Spain: “A speeding motorist who killed a teenage cyclist is suing the boy’s parents over damage to his luxury car, the government says.” (AP/WINS, Jan. 25).
Archive for 2008
Judith Regan settles…
Edwards to be AG in Obama administration?
So suggests Robert Novak, which, if true, puts to question any claims Obama has for being a different kind of Democrat. One wonders how long the prosecutions of Mel Weiss, Dickie Scruggs, or the Kentucky fen-phen lawyers would last. Of course, one recalls, the Clinton administration wasn’t any better when it buried a prosecution of Fred Baron in the Baron & Budd script memo scandal. Baron, who was the head of the ATLA trial-lawyer lobbying organization, is now Edwards’s finance chair, though the media has yet to note this hypocrisy by the supposedly anti-lobbyist Edwards.
Redwoods vs. solar panels
Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett face criminal charges for not cutting redwoods that have grown to block a neighbor’s panels. (Paul Rogers, “Sunnyvale homeowners told to cut redwoods that block solar panels”, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 24)(h/t: Karen Myers).
More: Kevin at Truck and Barter thinks the local statute, which includes elements of first-in-time first-in-right, does a relatively good job at drawing bright-line rules to protect the competing legitimate interests of the property owners. For arguably relevant history, check out the old English doctrine of “ancient lights“.
Big teaching-hospital cuts after Oregon high court ruling
But they told us the malpractice crisis was just a myth dept. (Associated Press):
Oregon Health & Science University plans to cut at least 200 jobs and raise tuition by at least 10 percent to free the money needed for higher insurance costs following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling.
The December ruling cleared the way for the family of a brain-damaged child to pursue malpractice damages from the university. It effectively eliminated a liability cap of $200,000 designed to protect state agencies from major damage awards.
The cutbacks, expected to be announced Friday, were first reported by The Oregonian newspaper. Besides trimming jobs and hiking tuition, OHSU expects to restructure or close clinical, research and education programs, and scale back construction on Portland’s South Waterfront.
OHSU said the court ruling will add $30 million a year in insurance and administrative expenses. Though that’s only 2 percent of OHSU’s annual operating budget of about $1.5 billion, it amounts to more than 60 percent of its annual support from the state’s general fund. …
OHSU is Portland’s largest private employer with about 12,000 staff.
More: Victoria Taft (cross-posted from Point of Law).
“IBM responds to overtime lawsuits with 15% salary cuts”
The fastest-growing area of employment litigation in recent years has been wage-and-hour class actions, perhaps the biggest subset of which are lawsuits charging that white-collar employees have been misclassified as exempt from hourly wage and overtime calculations. Like many big employers, IBM has been hit with such suits from lawyers seeking to represent thousands of its employees. Information Week:
The good news for those workers is that IBM now plans to grant them so-called “non-exempt” status so they can collect overtime pay. The bad news: IBM will cut their base salaries by 15% to make up the difference, InformationWeek has learned.
The plan has been greeted with howls of protest from affected workers.
The payroll restructuring goes into effect Feb. 16 and applies to about 8,000 IBM employees classified as technical services and IT specialists, according to internal IBM documents reviewed by InformationWeek and sources at the computer maker.
The plan calls for a “15% base salary adjustment down across all units with eligibility for overtime,” the documents state. The move is a direct response to the employee lawsuits — at least one of which has apparently been settled.
“To avoid protracted litigation in an area of law widely seen as ambiguous, IBM chose to settle the case — and to conduct a detailed review of the jobs in question,” the documents state.
The giant tech company also intends to lobby for modernization of New Deal era wage-and-hour laws which might allow it to restore the previous compensation methods. Good luck with that — even if it can show that most of the workers involved would themselves favor salaried rather than hourly status, the political clout of unions and trial lawyers has stymied efforts at legislative reform in the past. (Paul McDougall, Information Week/EETimes.com, Jan. 23).
Lost ski areas
There are more than 1,000 documented nationwide, including 113 in Vermont alone. The “1970s were hard times for operators of ski areas. There was an energy crisis, which not only cut down leisure driving by potential customers but saddled areas with higher energy prices. At the same time, liability insurance costs spiked. The histories of dozens of small ski areas end with the conclusion that it could not reopen one winter because the owners could not afford their insurance premiums.” (Bill Pennington, “Vermont’s Forgotten Trails and Frozen Lifts of Winters Past”, New York Times, Jan. 25).
Update: Bring me the identity of Patent Troll Tracker
Nanny state, Virginia 1934 edition
An Alexandria tapas bar was cited for serving sangria—which violates a 1934 Virginia law against mixing wine with spirits, with penalties of up to a year in jail. Virginia Spanish restaurants, so warned, now only serve a bowdlerized version of the drink, to the dismay of customers who can get the real thing a few miles away in DC or Maryland. The legislature is contemplating a change, though a pending bill would fail to exempt the similarly illegal kir royals or boilermakers. (Anita Kumar, “Virginia’s Sangria Ban At Issue in 2 Hearings”, Washington Post, Jan. 24). (According to Instruction 33 on this bulletin, Virginia also appears to ban the pitcher of margaritas the local Mexican restaurant serves.) Left unspoken: when is someone going to bring a consumer class action against the Spanish restaurants serving faux sangrias without warning customers?
(ObJingoism: At least Virginia still has better Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese food than DC or Maryland.)
For more on the more modern food police, see Overlawyered’s Eat, Drink, and Be Merry section or my article, A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation.
Case workers and perverse incentives
A reader writes regarding our post on the perverse incentives given social workers:
Frankly, I’m surprised this story is news. The belief of every case worker I know (I’ve only been at this since July) is that if a kid on your caseload dies, the odds are that you’ll be fired no matter what you did right or wrong. Besides the perverse incentives you mentioned, that cause over-removal of children at lower levels, there are perverse incentives for the people at the top of the chain–if they make the requirements so unattainable they can never be done perfectly, and keep caseloads high enough that no one can complete all his tasks, there will always be something they can find that caseworkers didn’t do, and the caseworkers (and sometimes their immediate supervisors) can be fired.
One of the greatest needs I’ve seen for a loser-pays system has been this year in my work with county dependency courts. The Child Protective Investigators, who remove children and work with the state AG’s office to get them adjudicated dependent on the state, prosecute the most absurd cases because it hardly costs them anything if they lose.
Right now I’m working with a CPI who is trying to take custody of a 17-year-old girl from her mother–even though by the time the trial comes around and the girl is adjudicated (probably won’t be, because the CPI has a crappy case against her) she’ll be one month away from aging out of the system. Since the CPIs don’t pay if they lose, and don’t even usually show up at trial to get chewed out by the judge, they have no reason not to waste my time, the judges’ time, the attorneys’ time, and (worst of all, since these poor folks aren’t paid to be there) a phenomenal amount of innocent parents’ time and money.
The single biggest problem with the dependency system, at least here in Florida, is that we don’t have loser-pays.
Sorry for the rant. That post hit close to home!
On a similar point: see Illinois Alliance for Parents & Children, whose website isn’t quite finished.