitzur tells the Graphing Calculator Story: engineers conspire to evade the lawyers and suits and create killer app software (via McIrvin); related Slashdot thread.

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Thanks for the haiku

David Giacalone (Dec. 20) dedicates to us this one by Kobayashi Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue:

a new year begins–
nonsense
piled on nonsense

Thanks also to readers of this site for countless kind words and acts over the past year, and — if it’s not at this point too politicized a thing to say — happy holidays to you all.

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Suing Santa Claus

“‘When I started doing this years ago, I never even thought about liability,’ Nevada [Victor Nevada, 61, a professional Santa Claus in Calgary, Canada] says. ‘But Santas have a pretty good chance of getting sued. You got the obvious things: You drop a child on its head. Then there’s Santa saying the wrong thing?. I had a Santa working for me a couple years ago; he had a girl on his knee, and he commented, “You have nice eyes and nice hair.” She claimed sexual harassment.'” (J.R. Moehringer, “Ho! Ho! Is More Like Uh-Oh”, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23).

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“One-Question Interview: Tom Perrotta”

From this August:

Yankee Pot Roast: Which do you prefer (to munch on, not to adorn book covers): Pepperidge Farm Goldfish or chocolate-chip cookies?

Tom Perrotta: I prefer chocolate chip cookies. They don’t have as many lawyers.

Background detail: Malcolm Jones, “Fiction: New Snack Attack”, Newsweek, May 24; before-and-after book covers; Perrotta’s Little Children.

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Center for Justice & Democracy’s Zany “Zany Immunity Law Awards”

Many farmers use anhydrous ammonia as fertilizer, because it provides vital nitrogen nutrients to the soil. The combustible material is produced in Louisiana, and then shipped to the Midwest on barges or through pipelines, and then stored on tanks on farms. However, ammonia is also useful for making illegal methamphetamines, and thefts are a regular problem. (KOMU-TV, “Law Officers Fight Ammonia Thefts”, May 19). If a thief injures himself tampering with an ammonia tank, should he be able to sue the farmer for the injury? Three states, Kansas, Missouri, and Wyoming, say no, and provide immunity for those who store, handle, or own ammonia equipment from suit by thieves. Legislatures are considering the issue in other midwestern states.

The misnamed anti-tort reform Center for Justice & Democracy has noticed the success of the ATRA’s judicial hellhole campaign (Dec. 15; Dec. 3, 2003), and decided to respond with its own report, the “Zany Immunity Law Awards”, intended to single out “special interests” who opportunistically subvert the legislative system to get improper immunity from liability. The cover shows a legislator receiving a statuette, cash in his pocket, and roses with a ribbon labeled “Sleaziest Legislation.”

Exposing sleazy special-interest immunity laws is a noble sentiment–but it’s a sure sign of how few and far between such laws are that CJD singles out the sensible anhydrous ammonia immunity laws for its top ten list. The CJD incorrectly blames the law on a supposed “anhydrous ammonia business lobby”; in fact, it’s groups like the Michigan Farm Bureau that push for laws like Michigan S.B. 786. Indeed, the only group to oppose such laws? Trial lawyers’ lobbying groups. See also Kelly Lenz, “Fertilizer law to help farmers”, Farm and Auction, Jun. 12, 2002.

How ridiculous are the CJD awards? One of the top ten “zany immunity laws” refers to “immunity” granted to placebo manufacturers and distributors. Except the immunity in question isn’t immunity–it’s an exception to a criminal statute prohibiting the sale of fake drugs! E.g., Fla. Stat. 817.564(6)(a). (This is the only appearance of the word “placebo” in the Florida Code. It’s telling that CJD omits the statutory cite in its footnotes.) Perhaps this law is zany, but it’s hardly an example of a special interest group buying sleazy legislation that damages consumers. A subject of a research test who is injured by adulterated placebos (has this ever happened?) will still have a cause of action.

