- Update to Maine Board of Tourism intimidate-a-blogger-by-litigation lawsuit: case dismissed, government official fired. [Maine Web Report; AP/Boston Globe]
- Senter blocks State Farm Katrina class settlement. [Point of Law; Rossmiller; Woullard v. State Farm]
- Senator Schumer (D-NY) calls for liability reform to save New York economy; Governor Spitzer shows up at press conference. [Point of Law]
- Canadian $10M settlement for Syrian torture: that’s what we get for trusting Syria. [Frum]
- Remember that case in Snohomish where the celebratory cannon blew up at the football game? And the plaintiffs’ lawyer complained that the injured student was getting threatened by the townspeople over his lawsuit? Turns out the student (allegedly) told a youth minister that he deliberately overloaded the cannon for “a bigger bang,” and now is (allegedly) harassing the minister. And the original threats had nothing to do with football spirit. Everett Herald]
- Regulations drive restaurateurs from New York to friendlier (if armpittier) climes. [New York via Taylor]
- Suit: suicide fault of auto dealership sponsoring “Hands on a Hardbody” contest. [AP/ Austin American-Statesman]
- Nanny statism meets failure to contemplate ex ante vs. ex post thinking in UK: new Manchester police policy is to refuse to chase helmetless bicycle thieves. [Telegraph (h/t F.R.)](earlier)
- Private eyes and lawyers among the transactions costs of rent regulation in New York. [NYT]
- The war on science doesn’t just come from the right. [Adler @ Volokh; Sandefur @ Positive Liberty]
- Mrs. Alito is very cool [WaPo via Bashman]
Archive for 2007
For their own good dept.
In the U.K., childhood obesity has now developed into a grounds for social service agencies to take kids away from their parents. (Sarah-Kate Templeton, “‘Fat police’ put children on abuse list”, Times Online, Jan. 28).
“Everyone’s a Lawyer”
Our very first embedded YouTube video. It originally appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Hollow Men” (via Nicole Black):
“Telecommuters Are Reaching Out to Sue Their Employers”
A possibly more accurate headline on this National Law Journal article from last month would have been, “Class-Action Lawyers Are Reaching Out to Sue Employers on Behalf of Telecommuters”. And for many of the putative beneficiaries,the consequences are apt to be unpleasant: some employers will curtail their use of telecommuters, while others will insist on legally defensive paperwork and work rules which add dreariness to the job, such as those suggested by a lawyer with one leading employment-defense firm:
Companies can minimize the risk of legal disputes with work-at-home employees by inking formal agreements about the work and hours, said Mark Batten, a Boston lawyer for New York-based Proskauer Rose.
Batten, a defense attorney, also recommends timesheets, a written policy banning overtime without prior approval and rules requiring employees to monitor and record work-related activities such [as] logging on or off a computer. …
“Just allowing employees to work at home without an understanding about how much time is actually needed for work will get the employer in trouble,” Batten said.
(cross-posted from Point of Law).
Penguin “black interest” lawsuit, cont’d
Our post of Wednesday on an author’s complaint that Penguin Group steered her work into “African-American interest” marketing channels, although she would have preferred for it to be marketed as a general interest book, has spurred a somewhat heated discussion in the reader comments section. It also drew an informative comment in email from Charles Petit, author of the publishing-law blog Scrivener’s Error, which we’ve appended to the original post.
Not about the money files: Steve Yerrid’s shallow forgiveness
If you ever want to see a trial lawyer manipulate the press, and the press unskeptically eat it up, you could do worse than to watch the recent performance of Steve Yerrid (Oct. 5-6) in a recent Tampa trial.
The facts convey an undeniably terrible accident. Fifty-year-old high-school-dropout Denzil Blake was cleaning an Isuzu Rodeo at Town ‘N Country Car Wash when he accidentally hit the gearshift, sending the car (which should not have been running) out of neutral. Blake didn’t know how to drive (Florida law allows a person without a driver’s license to operate a vehicle on private property, so there was nothing illegal about allowing unlicensed drivers to move cars in a carwash), panicked, and accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake, sending the car speeding into 43-year-old Brenda Lee Brown, striking her just after she pushed her young son’s stroller to safety; she died of her injuries two days later. Blake was not criminally charged.
Slow typist sues law school
According to Adrian Zachariasewycz, a/k/a Adrian Zack, of Woodlyn, Pa., some exams given at the University of Michigan Law School reward fast typists with a chance at higher scores. So he’ll see school administrators in court, in a pro se lawsuit that also names as a defendant the Wilmington, Del. law firm of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, where his associate’s gig didn’t work out. He’s suing two of the law school’s career counselors individually for alleged bad advice, too. (WSJ law blog, Jan. 26; complaint in PDF format). More: Feb. 5.
“Homicide conspiracy” indictments in Tennessee
“Not about the money” files: Dickie Scruggs edition
“It was never about the money for me, this litigation,” said Dickie Scruggs, who stands to collect between $26 million and $46 million from a settlement accomplished by the use of the state attorney general, Jim Hood, to extort State Farm with the threat of criminal proceedings for daring to enforce their flood exclusion clauses in their contracts. [Lattman] Many many posts on the subject at Point of Law.
Lowering fees — and infuriating colleagues?
“I recently ran a television advertisement offering to represent car accident victims in exchange for a 15 percent contingency fee, which is more than 50 percent less than the traditional 33 percent contingent fee. …One of the goals of my advertising campaign is to reform the tort system in the marketplace, without the need for legislation. … Making a lower contingency fee the centerpiece of an ad campaign, albeit just for car accident victims, educates consumers about the standard fee and how a lower contingency fee can benefit them, by putting more of the net recovery in their pocket.” New Haven, Ct. attorney Joshua A. Winnick sure isn’t angling for popularity among his peers (“Putting a Price on Plaintiffs Work”, Connecticut Law Tribune, Dec. 28). More: David Giacalone.