A comment about comments

I mostly leave regular visitors alone to say what they want in our comments section, whether or not I agree. That being said:

Given this site’s subject matter, we often find ourselves talking about cases of injury or death that pose unthinkable tragedies to the persons and families involved. Given the identifying material in the stories, it is inevitable that members of those families, or others who deeply care about the injured persons, or the persons themselves, will at some point come to the site and read what we have said.

When we voice our disagreement with the claims made in resulting lawsuits, it can be helpful to imagine those family members’ faces as being among those in the audience, and let our words be shaped accordingly. I’m sure I sometimes fall short of following this advice myself, but when I do follow it, I always feel like more of a grown-up.

Filed under: about the site

Update: unlawful to test for mad cow

By a 2-1 margin with Judge David Sentelle dissenting, a panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the USDA’s rule prohibiting companies from testing beef they own for the dread disease. The rule had been challenged by Creekstone Farms, a Kansas-based meat exporter. (Legal Times “BLT”; opinion in PDF; earlier).

Filed under: agriculture and farming, safety

Gov. Palin as judge-picker

Jeralyn Merritt @ TalkLeft and Jonathan Adler @ Volokh identify one data point.

P.S.: via comments, Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch has more.

Filed under: Alaska, judges, Sarah Palin, state trial lawyers groups

College should have warned student not to run on street

From the “Not About the Money” files; reader D.W. writes:

Seguin is about 35 miles east of downtown San Antonio. The deceased student/athlete was an adult, chose to run on a busy street despite ample on-campus facilities, and chose to run with traffic instead of facing it. The story doesn’t say, but the street in question is actually US90, possibly the heaviest traveled street in town aside from I-10. So naturally it’s the university’s fault she was struck and killed. Oh well, it could have been worse, at least they were only held 5% responsible.

(Ron Maloney, “Jury finds TLU partially responsible”, Seguin (Texas) Gazette-Enterprise, Aug. 29; more background here and here).

Filed under: colleges and universities, not about the money, roads and streets, Texas