- No, the “government can’t make you use ‘zhir’ or ‘ze’ in place of ‘she’ and ‘he'” [Josh Blackman, Washington Post; earlier on NYC human relations commission guidelines; Hans Bader/CEI on new D.C. rules along similar lines]
- Matt Welch on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the “casually authoritarian” movement to harass and legally penalize climate deniers [Reason] While styled as fraud probe, AGs’ climate denial investigation is essentially a SLAPP suit meant to silence advocacy [Ronald Bailey; letter from 13 attorneys general critical of probe] As one skirmish ends, expect wider war to continue, as Virgin Islands AG withdraws widely flayed subpoena against our friends at Competitive Enterprise Institute [John Sexton] Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey now chasing “right-leaning groups that have never received a penny from Exxon” including local political foe Beacon Hill Institute [Hans Bader/CEI] We’re the ones asking questions around here: AGs dodge public record/FOIA requests on probe [Chris Horner/Fox News]
- “N.Y. Senate passes bill banning funding for university student groups that ‘encourage’ ‘hate speech'” [Eugene Volokh]
- Licensing and other laws often restrict what members of professions and occupations can say, a problem that deserves more and better First Amendment scrutiny than it’s gotten [Timothy Sandefur, Regulation]
- Ninth Circuit will review ruling striking down Idaho ag-gag law [Baylen Linnekin on appellate amicus, Idaho Statesman, NPR last year]
- Ken White on why it’s okay to loathe Gawker and its actions but still see the danger in Thiel/Hogan episode [L.A. Times, related Dan McLaughlin, earlier]
Archive for 2016
Daniel Fisher on the VW settlement
The big Volkswagen settlement dishes out a large pot of money for owners of VW diesels, whether they feel injured or not. “A roster of the country’s biggest class-action firms will get an unspecified but huge amount of fees, likely measured in the billions. And buried in the 42-page proposed settlement are tidbits for other folks, including the professional association for state attorneys general and manufacturers of electric cars. … Some AGs justify such payments as reimbursement for their investigative expenses, but as tax-supported officers it is not clear why their professional association should get the money.” [Daniel Fisher, Forbes]
“Why police were called to a South Jersey third-grade class party”
“A third grader had made a comment about the brownies being served to the class. After another student exclaimed that the remark was ‘racist,’ the school called the Collingswood Police Department, according to the mother of the boy who made the comment.” Police calls seem to be a frequent occurrence in the local schools: “Superintendent Scott Oswald estimated that on some occasions over the last month, officers may have been called to as many as five incidents per day in the district of 1,875 students.” [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Politics roundup
- Vice presidential candidate Bill Weld, at Libertarian ticket town hall with Gary Johnson: trade war that followed Smoot-Hawley tariff “croaked the world economy.” Points for using “croaked” in a policy debate [CNN transcript]
- Litigator in chief? USA Today deep dive on Donald Trump’s lawsuit involvements including non-payment and tax categories [earlier]
- Lawyers and law firms had given 350 times more to pro-Clinton than pro-Trump efforts as of late May [American Lawyer, graphic] Should a lawyer work for Trump? [Josh Blackman]
- Be warned. “If Congress refuses to act, Hillary will take administrative action” against guns, her campaign vows [J.D. Tuccille]
- Raises interesting constitutional issues whatever one’s views of a #NeverTrump revolt [Washington Examiner]
- Trial lawyer/social conservative slate bid to control Texas GOP goes down in flames. [Texas Tribune, earlier]
Brexit, toasters, and teakettles
Government to return $29,500 seized from Maryland dairy farmer
Good news in the Randy Sowers case, written about often in this space. [Institute for Justice, Edward Ericson, Jr./Baltimore City Paper, Jacob Sullum, earlier, more on forfeiture]
17 years ago today…
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Fraud week V: lucrative gore
A good bit of creativity has gone into the faking of accidents and injuries, from NYC injury king Morris Eisen’s special ruler for photographing the size of potholes (calibrated fictitiously so as to exaggerate their size) to the Philadelphia auto guys who “went as far as to have employees gather and store deer blood, hair and carcasses in the shop’s garage to be used as props in photos that were later submitted with insurance claims.” And some are more audacious than creative, as when a California woman got in trouble after allegedly sending “faked treatment documents and burn photos from a hospital website” to bolster a hot coffee spill claim against McDonald’s.
