“Former Circuit Judge John Whitfield set a trial date on a lawsuit filed by Gulf Coast attorney Paul Minor before the defendant was served with the lawsuit, the defense attorney testified Wednesday.” (Jimmie E. Gates, “Former judge’s action questioned in judicial bribery trial”, Jackson Clarion Ledger, Mar. 8). More: Mar. 8, etc.
Archive for 2007
U.K. roundup
Because you were clamoring for one:
- Police warn householders of three convicted burglars but say they cannot describe them for fear of violating their human rights [Telegraph]
- Eight year old Connor McCreaddie is very fat indeed, so North Tyneside officials are considering taking him from his mum into protective custody [Gillespie, Reason “Hit and Run”]
- Sounds promising but haven’t seen: author Simon Carr has published compendium of legal horror stories entitled “Sour Gripes” [Telegraph]
- As in the U.S., prospect of discrimination suits has deterred efforts to keep unhealthily thin fashion models off the catwalk [Guardian]
- Ban on fox hunting not only is widely evaded but in fact has led to renaissance of the sport [Telegraph]
- “An incompetent expert [witness] can cause more misery than a psychotic gang member.” [Slapper/Times]
- Vacationing cop busted for Swiss Army knife [Daily Mail]
- In hospitals, perhaps a surfeit of privacy [Huddersfield Daily Examiner via KevinMD] and sensitivity [Daily Mail via ditto]
- Man obsessed by sex after motorcycling injury expected to get multi-million-pound award [Telegraph]
- Children’s sack race scrapped for lack of liability insurance [Telegraph]; industrialist says inordinate playground risk-aversion is bad omen for economy [ditto]
- Convicted armed robber “given legal aid to sue over a telephone message that reveals that his phone calls come from prison” [Telegraph]
- Familiar ring? Controversy mounting over “ambulance chasing”, allegations of sharp practices as no-fee-no-win injury work makes fortunes for some well placed solicitors [Times here, here, here, here]
The Richard Mraz case: $55M in Los Angeles Dodge Dakota trial
In April 2004, 38 year-old Richard Mraz got out of his employer’s 1992 Dodge Dakota while it was still running. He didn’t set the parking brake, and the vehicle started moving when it shifted itself from park into reverse. Mraz tried to jump into the moving vehicle, and suffered fatal head injuries for his trouble.
Chrysler admitted the vehicle had a defect that caused the automatic transmission to shift from park to reverse in rare circumstances. Thing is, they admitted it when they sent twelve separate recall notices to the Dakota owner, Mraz’s employer, who ignored them all. But, Mraz’s lawyers said, Chrysler spent time in internal discussions deciding whether to recall the vehicle before actually doing so, so they should be punished, pointing to an internal memo debating the question as a “smoking gun.”
A Los Angeles County jury agreed, finding $5.2 million in compensatory damages for the longshoreman’s death, and attributed 75% to DaimlerChrysler (10% for Mraz’s multiple safety errors, and 15% for his employers’ ignoring the recall notices), and issuing $50 million in punitive damages, all to Chrysler. Most press accounts failed to mention the recall notices or Mraz’s negligence, just regurgitating the plaintiff’s lawyer’s account. (David Shepardson, “DCX loses suit in Dodge owner’s death”, Detroit News, Mar. 8). More on California auto product liability cases.
Interestingly, at least one law firm has already purchased the Google search term “Richard Mraz.”
Obama finally pays his traffic tickets
Because it’s not as if traffic law counts as real law, right? (Howie Carr, “Hillary circling as Obama searches for parking space”, Boston Herald, Mar. 8).
P.S. in response to comments: I think it’s a cultural fact worth recording that the editor of the Harvard Law Review felt no obligation at the time to settle up on a stack of unpaid parking tickets. It’s not wholly unrelated to the phenomenon of attorney general nominees’ not having bothered to tell the IRS about their household employees, or of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ meeting for regular poker nights reputedly in noncompliance with local law: namely, it suggests that sonorous Law Day maxims about the need for each of us to respect the law in its full majesty have surprisingly little traction even in (especially in?) elite law circles. That’s a fact worth knowing, if true.
That Obama is running for president now is the least interesting bit of the story (and indeed is only of significance in that it provided the impetus for him to pay up). Far from being received as an unforgivable blot on his character, I suspect the story will (like his smoking habit) serve to humanize the senator for many voters, perhaps especially among those who, like many readers of this site, have a somewhat rebellious attitude toward law to begin with.
P.P.S. There have apparently been some malfunctions with comments on this entry — if you entered a comment and it didn’t show up within a reasonable time, you might want to email and let us know.
March 8 roundup
- Why the tort reform movement is really a civil justice reform movement. [Point of Law; University of Dayton Law Review]
- What to do about private securities class actions. [Wallison @ AEI]
- Law firm sued when witness trips, dies, in courtroom accident. [Lattman]
- Nifong responds to criticism of his handling of Duke Lacrosse case; KC Johnson not impressed.
