Except for, you know, falling asleep.
Archive for April, 2009
“Exxon’s Endless Lawsuit”
Dirk Olin at Portfolio magazine on the Valdez spill litigation.
Schools, school suppliers, and CPSIA
Turns out there is a trade association sounding the alarm (earlier)
Telemarketing consumer site menaced by foreign suits
Julia Forte of North Carolina
operates a pair of web sites — 800notes.com and whocallsme.com — that provide an interesting consumer service. These web sites include message boards that permit consumers who receive calls from telemarketers to comment on their experiences; other consumers who receive a call from a given telemarketer can take a look and make a decision about whether they want to take a particular call.
U.S. law protects her in this mission, but telemarketers who don’t like the critiques made available on her sites have begun suing, or threatening to sue her, in other countries where protections for online speech are less robust. [Paul Alan Levy, CL&P Blog]
“Adopting hospital quality measures too quickly can harm patients”
Wachter’s World (via KevinMD) reports on what can happen when promising innovations are too rapidly accorded the status of obligatory standards of care.
U.K.: Mom ticketed for stopping to revive 4 year old son
You do have to wonder what the cops are thinking in some of these cases.
CPSIA chronicles, April 9
Posting may be slower here over the next few days because of the holiday (and comments-moderation may be erratic at best, for which apologies in advance). If you’d like to catch up with CPSIA reading, though, there’s plenty of it:
- Excellent reporting in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last weekend, based on interviews with local people affected by the law, including a maker of kids’ clothing, a doll maker (more), and so forth. Virtually all of them contribute a striking fact, a memorable quote, or both: “Mark Kohlenberg, owner of the Umi children’s shoe company in Grafton, estimates that the required testing will cost his company $200,000 a year. … ‘This law was written one night in Washington when everyone was drunk,’ said a frustrated Peter Reynolds of the Little Toy Co. in Germantown. ‘It’s impossible to read and impossible to enforce.'”
- Before moving on from the state of Wisconsin, let Valerie Jacobsen’s comment be recorded: “Canvassed Janesville, Wisconsin thrift stores March 31. In an entire city of population 60,000 there was one piece of used clothing for a baby of six months or less”. (Further: ShopFloor).
- A report in the Northfield, Minn. paper on the vintage-kids’-books situation contains a line almost too depressing to pass along: “Congressman John Kline responded and said efforts are underway to change the law, but with the focus on larger budget issues he admitted it could be years [emphasis added] before this gets another look.” More: Deputy Headmistress.
- “The Myth of Good Intentions” [James Wilson, DownsizeDC]
- “$1,500 to test one clutch ball that retails for $16.50”: a letter to President Obama [Jill Chuckas of Handmade Toy Alliance at Change.org]
- Rick Woldenberg, running his family’s educational-toy company, remembers himself as the most apolitical person you would want to meet. How’d he turn into a nonstop organizer of the reform effort? [Story of My Life]
- “When I first heard about CPSIA I actually cried. I didn’t see how they could pass something so stupid.” [11-year-old Lizi, at AmendTheCPSIA.com]
- To grasp the immense scale of Congress’s blunder with this law, “follow a blog like Overlawyered“. Thanks! [Hugh Hewitt, The Examiner; and more, including radio questioning of Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), and John Ensign (R-Nev.)]
Public domain image from Walter Crane, Baby’s Own Aesop (1887), courtesy Children’s Library.
“Considering the explosion of new media, regulation is inevitable”
Phillips Givens’ IP Law 101 has more on the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed extension of liability to situations where bloggers or others in social media fail to disclose the receipt of freebie services (such as entertainment or software) or write insincerely favorable posts about the experience. Earlier here. More: Jeff Winkler, Reason “Hit and Run”.
P.S.: Doesn’t sound as if bloggers have much to worry about, though, if the topics on which they provide favorable coverage are of a more political sort.
Overheard, one lawyer talking about another
“He lies so much he had to hire someone to call his dog.” [Ohio blog The Briefcase]
April 9 roundup
- Teacher’s aide in Queens, N.Y., sues 11 year old, saying he was dashing for ice cream and ran into her (this happened when he was eight) [WPIX; Rosanna Tomack, Joseph Cicak]
- Extraterritoriality, or exit fees? Stiff taxes these days on Americans who renounce their citizenship [Coyote Blog]
- Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell hires Bailey, Perrin & Bailey, big campaign-donor law firm for anti-drugmaker suit [WSJ, Point of Law, ShopFloor, Adler @ Volokh]
- Injured in wrestling fall, will get $15 million from school district [Seattle Times]
- Feds seized Petri dishes at Buffalo professor’s home and word spread of major bioterror bust. Oops [Andrew Grossman, Heritage]
- Toward “public control over the media”: Creepy ideological origins of Nichols/McChesney scheme to subsidize newspapers [Adam Thierer, City Journal]
- Thanks to expensive modern medicine Virginia Postrel has been doing well in her fight against breast cancer, story might not have been so happy in some countries [The Atlantic, second essay responding to letters]
- Jury awards $22.5 million against vaccine maker to man who says he caught polio from daughter’s shot [Staten Island Advance]