Hello again! Walter Olson has welcomed me back to help fill in while he’s away. Don’t forget to check in at Overlawyered’s sister site, PointofLaw.com which also has a guest blogger this week. I’ll hit some high points on joint & several liability, wrongful death and might even pick on John Edwards a bit. You’re welcome to send along any story leads, with special encouragement for leads not picked up on by the national media–many of which come from your local paper or television station.
Archive for 2008
Baron money trail forced Edwards’ hand
Per Marisa Guthrie at the magazine Broadcasting & Cable, ABC News was able to force John Edwards’ hand in part because it had been tracing the Fred Baron money trail (which, it will be recalled, Edwards supposedly had nothing to do with). “According to multiple sources, Edwards was apoplectic that ABC News broke the story on its website and began promoting it early on Friday” because the former North Carolina senator — who, y’know, was beating up on himself so bad and wanted nothing more than to come clean with the American people — “had hoped to control the news cycle by making his admission late on a Friday night when the country was watching the Olympics and the long weekend yawned ahead.” Earlier here and here.
Many commentators have questioned whether Edwards was telling the truth about when the affair ended. (Despite her family’s publicly expressed wishes for a paternity test, Rielle Hunter says she won’t allow one; whether this refusal is or is not related to her presumably ongoing financial dependence on Fred Baron’s largesse is not for us to know.) A second question is whether Edwards was telling the truth on ABC when he said he hired Hunter first for her filmmaking skills and began the relationship later, thus dodging charges of having put his mistress on the payroll. Sam Stein at Huffington Post examines chronologies here. Relatedly, Advice Goddess Amy Alkon has this to say about the L.A. Times’s straightfaced description of Hunter as a filmmaker: “Katie, honey, in this town [L.A.], we know to look at imdb.com to see if somebody actually is a filmmaker. This is a good dating tip for you, too, dear, because half the guys you’ll meet at the bar in this town are ‘producers.'”
More: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers.
Yes, I’m being facetious
Where’s the trial lawyer bringing a class action on behalf of all of the people who were defrauded when they gave money to John Edwards’s presidential campaign? It’s certainly a much more plausible claim of causation, reliance, and financial injury than the typical class action.
More seriously, I hope someone somewhere is investigating whether Fred Baron violated federal campaign finance law when he set aside tens of thousands of dollars to pay Rielle Hunter hush money without disclosing the payments on behalf of Edwards. Edwards said he was in the Beverly Hilton to help keep the story from becoming public, which makes it seem unlikely he’s telling the truth when he said that he had no knowledge that Baron moved Hunter to California. Alas, ABC didn’t ask the right follow-up questions, such as how Edwards thought meeting Hunter in a hotel room would help keep the story quiet. And “Fred Baron” appears nowhere in the New York Times story, even as he is a major fund-raiser for Barack Obama today. Obama is still running for president, right?
Update: California courts won’t ban homeschooling
“A state appeals court lifted the cloud it had cast on the homeschooling of 166,000 California children and ruled Friday that parents have a right to educate their children at home even if they lack a teaching credential.” (Egelko, SF Chron; Malkin; earlier). More: Raymond Tittmann, Federalist Society “Engage”.
Report: Fred Baron paid for Rielle Hunter’s hideaway
We described the Dallas attorney as poster boy for legal ethics for his astoundingly brazen conduct in the scandal over an asbestos testimony-coaching memo. Now his name is hitting front pages on the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair:
Dallas lawyer Fred Baron told The Dallas Morning News today that he paid relocation and housing expenses for the woman that former presidential candidate John Edwards has confessed to having an affair with.
Mr. Baron, who was chairman of Mr. Edwards’ presidential campaign finance committee, said he paid money for Rielle Hunter to move from North Carolina to another location. …
He said Mr. Edwards did not know about the arrangement.
(Gromer Jeffers Jr., “Dallas lawyer Fred Baron paid for Edwards’ mistress to relocate”, Dallas Morning News, Aug. 8).
More coverage of Edwards’s (partial or otherwise) confession: ABC News, AP, Memeorandum, Marc Ambinder, Ben Smith/Politico, News & Observer, Just One Minute, Shaun Mullen/Moderate Voice. Readers will remember that Ted had the story very, very early, before it was much noticed even on the blogs (more). As for Edwards’s own credibility, Mickey Kaus, whose news judgment in pursuing the matter now stands vindicated, has this to say: “There is now one player in this scandal with far less credibility than the National Enquirer, after all.”
