Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2013

EU considers harmonizing class action rules

The various member countries have very different traditions as to “collective redress” of legal claims, and while some have liberalized the procedures recently, none is anywhere near as liberal as the United States in permitting lawyers to assert class actions. That’s not going to change, according to Monique Goyens, director general of the European consumer organisation BEUC, which has pushed for new collective redress rules: “The key safeguards against exorbitant awards are in place. So we are not importing US class actions.” [Euractiv] More specifically:

The safeguards include swiftly ending unfounded cases and avoiding national systems where lawyers’ fees are calculated as a percentage of the compensation awarded, like current systems in the US and, to a lesser extent, in some European countries. The Commission also advises countries to avoid punitive measures, inflicted on top of actual damage and compensation for victims.

Maybe one of these days we could get some of those safeguards over here.

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Law schools roundup

  • “How To Fix Law School” symposium at New Republic with David Lat, Paul Campos, Mike Kinsley etc. follows up on Noam Scheiber article on erosion of BigLaw business model, which in turn drew semi-rebuttal from Mark Obbie at Slate;
  • “So the poor defendants have to spend thousands on legal fees, while law students get their ‘practice.'” [John Stossel]
  • Brian Tamanaha vs. Simkovic and McIntyre “law degree worth a million bucks” study [Balkinization, response here, Adler, Caron]
  • Amid crisis, tone-deaf ABA “actually in the process of trying to make it harder for accredited law schools to fire professors and control their costs” [Elie Mystal]
  • Foundation case studies include Carnegie 1921 report on legal education, Olin support for law and economics, and some others related to law schools [J. Scott Kohler and Steven Schindler, Philanthropy Central]
  • “Shifts in law professors’ views” [Kyle Graham]
  • Bring on the strong verbs, and not just in legal writing [Ross Guberman] In recent Nike shoe case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote rings round Justice Kennedy [same]

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Scant state interest in rolling back Stand Your Ground

Although Eric Holder, Barack Obama and a long list of liberal publications and organizations have lately pressed the cause, states recognizing “stand your ground” principles of self-defense show little inclination to overturn them [Annie Yu, Washington Times last week, quoting me; AP] “The substantial majority view among the states, by a 31-19 margin, is no duty to retreat.” [Eugene Volokh] Barack Obama’s voting record on related issues in the Illinois state senate may surprise some readers [Jacob Sullum, who has been giving the issue thorough coverage] “Blacks benefit from Florida ‘Stand Your Ground’ law at disproportionate rate” [Patrick Howley, Daily Caller] Some more thoughts from Mark Bennett at Defending People. Bonus: what it’s like to be mounted in a fistfight (alleging that bare hands and feet have been responsible for 4,028 deaths since 2007, more than rifles and shotguns combined).

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Apple loses e-book antitrust ruling

After taking it on the chin in a lengthy opinion by federal district judge Denise Cote, “Apple may be more cautious about entering into other markets with the same zeal.” [Macworld] George Priest, distinguished antitrust specialist at Yale, isn’t on board with the action against Apple: “When firms come up with new pricing schemes that force other companies to adopt new schemes, that’s a good thing” [Daniel Fisher, Forbes] Nor is Geoffrey Manne, who points out that authors have expressed alarm at the prospect of seeing the e-book market thrown back into Amazon’s hands. Ira Stoll wonders whether a presumption is being created that outsider firms should denounce incumbent monopolies to the government rather than disrupt them through vigorous market entry, while Wayne Crews says that by finding a clear Sherman Act violation, the government is merely showing how useless the law is. A different view from Bill Dyer: “Apple is going to have a very tough row to hoe on appeal.”

