Trademark and copyright battles, it turns out, have helped shape the course of development of comic-book superheroes, including their names, histories and even the array of powers they wield. Jon Rowe (Jun. 12) sorts out some of the complications.
Archive for June, 2005
Payne Stewart air crash verdict
After golfer Payne Stewart and several others were killed in a 1999 plane crash, Stewart’s survivors sued a list of defendants starting with the aircraft’s owner and its operator; perhaps the deepest pocket sued was that of Canadian-owned Learjet, which stood its ground, took the case to trial and was entirely vindicated by a jury last week. (“Jurors clear Learjet in Payne Stewart crash”, AP/FoxSports, Jun. 10; “Payne Stewart family sue over air crash”, GolfToday (U.K.), undated 2000). DropZone has a comment thread which includes a discussion of the practice of suing multiple defendants after air crashes (and then working up theories against them individually as needed) and also includes some jaded comment about Instance #785,423 of It Not Being About The Money:
Tracey Stewart, her teenage son and college-aged daughter and Fraley’s widow, Dixie Fraley Keller, said through a statement that “their hope in this effort was to make air travel safer …”
“They brought this litigation not because of money in any capacity; it was always about responsibility,” said attorney Gregory McNeill.
The suit had demanded $200 million.
Sen. Grassley and the hospital litigators
It’s not exactly a secret around Washington that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Ia.) has been a good friend to the corps of plaintiff’s lawyers who employ the False Claims Act (the so-called “whistleblower” law) to sue universities, defense firms and other federal contractors. But is he also doing favors for the team of lawyers headed by Dickie Scruggs suing many of the nation’s nonprofit hospitals over alleged failure to meet charitable obligations? The American Spectator’s anonymous “The Prowler” assembles some of the evidence (“Grassley, Lott & Scruggs”, Jun. 14).
Proximate cause, void in N.J.?
David Bernstein and commenters (Jun. 10) discuss a 1999 case (Canesi v. Wilson) in which the New Jersey Supreme Court held that a woman could sue over the “wrongful birth” of a baby with birth defects because the doctor didn’t warn her that a drug he prescribed during the pregnancy was suspected of causing such defects, even though she was unable to offer any expert testimony indicating that the drug had actually caused the defects (and scientific evidence was accumulating that it had not in fact done so).
In Britain, less fearful M.D.s
David Asman, reflecting on his wife’s experience in British and American hospitals, notices some patterns (“There’s No Place Like Home”, American Spectator/Wall Street Journal, Jun. 8):
There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation. For example, as soon as my wife was ambulatory, I was determined to get her out of the hospital as much as possible….
Now try leaving a hospital as an inpatient in the U.S. In fact, we did try and were frustrated at every step. You’d have better luck breaking out of prison. Forms, permission slips and guards at the gate all conspire to keep you in bounds. It was clear that what prevented us from getting out was the pressing fear on everyone’s part of getting sued. Anything happens on the outside and folks naturally sue the hospital for not doing their job as the patient’s nanny.
Why are the Brits so less concerned about being sued? I can only guess that Britain’s practice of forcing losers in civil cases to pay for court costs has lessened the number of lawsuits, and thus the paranoia about lawsuits from which American medical services suffer….
Campaigns, blogs and free speech
Blawg Review #10
…is up at InternetCases.com. Coverage includes our reparations posts.
Michael Jackson verdict
Hamptons Indian land claim
It’s one thing when heavily lawyered-up Indian tribes bid to eject the residents of, say, Syracuse or Binghamton. But this is the Hamptons! It’s, like, a real news story now (Ann Givens and Andrew Metz, “Pricey bay tops tribal wish list”, Newsday, Jun. 12; Bruce Lambert, “Shinnecock Tribe Plans Suit, Claiming Land in Hamptons”, New York Times, Jun. 12).
Feds’ tobacco-suit shift, cont’d
L.A. Times has some good coverage of the Justice Department’s much-criticized decision last week (see Jun. 10) to scale back the damages it’s asking in its wretched Clinton-legacy tobacco suit:
Law professor Turley [Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, not suspected of overmuch sympathy with the views of this page] said he believed “legal realism and political realism” were the main reasons for the 11th-hour retreat.
The Justice Department had “seemed to be in institutional denial,” Turley said of the consequences of the appeals court defeat [in February, before a D.C. Circuit panel]. “By reducing the (requested) damages it brings the case more in line with that ruling.”
Noting that the case has lasted six years at huge cost to the government, Turley said Justice officials are “very sensitive about the ‘resume factor’ in this case.” The change “lays the groundwork for the spin that they labeled the industry as racketeers and they got the damages they asked for,” he said.
Tobacco lawyers have ridiculed the new proposal. Ted Wells, a lawyer for Philip Morris USA, said it was a $280 billion case, then a $130 billion case, now a $10 billion case and “eventually it will be a zero-dollar case.”
(Myron Levin, “Civil case against tobacco is turning to ash”, Los Angeles Times/Detroit News, Jun. 11).