Cathy Young, not surprisingly, has much to say (Mar. 13) about the lawsuit seeking a right for prospective dads to opt out of fatherhood the way pregnant women can opt out of motherhood. Mickey Kaus (Mar. 17) points out various problems with the idea.
Archive for 2006
Site disruption
Yesterday we got an Instalanche (thank you, Glenn!) the traffic from which unfortunately had the effect of crashing our server. The site was down for much of the day, as was email service to overlawyered.com and walterolson.com (if you sent us mail and we didn’t respond, please resend). While the front page was restored within a few hours, most of the rest of the site remained down until this morning. Thanks for your patience.
P.S. Welcome readers from the second Instalanche, which we’re happy to say our servers have succeeded in accommodating. Our new slogan, courtesy of Glenn: Overlawyered, the site “you should probably be visiting regularly anyway”.
“Man Hits His Own Car Then Sues Himself”
By reader acclaim, from California: “When a dump truck backed into Curtis Gokey’s car, he decided to sue the city for damages. Only thing is, he was the one driving the dump truck. But that minor detail didn’t stop Gokey, a Lodi city employee, from filing a $3,600 claim for the December accident, even after admitting the crash was his fault.” When the city rejected the claim, Gokey and his wife Rhonda refiled it under her name. (AP/Lodi News/ABCNews.com, Mar. 16).
Tactical use of workplace lawsuits
Don’t cooperate with us on one issue, and we’ll arrange for you to get sued on other issues:
More often, unions undertake confrontational campaigns to squeeze employers to agree to card checks [i.e., recognizing the union as sole bargaining representative of workers on the basis of majority sign-up, rather than a representation election]. To pressure Cintas, the giant uniform and laundry company, Unite Here has encouraged workers to bring lawsuits alleging pay violations and racial and sexual discrimination. Cintas has not given in, insisting that secret-ballot elections are fairer.
(Steven Greenhouse, “Employers Sharply Criticize Shift in Unionizing Method to Cards From Elections”, New York Times, Mar. 11).
“Serial” litigant told to pay $270K
If you drive your SUV into someone’s picture window you’ll be expected to pay for the damage, and — even in this country, at least in extreme circumstances — the same can hold true if you drive your lawsuits into them: “A federal judge has ruled that a Rochester School District teacher — who has been labeled a ‘serial’ litigant by district lawyers — must pay $270,000 in legal fees to the district and the Rochester Teachers Association. City school teacher Donald Murphy, who has been embroiled with the district in litigation for more than a decade, filed multiple frivolous actions claiming his civil rights were violated, U.S. District Judge David Larimer ruled.” (Gary Craig, “Teacher must pay $270,000”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Mar. 14).
Update: Judge tosses Ileto v. Glock
Huge, though not at this point surprising, victory for the firearms industry: “A new ban on lawsuits against gun makers caused a Los Angeles judge to toss out negligence claims the family of a slain mail carrier filed against Glock and a gun distributor”. An earlier decision by the Ninth Circuit to let Ileto v. Glock go forward had been considered one of the most important victories for the gun-control-through-litigation campaign, but the U.S. Congress had other ideas. (Jennifer English, “Judge tosses gun suit”, City News Service/San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Mar. 11). For our earlier coverage, see Nov. 20, Nov. 26 and Dec. 2, 2003. (& welcome Instapundit readers).
Revealing someone’s criminal record = privacy invasion?
Eugene Volokh on the background of a case now pending in the Ninth Circuit:
Unfortunately, for several decades, California courts did indeed take the view that accurately discussing people’s crimes from a decade or more ago could lead to legal liability. Such speech, a discussion in a 1971 California Supreme Court said, serves no “public purpose” and is not “of legitimate public interest”; there is no “reason whatsoever” for it, when (in the court’s view) the plaintiff has been “rehabilitated” and has “paid his debt to society.”
In 2004, the state’s high court recognized that as regards the media and its reporting, this stance had become inconsistent with modern views of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the court left open the possibility that non-media defendants might still face damage suits for privacy invasion over such disclosures, and exactly that possibility has now eventuated in a case by the name of Readylink Healthcare v. Lynch. (Mar. 15)
Update: assigning air carrier poor safety grade not defamation
Following up on our item of last May 12: the Eighth Circuit federal court of appeals ruled last year that the safety rating group ARGUS (Aviation Research Group) had not defamed Aviation Charter Inc. in 2001 by assigning the charter operator its lowest safety rating, “DNQ” or “Does Not Qualify”. Aviation Charter Inc. operated the plane whose crash a year later, in 2002, killed Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and seven others. The Eighth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the suit, saying ARGUS’s comparative ratings involved subjective interpretations of data and were not “sufficiently factual to be susceptible of being proved true or false”. So for now, at least, it seems that if you want to rate air carriers’ safety, go ahead and rate away. (“Court decisions: Air carrier’s poor safety rating isn’t defamatory”, National Law Journal, Aug. 1, 2005, not online).
Regulation vs. sous vide
We’re here from the government, and since we haven’t yet considered how to regulate your new cooking technique, we’re not going to let you use it (Dana Bowen, “With City Inspectors in Kitchen, Chefs Can’t Cook in a Vacuum”, New York Times, Mar. 9; Virginia Postrel, Mar. 10; Dana Bowen, “Chefs Wait for Rules on Sous Vide, as Experts Question Some Uses”, New York Times, Mar. 15)(& No Quarters).
“Bankruptcy Rewrite Predicted to Bring a Flood of Appeals”
Bad drafting = much uncertainty as to what the law requires. Uncertainty as to what the law requires = grounds for lots of costly litigation. Congratulations, Congress (Justin Scheck, The Recorder/Law.com, Feb. 8).