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Medical roundup

  • Crisis of sterile injectables rages on, among victims are premature infants who need parenteral nutrition [Washingtonian (“Even if the FDA’s doing something terrible, we can’t criticize them. They regulate us.”) via Tabarrok, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
  • “Tweets not medical advice” [@Caduceusblogger via @jackshafer]
  • “Why Your Dog Can Get Vaccinated Against Lyme Disease And You Can’t” [Curt Nickisch, WBUR]
  • Cites distinctive Connecticut law: “Hospital Successfully Sues its Patient’s Attorneys for Filing a Vexatious Malpractice Suit” [Alex Stein, Bill of Health]
  • Should adversarial medical examinations be videotaped? [Turkewitz]
  • “Lawyers Have Learned To Distort Pharmacovigilance Signals” [Oliver on FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), earlier]
  • Causation from nasal decongestant at issue: “Judge orders UW to pay $15M to Snoqualmie family” [KING5]
  • “The ban on compensated transplant organ donation has led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. A ban on compensated sperm and egg donation would lead to a dearth of lives.” [Alex Tabarrok, related on Canada]

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What’s scarier than asset forfeiture operations?

Asset forfeiture operations with private helpers working on contingency fee:

After seizing more than $1 million in cash in drug stops this year, a district attorney has suspended further roadside busts by his task force because of growing criticism over a private company’s participation.

District Attorney Jason Hicks, whose territory includes four Oklahoma counties, hired Guthrie-based Desert Snow LLC with a deal to pay it between 10 and 25 percent of seizure proceeds, depending on whether its “trainers” were present or only department officers. “Sometimes, no drugs were found and no one was arrested, but task force officers took money found in the vehicles anyway after a drug-sniffing dog got excited.” Now criminal charges arising from the stops are being ended, an investigation has been launched into allegedly missing funds, and “some” money is being returned to motorists. A judge said he was “shocked”

after learning the private company’s owner pulled over a pregnant driver along Interstate 40 and questioned her even though he is not a state-certified law enforcement officer….

Forfeited funds are split among the law enforcement agencies of the task force after Desert Snow is paid.

It bears repeating again and again: contingency fees and law enforcement authority don’t mix. Not ethically, anyway. (via Ed Brayton; more from Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform).

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Long Island: “Woman who drowned her 3 kids in tub in 2008…”

“… wants cut of wrongful death settlements.” “A mentally disturbed suburban New York woman who drowned her three young children in a bathtub in 2008 wants a cut of $350,000 in wrongful death settlements obtained by the children’s fathers, attorneys said Friday. Leatrice Brewer, 33, was found not guilty because of mental disease or defect in the deaths of her children, so her attorneys say she should not be subject to laws that bar convicts from profiting from their crimes.” [Associated Press/NY Daily News]

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Louisiana flood-protection board to sue oil companies

Saltwater incursion and wetlands loss associated with industrial use of coastal Louisiana have worsened the exposure of populated areas to flooding, according to official reports and scientific studies. Now a flood protection board representing much of the New Orleans area is suing energy companies demanding a contribution of “billions” of dollars, though its spokesman acknowledges that government actions were also responsible for weakening the natural environmental buffer. John Schwartz quotes me in his New York Times report today, though without the chance to study the suit’s contentions it was hard for me to make any more than the most preliminary observations.

P.S. More details emerge in an expanded version of the story as well as in a Thursday Washington Post report. The agency is suing “about 100” energy companies. Canal construction and other actions taken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were important contributors to the environmental losses, but principles of sovereign immunity restrict suits against the Corps. Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said “that the levee agency had usurped his authority and that the suit would enrich trial lawyers” and demanded that the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority “cancel contracts with the four law firms that had agreed to handle the case on a contingency basis.”

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FDA moving to ban menthol cigarettes

“The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.” (attributed to the Countess of Blessington) The main scientific reason (if it can be called that) cited by the Food and Drug Administration seems to be that adding menthol makes smoking more enjoyable to many users, leading to readier “initiation of the smoking habit.” [Atlantic Wire] In addition, the World Trade Organization ruled last year that it was an arbitrary trade restriction for the United States to have banned clove-flavored cigarettes of the sort formerly imported from Indonesia, as Congress did in the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, without also banning menthol-flavored cigarettes. [Jakarta Post]

More: Get ready for a huge boost to the already-thriving cigarette-smuggling business should the plan go through [ACSH] And from Arthur Caplan at Time: “Antismoking Advocates Have Misused Science.”

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