In an interview, Kip Viscusi reports that the efficiency of Superfund of money spent per case of cancer eliminated: $7 billion. Imagine if a fraction of Superfund money was instead spent on curing cancer. (via Tabarrok)
Archive for 2007
Imus in the Courtroom, Update
In April, Don Imus infamously called the Rutgers Unversity women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” After a week of controversy, criticism, and grovelling apologies, he was fired from his job by CBS radio. Imus threatened a lawsuit, and yesterday he settled with CBS. That should have been the end of the story. But of course, if it were, then how would the poor trial lawyers feed their families? Now that Imus’s settlement is final, he has money to burn. So, just a few hours after the settlement was announced, the first Rutgers player rushed to the courthouse to file suit against Imus and the other deep pockets:
“Imus lost four months of employment and gained $20 million and a new platform. But what about these young women? How does Imus’ big payday affect their self-esteem?” said Vaughn’s lawyer Richard Ancowitz.
The suit, which also named CBS, MSNBC and Imus sidekick Bernard McGuirk, did not ask for a dollar amount. There was no immediate comment from the defendants.
“The kind of sexist and bigoted attack these young women and Kia in particular suffered demands more than lip service,” Ancowitz said. “She wants the court to recognize that Imus slandered her.”
I haven’t seen a copy of the complaint yet, but it’s hard to imagine that it is anything other than utterly frivolous. Imus’s comments might have been nasty and uncalled for, but calling someone a “nappy headed ho” is not defamatory unless it is interpreted as an actual accusation that the person is a prostitute. No reasonable person could interpret it that way. That’s without even getting to the issue of lack of actual damages.
Update: AP provides the money quote from the complaint, and unless there’s a lot more they failed to mention, it’s exactly as frivolous as I expected:
The Vaughn suit claims that the comments were made in the context of a news or sports report and therefore Imus had certain standards to abide by but ignored them. The suit reprints the script from the “Imus in the Morning” show on which the comments were made.
“The … false, defamatory, sexually denigrating and slanderous statements and comments against the women athletes of said basketball team were heard, believed and understood by millions of listeners … as factual pronouncements concerning the character, chastity and reputation of the plaintiff,” the lawsuit says.
I’d tell you what I think of a lawyer that actually tries to make such a claim with a straight face, but I’m afraid he’d sue me for challenging his character, chastity, and reputation.
Pearson appeals
Are you really surprised? The D.C. Court of Appeals’ average time for appeal is 575 days, implying a wait until 2009 for a decision, but one would hope a simple case like this could be disposed of faster.
Spitzer now regulating airlines
Evan Sparks on the governor’s latest attack on federalism.
The political answer for Democrats?
According to the liberal bloggers at New Year’s Party, a component of any Democratic health-care plan should be tort reform, an issue to “take away from the GOP.” This, of course, assumes that the Democrats are more than a political vehicle for trial lawyers.
“The Politics of Bananas”
Alvaro Vargos Llosa writes on the $25 million fine paid by Chiquita for funding the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia:
Ultimately, this is a story about double standards—those applied by Colombia’s institutions, which encouraged the AUC for many years by sanctifying the very rules of the game they now decry, and those applied by U.S. authorities, who did not hold Colombia to the same legal standards to which they held their own country.
Chemerinsky on the Supreme Court
Erwin Chemerinsky writes a not-especially honest review of the most recent Supreme Court term. He falsely characterizes the Roberts Court as “a solid conservative voting majority,” notwithstanding the numerous decisions where conservatives were not in the majority, or where the majority decision fell far short of conservative ideals. He characterizes the divided Philip Morris v. Williams decision as “conservative,” even though it was Breyer and Souter in the majority and Scalia and Thomas in the dissent. He complains that conservatives “defer to the government in the face of most claims of individual rights,” but gives no mention of last term’s Wisconsin Right to Life v. Federal Election Commission, where five conservative justices reasserted first amendment rights for political speech over the dissent of Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg, and Stevens, who wanted to preserve the government ban on speech. We’ll ignore that Chemerinsky takes the typical liberal tactic of characterizing legal rules as favoring either businesses or consumers/employees—we all know darn well that many “pro-business” legal rules favor consumers and employees as a group ex ante.
