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| ARCHIVE -- JULY 2000 (II) |
July 19-20 -- "Coke
Plaintiff Eavesdrops on Lawyers; Case Unravels". After
lawyers suing Coca-Cola on discrimination charges hold a conference call
with their clients and with Jesse Jackson, one of the clients, a Coke security
guard named Gregory Clark, quietly decides to stay on the line, rather
than hang up as the others and Jackson do, and listen to what the lawyers
say among themselves. The sensational results are aired in this remarkable
article in the Atlanta legal paper, which just might blow the tightly screwed
cap off the whole issue of lawyers' management of litigation in their own
interest -- don't even think of missing it (R. Robin McDonald, Fulton
County Daily Report (Atlanta), July
18) (Atlanta Journal-Constitution special page on Coke discrimination
litigation).
July 19-20 -- Editorial
roundup: "The wrong verdict on tobacco". By a wide margin,
the American people believe that though cigarettes are harmful, it should
be lawful to sell them. "Last
week's verdict by a Florida jury, however, suggests that what the American
people want is no longer terribly important when it comes to tobacco."
(Chicago Tribune, editorial, July 18). "[T]he judge prohibited
any testimony relating to choice and personal responsibility," contends
the New York Post. In plain English, the fix was in."
("Milking the Tobacco Cow", July 18). Jury foreman Leighton Finegan
said he was "insulted" when tobacco company lawyers raised the possibility
that the throat cancer of one of the plaintiffs might have been caused
by occupational dust exposure, but it's perfectly legitimate for defendants
to point out that health problems arise from multiple origins, which sheds
light on the unmanageable nature of the supposed "class" (Hickory (N.C.)
Record,
"$145,000,000,000!", July 17). "It says something about the class-action
lawsuit Florida smokers filed against the industry that two of the lead
plaintiffs in the case were medical officials who bragged of their own
ignorance," comments the Washington Times. "Said one, a 44-year-old
nurse, 'I had no idea there was anything wrong with cigarettes at all."
("That will be $145 billion, please", July 17). And Smarter
Times, the new online venture edited by Ira Stoll that keeps a
watchful journalistic eye on the New York Times, notes that the
newspaper's July 15 editorial "basically comes out in favor of using class
action lawsuits to put companies out of business, even when the Congress
or state legislatures are unwilling to declare the products illegal." (Issue
#28).
July 19-20 -- Disabled
accessibility for campaign websites: the gotcha game.
The Washington Post's online edition plays gotcha with political
campaign websites, most of which fail to heed disabled-accessibility
guidelines of the sort that may already be legally binding on a wide
range of private sites. The Al Gore (D) and Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) websites
are among the minority that comply with "Bobby",
the most widely used program for evaluating a site's disabled accessibility.
Sites that fall short on "Bobby" include those of George W. Bush (R), Hillary
Clinton (D-N.Y.), Ralph Nader (Green) and Patrick Buchanan (Reform). (Ryan
Thornburg, Mark Stencel and Ben White, "Political Graffiti Goes Online"
(third item), WashingtonPost.com, July
17).
However, running the Thornburg-Stencel-White article itself through
a "Bobby" check discloses that as of Tuesday evening it itself suffered
from at least fifteen violations of disabled accessibility rules: lack
of alternative text for images (12 instances), lack of redundant text links
for server-side image map hot-spots (2 instances), and lack of alt text
for image-type buttons in forms (1 instance) (full
"Bobby" evaluation of Post article). The article is also
reprinted
on Slate, where as of Tuesday evening it suffered from at least 19
Bobby infractions, including lack of alt text (18 instances) and lack of
button text (once) (evaluation).
Numbers are subject to change if and as the pages change, of course.
July 19-20 -- Target
Detroit. "Those in Michigan cheering state assaults on
the tobacco industry and gun
manufacturers may want to hold their applause," writes the Detroit News'
Jon Pepper, since the state's leading industry, automaking,
could face assault from some of the same litigation forces. ("Auto
industry could follow guns, tobacco into courtroom", June 4). Many
lawyers are eager to pin liability on the design of sport utility vehicles
because of their tendency to inflict higher than usual damage on other
motorists and pedestrians, but they've had trouble so far finding a theory
that will stick (Keith Bradsher, "S.U.V. Suits Still Face Long Odds", New
York Times, May
30). And a federal judge has refused to dismiss a defamation
countersuit by Philadelphia class action
firm Greitzer & Locks against DaimlerChrysler and its associate general
counsel, Lew Goldfarb, arising from charges DaimlerChrysler filed last
fall (see Nov. 12) charging the Greitzer
firm and another attorney with the filing of abusive class action litigation.