An entertaining and informative treatment of this subject is Ken Dornstein’s 1996 Accidentally on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America, about which I wrote this review at the time. Excerpt from my review:
In Illinois, runners took over the Community Hospital of Evanston, dispensing with doctors’ supervision and discouraging “real” nurses from applying. (“You’re going to be so bored here. There is nothing to do.”) The driver of the courtesy van whisking clients from law offices told why he liked the job: “No one is really hurt” so “no one gets sick on me”.
True-crime books usually aim to show how the dirty deed is done, and this one does not disappoint:
How do I get started? For a “paper” accident, try inflicting “controlled damage” on a couple of cars with a sledgehammer in a dark parking lot. Insert passengers. Summon a witness. Gather broken glass in bags for re-use.
That was easy, what next? “Staged” accidents: Buy rustbuckets, insure one and run it into another one full of recruited claimants-to-be (“cows”). If you’re nice, give them pillows.
I need symptoms! “OK, you can take tingles, and you can take hips or your shoulder,” said one coach to his aspiring victims. “But don’t go saying the exact same things.” And be glad you aren’t being sent to one of the House of Pain operations that massage would-be claimants with sandpaper and jagged can lids or flog them with apple-filled sacks. Let alone “Nub City”, the Florida town that, in the 1970s, could boast that something like 10% of its population had practiced self-amputation for insurance, typically popping a left hand with a hunting rifle.
Vernon, Florida, subject of a famous documentary by Errol Morris, is the subject of coverage here (“By the end of the ’50s, the Florida Panhandle was responsible for two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident claims in the United States.”) and here.
Fraud week IV: lawyers who should know better
Where there is highly organized claims fraud, there are often found clusters of lawyers, doctors and their associates.
In Las Vegas’s Medical Mafia case, “physicians who played ball are said to have been assured protection from malpractice suits from many feared attorneys, while those not in on the scheme appear in some cases to have been at extra peril.”
Disloyal insurance company employees or counsel are sometimes in on the game too. California’s 1980s “Alliance” scandal, “a covert joint venture between plaintiffs’ and defense lawyers to manufacture and prolong legal claims for which the insurers would be obliged to employ legal counsel, bilked large insurance companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1980s.”
We could multiply examples many times over from mass tort fields like asbestos (with its creative witness-coaching and memory-massaging approaches to the issue of product identification) but for a good single episode, check out the banana pesticide litigation against Central American producers. Like many litigation campaigns, it generated a not-so-indie “documentary” (financed by plaintiff’s lawyers) billed around the film festival circuit as exposing multinational corporations’ guilt. That was before a federal judge described the litigation before her as a “pervasive conspiracy to defraud” its target, Dole.
Fraud week III: jump-ons
Jumping onto the hood of an oncoming car is one way of getting into claims fraud with minimal commitment, but there are many other ways, some of them quite complex and diabolical. After air crashes in Latin America in which U.S. residents lost their lives, it was noticed that a number of youthful claimants appeared on the scene whose mothers described them as the unacknowledged out-of-wedlock children of American men reported as lost on the ill-fated plane. These children, living in countries like Mexico and Guatemala, would then file claims in U.S. court against the airline, aircraft maker, and other potentially liable parties for cash settlements over the loss of what was said to be their father. These claims would come as bewildering, even horrifying news to the wives, children, and other family members of the deceased, who had to consider the possibility that the men they thought they knew so well had been living an undisclosed second life. At least one survivor — who probably had better reason that most to doubt the veracity of the claim — decided to fight:
In one case, a 53-year-old San Francisco man who perished on the doomed flight is alleged to have recently fathered two Latin American children who deserved to collect for his decease, a story that ran into trouble when his outraged gay partner of twenty years, Dale Rettinger, 63, stepped forward to challenge it.
For a defense by a Florida lawyer who had been involved in the filing of multiple surprise-heir claims, follow the above link. And more conventional jump-on fraud occurs when, say, a city bus with 15 passengers on board gets in an accident and by the time the police arrive the number of passengers is up to 30. (From 2014: Jackson, Miss. driver leaves scene of accident and returns accompanied by more victims.) And it even happens with cruise ships.