Chemerinsky is entitled to his left-wing opinion, though one might justifiably complain that he’s not entitled to his own facts. But what I certainly object to is the fact that this is being distributed and printed by the State Bar of California in the California Bar Journal, and advertised at the top of the State Bar of California website, since I am required to pay the California Bar hundreds of dollars a year, and have no way of getting a refund for the fishwrap mailed to me every month. This sort of partisan activity strikes me as a highly unethical use of my dues, and I hope someone in California is doing something about it.
(Earlier: Coleman; Bainbridge.)
More Prop 65 follies
Hoover Institution’s Henry I. Miller:
Moreover, because Prop 65 is enforced entirely through litigation, it has created a system of legalized extortion. To initiate a lawsuit, a plaintiff need only show that a listed chemical is present in a consumer product and that the defendant business “knowingly” exposes Californians to that product without posting the warnings. Prior to filing the suit, the plaintiff must send the defendant a notice describing the exposure; 60 days thereafter, the plaintiff may sue. That notice may be the first inkling a retailer has that his products are exposing consumers to listed chemicals.
The latest chemical to run afoul of Prop 65 is di-isodecyl phthalate, or DIDP, an important and extremely useful additive used to soften hard vinyl plastic and found in dozens of common items, including shower curtains. It is also used to insulate the wires in the walls of homes across America. Safely used for more than 50 years, it is one of the most thoroughly tested products in the world and has been closely examined by numerous regulatory agencies throughout the United States and Europe. Through all that evaluation, no credible scientific review has found DIDP to be dangerous in normal use.
However, those favorable conclusions didn’t faze regulators at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), who recently decided that DIDP may pose a risk of developmental harm in humans and, therefore, should be listed under Prop 65.
But the mere presence of something does not imply that it’s dangerous; one needs to know the dose, length of exposure, how the body disposes of it, and so forth. Prop 65 standards only look at the potential for risk as criteria for listing. Using that logic, since people regularly suffocate from a chunk of meat blocking their windpipe, maybe steaks should be listed too. (One hates to give the regulators ideas, however.)
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t files
Over at Point of Law, guest-blogger Deborah LaFetra discusses the case of Castaneda v. Olsher, where a owner of a mobile home park was sued by a victim of gang-warfare crossfire for permitting gang members to rent space on the lot. Of course, as Pacific Legal Foundation argued (and the court held), any alternative would run afoul of California anti-discrimination law, as well as the impossibility of obtaining information protected by California privacy law.
Government pays for prosecutions
In two cases in the last few months, federal judges have ordered the government to pay the defense costs of failed health care fraud prosecutions.
In Nevada, Judge Robert C. Jones awarded about $300,000, about 30% of the defense costs, to an Idaho doctor, finding that the losing case was frivolous because, the American Medical News reports, the government’s experts contradicted other experts in the case. (There is presumably more to the story than this, as the same is true in nearly every criminal trial involving expert testimony.) Half the claims were dismissed before trial, and the others were adjudged not guilty by a jury. The government has appealed. (Amy Lynn Sorrel, “Judge rules criminal fraud case against Idaho doctor is frivolous”, Aug. 20) (h/t P.N.).
And, in Texas, Judge Lynn Hughes awarded $391,000 to an Oklahoma attorney to cover part of his defense costs after being wrongly prosecuted on 54 counts of health insurance fraud. The court criticized prosecutors for misleading the grand jury and a “reckless disregard for the truth.” Again, the government will appeal. (AP/Tulsa World, “U.S. ordered to pay OKC attorney”, Aug. 13).