“Nearly 35 percent of all the imaging costs ordered for 2,068 orthopaedic patient encounters in Pennsylvania were ordered for defensive purposes, according to a new study presented today at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).” [AAOS, ABA Journal, Frank]
Related: David Freddoso, “Trial lawyers release malpractice primer.“
“The city of Lodi ended a long legal battle over groundwater contamination earlier this month,” accepting $6.3 million from insurers for local businesses. [Lodi News-Sentinel] We covered the convoluted litigation, in which the California city sued numerous local businesses, in reports here and here.
Ted Frank and Scott Greenfield suspect that some New York lawyers are soon going to be donating to judges they dislike, just to keep from drawing them for their case.
Such is the theme of a legal audio conference. The wave-after-next of employment litigation, presumably, consists of suits by workers infuriated because their employers have curtailed permission for telecommuting on advice of HR lawyers trying to avoid the wage-and-hour suits.
I’ll be talking on Monday at noon at the University of Indiana-Bloomington Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Ind., about my forthcoming book Schools for Misrule. Prof. Bill Henderson will comment. On Tuesday I’ll speak to law students at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, again at noon, with Prof. Larry Ribstein commenting. Student chapters of the Federalist Society are sponsoring both events. If you’re there, please feel free to introduce yourself.
Column by Sameer Vasta in Sympatico.ca’s “Coffee Talk”:
Thankfully, a lot of these cases are thrown out by judges who realize that litigation isn’t the solution to every problem, but some of them are not, tying up important public resources that could be better used.
Over-litigiousness doesn’t really solve any problems, even for the person filing the case.
The customer says he has diabetes and should be entitled to scrape the rice off and just eat the fish. “The rice is part of the all-you-can-eat sushi,” said the restaurant owner, who says the plaintiff has asked $6,000 to drop his suit. “If you only eat the fish, I would go broke.” [Consumerist; David Lazarus, L.A. Times]
Religion correspondent Mark Oppenheimer mentions this site and me in a finely drawn profile of Secular Right, the website I’m involved in (it launched in 2008) which explores the theme of a non-religiously-based conservatism. Oppenheimer interviewed at length two scintillating writers who contribute much of the site’s luster, Heather Mac Donald and Razib Khan. This passage amusingly captures the diversity of views among the SR principals:
The five bloggers are like the dramatis personae of a drawing-room comedy about irascible conservatives — written by Alan Bennett but set at the Heritage Foundation.
There’s the urban pragmatist (Ms. Mac Donald, who clerked for the liberal federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt but now writes conservative essays about homelessness and policing), the data-driven scientist (Mr. Khan), and the libertarian enthusiast for tort reform (Walter Olson, also founder of the blog Overlawyered).
The other two, I should add, are John Derbyshire and Andrew Stuttaford, both born in Great Britain and well known through their association with National Review, and both, like Khan and Mac Donald, exceptionally talented writers. The article is interesting throughout, and has already begun to provoke a variety of responses: Memeorandum, Dan Riehl (disapproving) with response from Razib Khan, Amy Alkon, Tyler Cowen, Ilya Somin, FrumForum, etc.