Read On…

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Watch what you say about lawyers, cont’d

Madison County: Gordon Maag, the trial-lawyer-backed candidate who last month was defeated in a race for the Illinois Supreme Court in what is said to have been the most expensive judicial race in American history, has filed a $100 million defamation suit against an arm of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce for saying bad things about him during the recent campaign. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Edwardsville Intelligencer/Southern Illinoisan/Illinois Leader). Jim Copland comments at Point Of Law. For two other widely noted efforts by Madison County lawyers to silence or intimidate their critics, see Nov. 4 and Nov. 30, 1999 and Feb. 29, 2000 (class action lawyers sue Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan for making fun of them) and Jun. 9, Jul. 12, Jul. 26, 2003 (dragging national tort reform groups to court). For efforts to suppress the airing of ads affecting the Maag-Karmeier race, see Oct. 27. For other watch-what-you-say-about-lawyers cases, see Mar. 16 and Nov. 15, 2004, Nov. 30, 2003, and earlier posts; and Point of Law, Oct. 25 and Dec. 22, 2004.

Read On…

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Canadian court: co. to blame for unionist’s bomb

A Canadian employer has now been held partly to blame for a murderous onslaught by one of its adversaries in a labor dispute:

A court has awarded $10.7 million in damages to the widows of nine men killed by a bomb during a labour dispute at Yellowknife’s Giant Mine, blaming the mining company and the union almost as much as the man who laid the explosives….

Justice Arthur Lutz ruled that none of the involved parties did enough to control the relentless and escalating violence on the picket line that summer. He assigned almost equal blame to the union, Royal Oak Mines and Roger Warren, who was convicted of the murders. Lutz also assigned a share of the damages to Pinkerton’s security, two union activists and the N.W.T. government….

Royal Oak had argued that it couldn’t have predicted the deaths, but Lutz scorned the reasoning. … The judge said violence and threats were rampant during the 18-month strike, including physical injuries, property damage and sabotage. Strikers staked out the houses of replacement workers and stole explosives from the mine, setting off one blast that cut off power to a hospital.

(“Giant Mine widows awarded $10.7M”, CBC, Dec. 16).

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“Get your million dollars” Vioxx site, cont’d

Law.com’s The Recorder reports that some in the plaintiff’s bar are understandably upset that Google’s ad program placed their firms’ ads on the lurid site discussed in this space Nov. 15 and Nov. 18. “The ‘million dollars’ site ‘is patently sleazy, but the question is whether it violates the ethics rules,’ said Richard Zitrin, an ethics specialist and partner with Zitrin & Mastromonaco who advises plaintiff firms. ‘I think it’s unethical. And I’m a free-speechist on this.'” Lawyers with Lieff Cabraser and Schneider & Wallace also deemed the site unethical. Others, as in earlier rounds of the brouhaha, complained that too much attention was being paid to the page, including a mention by Sen. Orrin Hatch at a Senate hearing. (Justin Scheck, “Vioxx Web Site Has Law Firms Outraged”, The Recorder, Nov. 30). And in a dispatch a week later, the same reporter found that law-firm ads had been removed from the site and replaced with public service ads (“Controversial Web Site Drops Lawyer Ads”, Dec. 6).

More: David Giacalone, guestblogging at RiskProf, has news of more developments, including a substantial rewrite of the site (Dec. 26).

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Inmate to be freed after 25 years

“The Ohio Parole Board has decided a Cleveland-area man has spent the last 25 years behind bars for a crime he may not have committed and voted unanimously for his release.” Gary Reece was convicted of rape in 1980 on the accusation of a neighbor despite his denials and a lack of any evidence that he had ever been in the accuser’s apartment. In the years since then much evidence has accumulated casting doubt on the credibility of his accuser, Kimberly Croft. In fact, “on one television news program, [Croft] claimed that Gary Reece actually killed her during the attack in question, but that ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ brought her back to life,'” according to a brief filed with the parole board by law students working with the Ohio Innocence Project. (Roy Wood, “UC law students convince board: Man is innocent”, Cincinnati Post, Dec. 18; “Imprisoned on a shaky story”, (editorial), Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 5).

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