- “Texas Bill Would End ‘Wrongful Birth’ Suits Against Doctors” [Insurance Journal, earlier on wrongful birth]
- Worse outcomes mean more risk of being sued: “Doctors are refusing to operate on smokers.” [Karen Garloch, Charlotte Observer/Macon Telegraph]
- 2015 breakdown by state of medical malpractice suits per capita and aggregate payouts (the latter not broken down per capita, but with Northeastern states, as usual, far overrepresented) [Becker Hospital Review] Note: figures challenged, see comments;
- “…and the medical board voted to dismiss the complaint against you.” [Birdstrike, White Coat]
- Britain considers limiting cost (legal fee) awards in lower value medical claims [John Tingle, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
- Will not surprise those who’ve been around: pharma cos. might fight attempts at easing FDA drug introduction rules [Bloomberg] Muscular dystrophy patients can see the case for drug importation [Alex Tabarrok who is interviewed on the subject by Robert Gebelhoff] Related on FDA: Ronald Bailey, Reason.
Archive for March, 2017
Judge Posner and the much-too-pampered cats
Eike v. Allergan, a consumer class action certification case about allegedly over-generous allotments of fluid in eyedrop dispensers, raises two questions: how’d this case get past the motion-to-dismiss stage? And, second, how did Judge Richard Posner manage to go out on such a very extended cat metaphor in a case having nothing to do with cats? [Lowering the Bar, Chicago Tribune, ABA Journal]
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?”
Yes, Sen. Whitehouse, I am, proudly [Jonathan Adler/Volokh] We have earlier noted Sen. Whitehouse’s brutal efforts to subpoena and silence wrongthink in nonprofit and academic circles on climate issues.
Social media “right to be forgotten”
A First-Amendment-hostile concept pioneered in Europe, the “right to be forgotten,” rears its head in the New York assembly, though it looks unlikely to go anywhere soon [Eugene Volokh, Scott Shackford/Reason, earlier]
ADA: “Needle-Phobic Pharmacist Loses $1.8 Million on Appeal”
“Reversing and remanding a $1.8 million jury verdict, the Second Circuit found Tuesday that Rite Aid was justified in firing a needle-phobic pharmacist who refused to administer immunizations.” [Courthouse News] The man’s trypanophobia — fear of needles — gave him a discrimination claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the Second Circuit ruled the evidence “compels a finding that immunization injections were an essential job requirement.” [Dan Schwartz]
Report: USDA inspectors wrote up meat packing owner over pamphlets in breakroom
According to reports last month in the religious press, the owner of a small meat-packing operation in western Michigan left some pamphlets around in the breakroom reflecting his views on same-sex marriage (opposed) and got written up for it by inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose duties, it seems, include spotting and demanding prompt rectification of hostile-environment harassment, in this case consisting of the printed word. [Reformed Free Publishing Association, Gene Veith] And Stephanie Slade of Reason has a big essay on religious liberty, in which I’m quoted, in Jesuit magazine America.
Regulation magazine turns 40
“Forty years and going strong: Regulation magazine.” I look back with enormous fondness at the years I spent there. [Cato Institute Tumblr; anniversary issue with overview essay by Peter Van Doren and Thomas Firey; David Henderson on the hopes for further deregulation]
Banking and finance roundup
- Per more than 30 state attorneys general, the less information lenders can draw on in credit reports, the better the credit system will work [Annamaria Andriotis, WSJ; exclusion of many tax liens and civil judgments under pressure from authorities]
- Federalist Society podcasts: Ted Frank on Walgreen shareholder litigation, Thaya Brook Knight on “predatory lending” cases before Supreme Court [Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami and Wells Fargo v. City of Miami; can cities sue under Fair Housing Act as indirectly injured?];
- The eternal recycling of bad old ideas: efforts to bring back public ownership of banks persist [East Bay Express, Oakland; earlier]
- Statutes of limitations protect us from spending life anxious about distant past coming back to haunt us over half-forgotten slights [Ilya Shapiro, Thaya Brook Knight, and David McDonald on Kokesh v. SEC “equitable disgorgement” end-run around 5-year statute]
- Obligatory employee vacation-taking as an anti-fraud measure [Dan Lewis, Now I Know]
- Obama’s hosing of secured creditors in Chrysler bankruptcy raised borrowing costs of other unionized firms [Bradley Blaylock, Alexander Edwards, and Jared Stanfield, SSRN]
Dial O for opportunism
“More than 25 years after its passage, a federal telemarketing law hasn’t just created a cottage industry for lawyers – it has spawned a group of professional plaintiffs like [Melody] Stoops who are armed with several cell phones for the purpose of receiving debt collection calls often intended for other individuals.” [John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine]
Forethought goes into the question of how to be legally injured by unlawful calls in the manner most lucrative under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA):
Individuals receiving calls they believe to be in violation have two options to try to maximize recovery.
-Answer the phone, tell the company to stop calling and hope the calls keep coming. Those calls could be construed as “willful” violations of the TCPA and lead to triple damages; or
-Don’t answer the phone, never tell the company to stop calling but chronicle how many times it does. This would lead to only $500 claims but keeps the company calling.
The “wait and build damages” strategy can sometimes pay off nicely:
“Mr. Spencer is seeking to exploit the TCPA to recover a $2.7 million jackpot in statutory penalties because he inadvertently received – on a five-dollar disposable cell phone that he seldom used – emergency text alerts that the previous user of his cell phone number had requested,” AT&T’s attorneys wrote in November while asking for summary judgment.
“(Spencer) waited for the text alerts to accumulate, and then filed this lawsuit seeking millions of dollars unrelated to any alleged harm that he experienced.”
Later entries in the three-part series include part two, “the story of a Polish immigrant who has allegedly made more than $800,000 with a phone number belonging to his ex-wife,” and part three, on a defendant firm that struck back with racketeering suit against a prolific California attorney who has filed many TCPA claims. (earlier)
P.S. And related, just out today: junk-fax suits, covered here extensively in the past, “are active in industries that still rely on faxes for conducting business, such as hospitality and health care, a review of court filings shows. Recent lawsuits complain of unwanted faxes hawking medical supplies, pet medications, air conditioners and mortgage refinancing.” TCPA is nicknamed Total Cash for Plaintiffs’ Attorneys [Sara Randazzo, Wall Street Journal]
“The Oxford Comma Case Proves We Need New Employment Laws, Not Better Grammar”
Suzanne Lucas (Evil HR Lady), in her column at Inc., uses the Oxford comma trucking-hours case as a jumping-off point for a wider discussion of how the current workplace regulatory regime needs overhaul, starting (but not ending) with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, a long-obsolete, coercively paternalistic, hard-to-understand mess:
Do I have a solution for all employment law? No. But where would I start? Well, with the assumption that employees over the age of 18 are adults and should be able to make their own contracts with employers. The key of my proposal would be that all job offers must be in writing (electronic or on paper) and that those terms could not be changed without advance notice. Let each person decide if a job offer makes him or her better or worse off.
She quotes my recent essay in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers (earlier on which).