Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2009

“The lethal dangers of sand”

Wear appropriate protective clothing, “do not let this chemical enter the environment”, and if you come in contact with it, “immediately flush skin with plenty of water for at least 15 minutes while removing contaminated clothing and shoes”. It’s ocean sand! MSDSs (Material Safety Data Sheets) are by and for lawyers: “Very few chemists, in my experience, spend much time with these forms at all, preferring to get their information from almost any other source.” [Derek Lowe via Virginia Postrel]

More: Interesting comments, including one on ionized water (if exposed, “flush the contaminated area with water”) and this from reader John: “Good news: if the sand is intended for use by children under 12, as of August 14 the sand itself will have to be permanently labeled with a batch number so it can be easily recalled.”

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Government regulation of broadcast content

Administrations of both political parties shamelessly exploited the unlamented “Fairness Doctrine” to harass their critics in the broadcast world, and there’s every reason to believe that proposed “local content” mandates would be open to the same abuse. [John Samples, “Broadcast Localism and the Lessons of the Fairness Doctrine”, Cato Institute Policy Analysis #639, May 27 (PDF)]

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“The U.S. Can’t Be the World’s Court”

So argued former State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III in the WSJ last week, with special reference to the overreaching, extraterritorial Alien Tort Statute. But it’s not as if the efforts to turn the U.S. into the courtroom for the world are slackening at all:

  • As Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith note in the Washington Post, a federal court recently allowed to proceed a lawsuit seeking to blame the evils of South African apartheid on Western multinationals, even despite strong opposition to the suit from both the U.S. government’s executive branch and today’s duly elected multiracial South African government. Unfortunately, the State Department’s up-to-now-staunch opposition to this and similar lawsuits is imperiled by the installment of Harold Koh as legal adviser at Foggy Bottom: “Koh is an intellectual architect and champion of the post-1980 human rights litigation explosion. He joined a brief in the South Africa litigation arguing for broad aiding-and-abetting liability.”
  • If asked what should happen to frozen Cuban-government assets under U.S. control, reasonable possibility #1 might be “hold them against the eventual day when a non-tyrannical regime emerges there, it will need help.” Reasonable possibility #2 might be “divide the assets among Castro’s many victims in some deliberate and step-by-step way, knowing that their injuries are so numerous and severe that even very deserving victims will get only small payments”. The answer you’d think makes no sense at all is “encourage first-come-first-served tort lawsuits, so that the first couple of cases to maneuver their way through the legal process get handsome compensation, while no money is left for either #1 or #2”. So naturally, the latter is what our legal system is doing, previously in $188 million and $253 million verdicts involving single incidents or families, and now in a new case in which the family of Gustavo Villoldo has been awarded $1.179 billion. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers in the case actually boasts that the new award may obstruct a warming of relations between the U.S. and a post-Castro successor regime: “with the opening of relations between the U.S. and Cuba to come, there are debts to society to be paid before that happens” (more on Che Guevara, via).
  • On the brighter side, the Obama administration has joined its Bush predecessors in correctly drawing a line against litigation by some September 11 victims and insurance companies: under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, the courts are no place to pursue theories trying to link the rulers of Saudi Arabia to the terrorist attacks.

(cross-posted from Point of Law)

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Ensuring Pollan-ization

A controversy had erupted at Washington State University over whether it was really a good idea to require all freshmen to read and discuss Michael Pollan’s impassioned attack on the American food industry, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. (The word “indoctrination” might even have come up.) Then famed Seattle-based injury attorney Bill Marler, whose practice focuses on suing over food poisoning and who has extensive ties to the university, offered to foot the bill himself for the program’s cost. Which, as the New York Times reports, seems to have made everything okay.

I wonder what the various personages decrying the “commercialization of the university” will have to say about all this. (Fixed name of university, originally mistakenly given as U-W, thanks Jason Barney in comments. And see response from attorney Bill Marler in comments).

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