- Big corporations have bogus consumer fraud lawsuits, too: NutraSweet maker sues Splenda maker over “Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar.” [Legal Intelligencer]
- The effect of a malpractice suit on a physician. [Levy via Kevin MD]
- “Are our institutions or is our sense of justice stronger because of [the Libby] prosecution?” [Fred Thompson; WaPo oped; also many posts by Frum]
Warning: “Contains nuts”
Apropos of Walter’s post about silly warning labels, such as “contains nuts” on a can of nuts, I figure we ought to slap the same warning label on the state legislature here in New Jersey.
For instance, the New Jersey Law Journal reports that a state Senate committee unanimously approved a bill this week that would require warning labels on… internet dating sites. The bill first requires that the site inform members “in bold, capital letters in at least 12-point type” whether or not it has conducted a criminal background check on its members. And if it does conduct criminal background checks, it then has to disclose that there’s no real point to conducting criminal background checks:
[The service] shall state that criminal background screenings are not foolproof; that they may give members a false sense of security; that they are not a perfect safety solution; that criminals may circumvent even the most sophisticated search technology; that not all criminal records are public in all states and not all databases are up to date; that only publicly available convictions are included in the screening; and that screenings do not cover other types of convictions or arrests or any convictions from foreign countries.
(How many people do you think are going to read through that verbal thicket of disclaimers?) But wait, that’s not all. The Senate had some extra free time, so it piled on the list of warning labels required:
“You got your lawsuit in my peanut butter.” “You got your peanut butter in my lawsuit.”
On February 14, 2007, the Food & Drug Administration issued a recall for certain brands of peanut butter manufactured by ConAgra. On March 1, 2007, the FDA announced it had identified the salmonella at the manufacturing plant. Enter the lawyers.
On Wednesday, a Louisville, Kentucky man who claimed he got sick after eating the peanut butter, filed suit against ConAgra. (The story featured a disclaimer I don’t believe I’ve seen elsewhere in news coverage of litigation: “Claims made in filing a lawsuit give only one side of the case.”) I certainly didn’t think that this was the first suit filed against ConAgra, but I naively thought it was one of the first. Ha! (In my defense, I wasn’t blogging at Overlawyered at the time, and I hadn’t eaten the peanut butter, so I didn’t have any particular personal or professional reason to notice the announcements of the lawsuits.)
The first suits — at least three of them — appear to have been filed on February 16, 2007, just two days after the FDA’s announcement. Each of those three involved individual plaintiffs; in case you were wondering, the first (of many) class action lawsuits seems to have waited until February 20, 2007. The huge four-day gap between the filing of the individual suits and the class-action suits is explained by the three-day Presidents Day holiday; Feb. 20 was actually the next business day.
Is there some sort of trial lawyer contest like the old Name That Tune game show? “I can file that suit in 72 hours.” “I can file that suit in 48 hours.” “Okay, file that suit!” There’s certainly no legal reason the suits need to be filed that fast; there was no approaching statute of limitations, for instance.
“Wrongful birth” in Boston
We’ve covered a number of cases over the years in which parents sue physicians and others over the “wrongful birth” of perfectly healthy children, demanding, as part of the claimed damages, the cost of raising the youngsters to adulthood: May 9, 2000 (Phoenix), Jun. 8, 2000 (Revere, Mass., outside Boston), Apr. 9, 2006 (Scotland), and Nov. 1, 2006 (Germany). Many such cases arise from failed sterilizations or other efforts at birth control, but a new suit by Jennifer Raper of Boston against Planned Parenthood and two doctors claims that an abortion went awry. “The [Massachusetts] high court ruled in 1990 that parents can sue physicians for child-rearing expenses, but limited those claims to cases in which children require extraordinary expenses because of medical problems, medical malpractice lawyer Andrew C. Meyer Jr. said. Raper’s suit has no mentions of medical problems involving her now 2-year-old daughter.” (“Boston woman sues for child-rearing costs after failed abortion”, AP/Boston Globe, Mar. 7; Jonathan Saltzman, “Suit seeks compensation for botched abortion”, Boston Globe, Mar. 7). More: “One day Jennifer Raper’s daughter will punch her mother’s name into Google and discover that she was the result of ‘a failed abortion.'” (Taranto)
“Scruggs offered immunity in bribery trial”
Lands on his feet every time, it seems: “The U.S. Justice Department has offered immunity from prosecution to attorney Richard ‘Dickie’ Scruggs in exchange for his testimony in a judicial bribery trial involving his former colleague, Paul Minor.” (Biloxi Sun-Herald, Mar. 7). We’ve extensively followed the trial and now retrial of Minor, a prominent Mississippi attorney, and several judges.
Cocktail napkin not to be used for navigation
I’ve got a short piece in The American, the recently launched American Enterprise Institute magazine, about the problem of overzealous warning labels, taking as my point of departure Bob Dorigo Jones’s new book Remove Child Before Folding. Alert readers will notice that the piece is based on my Times Online column of a few weeks ago, adapted with about three paragraphs’ worth of new and added material, mostly on how liability law helps worsen the problem. (Walter Olson, “Warning: This Column Might Give You Something to Think About”, The American, Mar. 6).
For more coverage of Remove Child Before Folding, see Jan. 6, Jan. 26, etc. Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie, incidentally, reviewed the book in the New York Post here.