Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for May, 2008

May 2 roundup

  • Contriving to give Sheldon Silver the moral high ground: NY judges steamed at lack of raises are retaliating against Albany lawmakers’ law firms [NY Post and editorial. More: Turkewitz.]
  • When strong laws prove weak: Britain’s many layers of land use control seem futile against determined builders of gypsy encampments [Telegraph]
  • “U.S. patent chief: applications up, quality down” [EETimes]
  • Plenty of willing takers for those 4,703 new cars that survived the listing-ship near-disaster, but Mazda destroyed them instead [WSJ]
  • “Prof. Dohrn [for] Attorney General and Rev. Wright [for] Secretary of State”? So hard to tell when left-leaning lawprof Brian Leiter is kidding and when he’s not [Leiter Reports]
  • Yet another hard-disk-capacity class action settlement, $900K to Strange & Carpenter [Creative HDD MP3 Player; earlier. More: Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”.]
  • Filipino ship whistleblowers’ case: judge slashes Texas attorney’s fee, “calling the lawyer’s attempt to bill his clients nearly $300,000 ‘unethically excessive.'” [Boston Globe, earlier]
  • RFK Jr. Watch: America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure® endorses Oklahoma poultry litigation [Legal NewsLine]
  • Just what the budget-strapped state needs: NY lawmakers earmark funds for three (3) new law schools [NY Post editorial; PoL first, second posts, Greenfield]
  • In Indiana, IUPUI administrators back off: it wasn’t racial harassment after all for student-employee to read a historical book on fight against Klan [FIRE; earlier]
  • Fiesta Cornyation in San Antonio just isn’t the same without the flying tortillas [two years ago on Overlawyered]

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Welcome New York Times readers

This website is mentioned in an article on allergies and chemical sensitivities in the workplace, specifically on the case of Susan McBride, who’s suing her employer, the city of Detroit, for not preventing a co-worker from wearing perfume to the office (see Jul. 6 and Jul. 18, 2007; earlier Detroit case, May 25, 2005). (Lisa Belkin, “Sickened by the Office (Really)”, May 1).

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Has the trial bar’s power crested?

In the April American Spectator, William Tucker has a lengthy piece on the question of whether scandals, legislative setbacks and a more critical public view toward litigation together signify that the power and influence of the trial bar has peaked. This site is mentioned in the piece and I’m quoted, observing that “People have called the top of this market before and they’ve always turned out to be wrong.” (not online, apparently; Jane Genova discusses).

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Connecticut: timed fireman test violated ADA, cont’d

Updating our Jan. 18, 2007 post: “Connecticut’s Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities says that the city of Stamford violated anti-discrimination law because they wouldn’t give extra time on a promotion exam to David Lenotti. Lenotti is a fire lieutenant with attention deficit disorder.” [Excerpting coverage in the Apr. 15 Stamford Advocate*]:

The city defended the denial by claiming a fire captain, the position Lenotti sought, must be able to read and process information quickly at a fire scene. But state officials said the city never proved that was true, never consulted with disability rights experts and does not use a promotional test that actually measures how fast a candidate can read.

(Dave Statter, Apr. 20; Created Things, Apr. 16; decision in PDF format). More: Daniel Schwartz has more analysis (May 3): if you want a fire captain to be able to read quickly at emergency scene, gotta spell that out explicitly in the job description.
*An odd aspect of the Stamford Advocate article, preserved on GoogleCache: it quotes disability consultant Suzanne Kitchen making the very same comment, word for word, that we criticized her for making more than a year ago. Does Ms. Kitchen really repeat herself so precisely?

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