“As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me. ”
— Richard Neely, Justice, West Virginia Supreme Court, The Product Liability Mess at 4
It wasn’t exactly a failure of unregulated business, even if many of the lawsuits are going to push that theme (Carol D. Leonnig, “How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis”, Washington Post, Jun. 10)(via Hans Bader).
Ted earlier linked to an audio of the hearing, but GamePolitics.com has now posted a transcript.
Overly eager salmonella-chasing attorneys might risk coming across as, well, bad actors (ATRA press release, Jun. 11). More: Jane Genova takes a different view.
Daniel Radosh is skeptical that the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s settlement with ISPs Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable is anything other than a publicity-stunt shakedown. The Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography argues that it is actually counterproductive. Orin Kerr notes that it is of questionable constitutionality. Declan McCullagh suggests, as does David Kravetz, that the ISPs will comply by shutting off customers’ access to broad swaths of Usenet well beyond anything alleged to contain illegal material.
Toldjah so: The Virginia Supreme Court has unanimously ruled against Lisa Miller of Winchester, who has been ignoring a duly issued Vermont court order providing her former lesbian partner Janet Jenkins with rights of visitation to the child they had been raising together. Miller’s defiance of the law had been backed by Liberty Counsel, the ironically named pro bono group headed by the dean of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law, as well as other conservative religious figures such as Chuck Colson. Despite misreporting to the contrary in some quarters of the conservative press, the case had nothing to do with recognition of the former couple’s Vermont civil union, nor did it eventuate in an award of custody (as distinct from visitation) to Jenkins. (AP/Newport News Daily Press; Ed Brayton and more; our earlier coverage).
And so the divorce case winds up generating massive demands for hard drive contents and other electronic discovery. Draconian spoliation sanctions, as exemplified in the Morgan Stanley-Perelman and Zubulake-UBS Warburg cases, make a potentially fatal trap for the unwary:
Defense lawyers complain that their clients often are forced to supply voluminous information at great cost with little benefit. And because there is so much more information potentially subject to a discovery order, the chances are greater that a client might violate the order by inadvertently deleting data.
“Does this enhance justice? Not usually,” said Tess Blair, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P., who heads the 1,350-lawyer firm’s electronic-data-discovery unit. “It becomes a weapon in many cases.”
(Chris Mondics, “Ediscovery profoundly changing lawyering”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jun. 8).
They’re why the Weymouth, Mass. housing authority is banning residents from using inflatable kiddie pools at municipal housing. The state housing department sent a memo to town authorities five years ago recommending a ban on pools as well as trampolines and swing sets: “Housing authorities routinely get sued for incidents even when a tenant is the responsible party,” it said. (Jack Encarnacao, “Weymouth bans kiddie pools at public housing”, Quincy Patriot-Ledger, Jun. 7).
At Bizarro-Overlawyered, Justinian Lane states:
Ted Frank at Overlawyered falsely claims that “In civil court, a default judgment can be obtained merely on a plaintiff’s say so. In contrast, most arbitration agreements require the arbitrator to scrutinize the evidence before granting an award, even when the debtor does not contest the arbitration claim…” A default judgment against a debtor will be based upon the same evidence in civil court or in arbitration: an affidavit or affidavits from the creditor alleging that the debtor owes a specific sum. Both the judge and the arbitrator will “scrutinize” the affidavit in the same way; they’ll check to make sure names and sums are correct.
It will be no surprise to long-time readers of Overlawyered that Justinian Lane is 100% incorrect.
As pro wrestling is to Olympic wrestling? As legal tender is to genuine tenderness? Help John Steele and his readers (riffing off Sasha Volokh) find the best apothegm (Legal Ethics Forum, Jun. 9).