Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2006

The Return of the Coffee Tort

Where’s Ted Frank when you need him?

A bad experience at Starbucks turned into big bucks — 301,000 of them — for a Manhattan lawyer who got a painful hotfoot when a steaming cup of coffee toppled onto her at the java palace.

“I jumped back and looked down,” Alice Griffin, 42, testified. “My foot was steaming, and the puddle was steaming.”

The jury’s April verdict was upheld yesterday by [New York] Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman — even though the jurist said she was “inclined to agree” the $301,000 that Griffin won at trial “was excessive.”

Gee, absolute deference by a judge. Go figure. I guess remittitur (let alone JNOV) would be “judicial activism.”

In any event, I’m far too humble to blog about hot coffee lawsuits at this site.

Maybe Ted will make a cameo today… [Editor’s note: And he did.]

On Bloomberg’s “Beneficence”

Walter beat me to the punch regarding the announcement that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to donate contribute up to $125 million to anti-smoking efforts.

Why the strikethrough?

His effort will include cash for programs that help smokers quit and educate children to prevent them from starting; funds to push for smoking bans and higher tobacco taxes in other cities, states and countries; and money for a system to track global tobacco use and the effectiveness of anti-smoking efforts.

Excuse me, but that’s not “charitable giving.” That’s lobbying.

And I would hope that this portion of Bloomberg’s “benevolence” is therefore appropriately regulated, registered, disclosed, limited, taxed, McCain-Feingolded and generally treated the same way as anyone else’s attempt to buy a law under our current schizophrenic political funding system.

My previous thoughts on campaign finance reform here. A related thread on the abuse of tax exemption by politically active religious leaders and institutions here.

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“The Lieberman Purge”

Off-topic, I add to the punditocracy’s surfeit of blather on the Connecticut Senate election at National Review Online.

One thing I didn’t mention in the article that is on topic for this site is that Lieberman is one of the few prominent federal Democrats still in office that is generally willing to stand up to the trial bar. If Lamont does supplant Lieberman, the trial-lawyer takeover of the Democratic party (commented on a year ago by Walter) will be all but complete.

Update: Walter reminds me of his 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed on Lieberman’s record on liability reform.

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Bloomberg’s anti-smoking philanthropy

Gotham’s nurse-mayor has donated $125 million from his personal fortune “to track smoking across the globe and to push for the same kind of smoking bans and cigarette tax hikes that the mayor has implemented in New York since taking office in 2002”. New York Sun reporter Jill Gardiner quotes me in reaction (“Bloomberg Gives $125 Million Gift To Fight Smoking”, Aug. 16).

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On “Malpractice Plaintiff” Databases

As consumers, we increasingly have ever more access to information about the enterprises that we may wish to do business with. In the beginning there was the Better Business Bureau, then Zagat Surveys, then BizRate, then online reviews from Amazon, Expedia, iTunes, etc.

In the medical field, patients had indicia such as board certifications and hospital privileges when choosing physicians. There are also services that collect data on malpractice lawsuits — you probably don’t want to retain a doctor (or a lawyer, for that matter) who has lost too many malpractice cases.

Fair enough. But what happens when the professionals turn the tables?

In the latest effort to enable doctors to shun patients who sue, an offshore company has launched an Internet site that lists the names of plaintiffs who have filed medical malpractice cases in Florida and their attorneys.

The site, LitiPages.com, encourages doctors to consider avoiding patients who are listed in the database, and it strongly encourages plaintiffs who have lost their cases at trial to turn around and sue their plaintiffs attorney.

Note: The urls “http://www.LitiPages.com” and “http://LitiPages.com” seem to be inactive. Go figure. I guess we now have to treat this post as a hypothetical. Walter blogged about a similar service long ago.

Let’s clearly delineate the two separate concerns here. I will leave to others (Walter?) the task of explaining why a lost lawsuit is not automatically, or even presumptively, a malpractice claim against your attorney.