More: Byron York at NRO “Corner” quotes the Raleigh News & Observer account with Baron’s statement:
“I decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life,” Baron, a Dallas trial lawyer said in a statement, Rob Christensen reports.
“John Edwards was not aware that assistance was provided to anyone involved in this matter,” Baron said. “I did it of my own voilition and without the knowledge, instruction, or suggestion of John Edwards or anyone else. The assistance was offered and accepted without condition.”
York points out:
Hunter and Young, the recipients of Baron’s generosity, were not high-ranking officials in the Edwards campaign. How Baron got to know them and how he decided to fund their move to California, and why he decided to do so without Edwards’ knowledge, might be the subject of more questions as the Edwards matter goes forward.
Blogger Gina Cobb hopes the window of Baron’s generosity is still open:
I am touched and moved by your generosity. I especially like the part about “The assistance was offered and accepted without condition.” Accordingly, I would like to request the same generosity from you. Henceforward, I would like you to rent me an enormous house and pay my living expenses in perpetuity. I can assure you that the assistance you offer will be accepted without condition.
And see Ted’s follow-up post.
The trouble with civil Gideon
In the latest Liability Outlook, I rebut the ABA’s resolution for guaranteed taxpayer funding of civil lawyers for the poor, expanding on my earlier ACS talk:
[The poor] will trade higher rents and higher taxes for the right to legal services that often will not help them.. . . [P]arties with meritorious cases will find it harder to signal to overwhelmed judges that their cases are distinguishable from the vast majority of meritless cases with appointed counsel that the courts will see every day.
Larry Ribstein approves: “The ABA resolution should be seen as what it is: a justification for rent-seeking by the organized bar.”
Judges, lawyers, and cognitive bias
“Sixty-five percent of those attending the ABA Annual Meeting session said they were better than average at predicting the settlement value of a case, and 76 percent said they were better than average at predicting when a trial court judgment would be reversed on appeal.” But when asked a multiple-choice question on basic Bayesian statistics, only 34% of the attendees got it right–just nine points better than chance. (The most popular answer was also the most incorrect.) The ABA Journal blog also reports that attendees also suffered from severe cognitive bias on such issues as non-economic damages:
A hypothetical described a case involving a school teacher who lost his arm in an accident. Half were told that the plaintiff offered to settle for $100,000, and the other half learned of a $10 million settlement offer.
A majority of the $100,000 group said a judge would assess the value of pain and suffering between $500,000 and $2 million. But a majority of the $10 million group went higher, saying the value would be between $1 million and $5 million.
When even the lawyers and judges can’t accurately peg noneconomic damages, what other evidence do we need to show that uncapped and unscheduled noneconomic damages are unconstitutionally arbitrary and irrational?
The flight attendant and the televangelist’s wife
We express no opinion as to exactly how badly Victoria Osteen, wife of a celebrated evangelical minister, may have behaved on that Continental Airlines flight in 2005; “The Federal Aviation Administration fined [her] $3,000 for interfering with a crew member.” Readers keep writing in, however, to call our attention to the financial demands that flight attendant Sharon Brown is making in her lawsuit, which just went to trial. It seems Brown wants compensation not only for such things as hemorrhoids and damage to her religious faith but also, by way of punishment, “10 percent of Victoria Osteen’s net worth”. Wouldn’t we all! (“Joel Osteen’s Wife on Trial in Flight Attendant Assault”, AP/FoxNews.com, Aug. 7).
Legal consequences for denying climate-change consensus?
The idea does seem to be in the air (Coyote, Aug. 5; Alex Lockwood, Jul. 31 but note Aug. 4 post backtracking somewhat). Lockwood writes from the U.K., which of course lacks our First Amendment. On the idea of staging show trials of energy executives for propagating incorrect opinion, see Point of Law, Jun. 23, as well as Kivalina suit coverage.
“Lack of Minorities Closes Boise Bone Marrow Center”
So now everyone will be happy dept.: The only bone-marrow donor program in Idaho’s capital of Boise is closing down. It seems the National Marrow Donor Program has enacted regulations requiring local programs either to recruit at least 1,000 minority donors a year or to hire a full-time recruiter by way of showing a good-faith effort toward that goal. But there aren’t enough minorities in the Treasure Valley to hit the numerical target and the program at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute isn’t big enough to support the full-time hire, so now the nearest local option for potential donors will be an institution in Spokane, Washington. (Idaho Statesman and more, Idaho Business Review, Seattle Times) (via Taranto).
More: The national program, however, denies that its regulations require the hiring of a recruiter and says its local minority recruitment goal is 575, not 1,000: Taranto, Aug. 11.