Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for May, 2013

“Derek Boogaard’s Family Is Suing The NHL For Wrongful Death”

The family, now represented by Chicago’s Corboy & Demetrio, is refiling a suit dismissed earlier [Deadspin]:

According to The New York Times, the complaint alleges that the N.H.L., through the actions/inactions of the teams and team physicians charged with caring for Boogaard, breached a duty to Boogaard in failing to monitor his prescription drug use. The suit also alleges that the league’s substance abuse program violated its own rules when it failed to suspend or reprimand him for his several lapses, even in the face of multiple failed drug tests and his admissions that he occasionally purchased the drugs illegally.

P.S. In other sports-lawsuit news, “Vijay Singh sued the PGA Tour on Wednesday for exposing him to ‘public humiliation and ridicule’ during a 12-week investigation into his use of deer-antler spray that ended last week when the tour dropped its case against him.” [ESPN, auto-plays video]

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Government is simply the name for the things we do together…

…such as harass our political enemies [Michael Cannon, Cato, more; Washington Post on revelations that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra tax scrutiny to groups that “criticize how the country is being run”.]

Update: that “just a rogue field office in Cincinnati” story didn’t last long. AP is reporting that the agency’s acting head knew nearly a year ago that tea party groups were being targeted, a fact that might have been of interest to lawmakers pursuing constituent reports of overly onerous document demands from the IRS (see our earlier coverage of that here and here). Meanwhile, ProPublica, the generally liberal-leaning journalistic outfit, has disclosed that the IRS shared with it confidential data from nine conservative-leaning nonprofits.

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Texas and industrial accidents

Ira Stoll catches the New York Times being tendentious again [SmarterTimes]:

…one reason that Texas is at or near the top of the nation in terms of workplace fatalities is that it is at or near the top of the nation in terms of the number of workers and how many hours they work. If you adjust for that, and take the rate of workplace fatalities — that is, the number of fatalities from workplace injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, Texas isn’t worst in the nation, but somewhere in the middle…

Related: Josh Barro, Steven Greenhut (California as comparison).

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Class action roundup

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“Copyright troll Righthaven finally, completely dead”

Judge Clifton of the Ninth Circuit (via ArsTechnica):

Abraham Lincoln told a story about a lawyer who tried to establish that a calf had five legs by calling its tail a leg. But the calf had only four legs, Lincoln observed, because calling a tail a leg does not make it so,” the opinion begins.

Before us is a case about a lawyer who tried to establish that a company owned a copyright by drafting a contract calling the company the copyright owner, even though the company lacked the rights associated with copyright ownership. Heeding Lincoln’s wisdom, and the requirements of the Copyright Act, we conclude that merely calling someone a copyright owner does not make it so.

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