Read On…

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“Teen Sues Mother for ID of Father”

“In a case that family law experts fear could set a dangerous precedent, a Michigan teenager is suing his mother to learn the identity of his father. Family law attorneys say the issue of compelling a mother to reveal the identity of the biological father is a new area of law. And depending on how the Michigan judge rules in the case, they say, courts nationally could see a new flood of lawsuits of children suing their parents.” (Tresa Baldas, National Law Journal, Aug. 11).

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From “De Novo” to “Do Nothing”

No sooner had I put the finishing touches on my subway search post, in which I analogized the Second Circuit’s abdication of responsibility in that case to the recent gay marriage defeats in New York and Washington States, than I came across this excellent CQWeekly editorial:

[T]he New York and Washington courts both said that legislators could have believed that children fare better in families with both a mother and a father as role models. Neither court had research to prove the point: There is none. Instead, as the New York court said in the main opinion, the supposed advantage was a “common sense premise” supported by “intuition and experience.”

Whatever quibbles one might raise about each of the points, both courts were guilty of an overriding lapse of logic. The issue in both cases was not whether marriage for opposite-sex couples is a good thing, but whether legislators had some reason — other than ignorance or prejudice — to deny those benefits to same-sex couples.

Precisely.

Read On…

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“Express Yourself” — But Not in Duesseldorf

One of the points that I often emphasize at my own blog is that there simply is no First Amendment in Europe.

Just ask Madonna:

Prosecutors plan to keep an eye on Madonna’s weekend concert in Duesseldorf to see if the pop diva repeats the mock crucifixion scene that has drawn fire from religious leaders.

Johannes Mocken, a spokesman for prosecutors in Duesseldorf, said Tuesday that a repeat of that scene during Sunday’s concert could be construed as insulting religious beliefs.
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Mocken said authorities would rely on media reports rather than sending observers to the concert and that the show might be covered by laws protecting artistic freedoms.

Read that again: “might be covered.” So not only is there no blanket freedom of expression, but what partial protections do exist are so vague that even the prosecutors don’t know how they apply to whom under what circumstances.

Read On…

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Circuit Court Upholds Worthless Subway Searches

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I have a soft spot for the Fourth Amendment. Unfortunately, it seems that judges, up to and including the Supreme Court, have made it a hobby to poke ever more holes into the Amendment’s proscription against warrantless, suspicionless searches, purportedly in the name of “reasonableness.”

Most of the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment has been proximately caused by the War on Drugs, particularly regarding the ever-increasing “automobile exception” to the warrant requirement. But we also have a whole panoply of other exceptions: border searches, administrative searches, consent searches, health & safety inspections, exigent circumstances…

…oh, and the War on Terror:

A federal appeals court Friday upheld the constitutionality of the city’s random police inspections of subway riders’ bags.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a challenge by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which argued that searches were ineffective and an unprecedented intrusion into privacy.

The appeals court ruled that a lower court judge properly concluded the program put in place in July 2005 after the deadly London subway bombings was a reasonably effective deterrent and that the intrusion on riders’ privacy was minimal.

If you’ve never ridden the New York City subway*, then it might be difficult for you to appreciate just how wrong that last sentence is. The search program has, literally, zero deterrent effect. None.

Read On…

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Indians Sue, Yet Again, to Ban “Redskins” Name

The only thing worse than a frivolous lawsuit is a frivolous repeat of a frivolous lawsuit:

A group of Native Americans filed a new legal challenge yesterday to trademarks for the name and logo of the Washington Redskins, saying the team’s name is a racial slur that should be changed.

A petition filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by six Native Americans represents a second chance for Indians to challenge the football franchise’s name. The team prevailed in an earlier fight when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the plaintiffs waited too long under trademark law to object. This time, the complaint was filed with a new set of plaintiffs.
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“The term ‘redskin’ was and is a pejorative, derogatory, denigrating, offensive, scandalous, contemptuous, disreputable, disparaging and racist designation for a Native American person,” the complaint says.

Whatever thesaurus the plaintiffs are using, I want one. I’m surprised the complaint didn’t add “just plain icky.”

Read On…

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