Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2006

Disney World ride fatality

Writes Prof. Childs (Jun. 15) of the lawsuit over the death of a four-year-old hours after taking part in the Mission:Space ride:

Setting aside the allegation of a failure to respond properly (about which I know nothing), the lawsuit presents a fairly fundamental question in amusement litigation: when a ride does exactly what it is supposed to do, and when that action is well-disclosed to riders and is safe for the vast majority of people, who, if anyone, is responsible when that action causes foreseeable injuries to people with unknown preexisting conditions?…

As for a warnings claim, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ride with such thorough signage.

Filed under: ,

Update: Tony Twist $15M verdict upheld

We covered the case—where a hockey player complained that a comic-book character had the same name—on July 13, 2004. Todd MacFarlane still has the chance for discretionary review by the Missouri and U.S. Supreme Courts, though the former has already ruled against him once. Eugene Volokh will be sure to have insightful commentary on the First Amendment implications; here’s his earlier take, predicting a “good chance” of Supreme Court review and reversal. Beyond the First Amendment implications, the damages are ludicrous.

Filed under: , ,

Another McDonald’s coffee urban legend

The McDonald’s coffee case came up in a comment-board discussion of the MySpace suit on the WSJ Law Blog, and, as is common thanks to a tremendously successful propaganda campaign by the plaintiffs’ bar, a law student popped up to “debunk” the story. He justified the ludicrous award by arguing that the coffee was so hot to “melt the plaintiff’s pantyhose to her skin.” Well, that is rather hot coffee, if true, since the melting point of nylon is hundreds of degrees higher than the boiling point for coffee, so I would have no problem holding McDonald’s liable if they were selling coffee at a temperature where it ceases to be liquid or solid.

Of course, it’s not true that the coffee was so hot to melt pantyhose (and Stella Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants), but one looks forward to Jonathan Turley decrying this urban legend that’s distorting the debate over legal reform.

Filed under: ,

By reader acclaim: MySpace sued over alleged assault by date

On MySpace, a 19-year-old Texas youth approached a 14-year-old girl; his profile claimed that he was a high school senior on the football team. She says that following a series of emails and phone calls, she went out with him and their evening on the town culminated in his sexually assaulting her, for which Rupert Murdoch should pay $30 million as owner of the social networking site. Still to come: suits against shopping malls, ice cream shops and music venues for providing environments in which older teens can approach younger ones and sweet-talk them into eventual dangerous situations. (Claire Osborn, “Teen, mom sue MySpace.com for $30 million”, Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 20). Prof. Childs has more, here and here, as do Joanne Jacobs, KipEsquire and Shakespeare’s Sister.

Filed under: , , ,

Devastated by cheating spouse

So devastated, in fact, that even years after her husband Gary walked out on her for another woman, Sherry Leskun was too transfixed by the injustice to tackle the job market: a British Columbia court ruled that she was “bitter to the point of obsession with his misconduct and in consequence has been unable to make a new life.” Reason enough to maintain support payments at a level set to compensate for her lack of earnings? The Supreme Court of Canada is expected to decide soon. (Bruce Cheadle, “Supreme Court set to rule on whether a cheating spouse is debilitating”, CP/Maclean’s, Jun. 20).

Filed under: ,

Michigan drug liability law

Trial lawyers in Michigan continue to agitate for repeal of the law, which, uniquely among the 50 states, affords manufacturers a defense in product liability actions for pharmaceuticals marketed in compliance with FDA regulation. At the Manhattan Institute (with which I’m associated), a new report from the Trial Lawyers Inc. project defends the law (“The Move to Reverse Michigan’s Model Reforms”, June). Also see Point of Law, Apr. 11.

Filed under: ,

On Hellholes

Madison County plaintiffs’ lawyer Evan Schaeffer writes, partially tongue in cheek:

Meanwhile, I’m working on a propaganda campaign of my own. I’m going to take ATRA’s term and turn it on its head. Rather than “judicial hellholes,” I’ll be focusing on those jurisdictions in which the playing field is tilted in favor of big business. I’m calling them “consumer hellholes.” What do you think?

Unfortunately for Evan, there will never be a proper analogue; in these hypothetical “hellholes”, even if they exist, consumers that prefer a court system unfairly biased towards plaintiffs can completely avoid the effects of reform by moving to such a jurisdiction. If tort reform really makes people worse off, then people will leave the states with reform for the states where the plaintiffs’ bar controls one of the three branches. In contrast, businesses have very little power to avoid being sued in judicial hellholes; and consumers who don’t live in the judicial hellhole have little ability to escape the detrimental effects that the hellhole has in crafting nationwide liability. The $500 “tort tax” on automobiles that covers the cost of the liability system has to be paid whereever a car is sold because the manufacturer can’t bar the buyer from taking the car into the hellhole forum.

What bothers the ATLA-ites is that consumers have shown that they prefer tort reform, and the benefits tort reform brings: judicial hellholes are consumer hellholes, because we all bear the costs of runaway litigation and its effect on the economy.

Filed under: , ,

Philip Morris gets (some of) its money back

AP reports that the Illinois Supreme Court has released $2.15 billion of the gigantic, and almost bankrupting, appeal bond (Oct. 11, 2004; Apr. 2003) Philip Morris posted for the right to successfully appeal an absurd $10.1 billion Madison County judgment. (Dec. 15, 2005 and links therein.) Another $6 billion note awaits the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the certiorari appeal.

Filed under: , , ,

Update: Mirfasihi II

We covered the Seventh Circuit’s refusal to countenance in Mirfasihi v. Fleet Mortgage a collusive class-action settlement that benefited the attorneys but not the class members in January 2004; after remand, the parties went through the motions of jumping through hoops and returned with an economically identical settlement. The Seventh Circuit was not amused.

Interesting, and all too typical, statistic: out of the $2 million settlement pot, there were only $276,000 in claims filed by 190,000 class members, who apparently didn’t feel especially injured by Fleet Mortgage’s alleged wrongful practices of selling them products through telemarketing. (I wouldn’t oppose the death penalty for telemarketing, but that’s just me.)

Filed under:

“Big law firm picks up Little Guy in sweep for defendants”

In March 2004, the Kansas City law firm of Walters Bender Strohbehn & Vaughan filed a class action against 63 defendants for supposedly overcharging for mortgage fees. The firm, however, confused Wall Street banking behemoth Salomon Brothers with developer Berton Solomon’s “Solomon Brothers” St. Louis commercial real-estate company and sued the latter. (This was a double mistake since Salomon Brothers hasn’t existed since 1997, and is now part of Citibank after at least two name changes and two mergers.) Unfortunately, the plaintiffs refused to immediately drop Solomon from the suit, and he ran up (a remarkably cheap) $4000+ in legal expenses in the seventeen months of legal proceedings before he was finally dropped, $4000 that Walters Bender is refusing to pay. They’re not very happy about being sued in small claims court, and are fighting that suit, even though it will cost them more to do so than to pay Solomon’s bills. (Bill McClellan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jun. 18).

Without a settlement, Solomon is unlikely to recoup his costs in the absence of showing malice, a required element in Missouri law; lawyers are immune from the consequences of mere negligence, because, they’ll be happy to explain, such liability might deter productive activity like scattershot lawsuits. If only the same protections applied to, say, practicing medicine or providing jobs or producing goods.

Filed under: , ,