The Greitzer firm is now suing Mr. Goldfarb personally for defamation and
interference with contractual advantage and cites, as evidence of malice,
his description of the cases filed by Greitzer & Locks as "a form of
legalized blackmail" and of one such suit as one that "belongs in the class
action hall of shame." How many times do we have to warn you to watch
very
carefully what you say when you criticize
lawyers? (Shannon P. Duffy, "DaimlerChrysler GC Can Be
Sued in Pennsylvania", The Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), June
30; "Greitzer & Locks Takes a Swing Of Its Own at DaimlerChrysler",
Jan. 14).
July 18 -- Florida
tobacco verdict. Our editor has an op-ed piece in today's
Wall
Street Journal discussing last week's punitive award in the Florida
tobacco class action: Walter Olson, "'The Runaway Jury' is No Myth",
Jul.
18. For more on the Engle case, see July
10; our editor's Wall Street Journal op-ed from Jul.
12, 1999; the related commentaries on our tobacco-litigation
page; and the press clips at Yahoo
Full Coverage. Also check our numerous commentaries, from yesterday
and earlier, on the multistate tobacco
settlement, which counts as trial lawyers' bird-in-the-hand compared with
Engle's
bird-in-the-bush. Later developments in case: see
May
15, 2004 and links from there.
July 18 -- "Court
says warning about hot coffee unnecessary". It makes a
contrast to the famed McDonald's case: the Nevada Supreme Court, upholding
a lower court's decision, has dismissed a lawsuit against a restaurant
and its suppliers alleging negligent failure to warn about the dangers
of hot coffee. Lane Burns had sued the Turtle Stop restaurant after
spilling coffee on his leg and suffering burns, but District Judge Gene
Porter ruled that the "danger is open
and obvious." That differs from the sentiments of the judge and
jury in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where octogenarian Stella Liebeck won
a $2.9 million judgment against the fast-food chain, which was later reduced
to $480,000 and settled for an undisclosed sum. (Cy Ryan, "Court
says warning about hot coffee unnecessary", Las Vegas Sun, July
11).
July 18 -- "Chutzpah
is. . ." Eugene
Volokh of UCLA law school writes as follows: "Chutzpah is .
. . when you get a job working for your
wife's parents because you are their son-in-law, and then when you and
she get divorced and her parents fire you, you sue them for marital status
discrimination.
"This is exactly what happened in Matteson v. Prince, Inc.,
Montana
Dep't of Lab. & Indus. No. 9901008658 (1999) (pdf document).
Amazingly, the agency held that the employer's behavior was illegal discrimination,
but Matteson wasn't entitled to any damages because in this particular
case the ex-son-in-law would have been fired in any event because he had
gotten into a shouting match with his employers at work."
July 18 -- Breakthrough
for plaintiffs on latex gloves? Last Thursday an Alameda
County, Calif. jury returned an $800,000 award to a health care worker
against Baxter Health Care, which formerly made latex
gloves for hospital use. Naturally occurring substances in the
gloves sometimes trigger virulent allergies in health care workers which
prevent them from continuing in medical work, and lawyers have argued that
had Baxter instituted a practice of washing the gloves before sale to remove
surface proteins, it would have reduced their allergy-stimulating potential.
Hundreds more latex allergy lawsuits are pending, and lawyers are hoping
the new case, McGinnis v. Baxter Health Care, will serve
as a model for others. (Sonia Giordani, "California Latex Glove Verdict
Sets Tone", The Recorder (San Francisco), July 17) (more
about latex allergies) (see also Oct.
26).
July 17 -- Dershowitz's
Florida frolic? Alan Dershowitz is demanding $34 million
for putting in 118 hours of work on the state of Florida's Medicaid-reimbursement
tobacco
suit, according to two of the lawyers who helped mastermind that suit,
Robert Montgomery and Sheldon Schlesinger. The two filed suit against
the famed Harvard law prof last week, asking a judge to determine whether
he's entitled to a bonus they say they never promised him. Through
their attorney they allege that Dershowitz is asserting an entitlement
to 1 percent of the gargantuan $3.4 billion fee award made to the attorneys
who represented the state, which would amount to $34 million, but they
say he hasn't submitted any hourly time sheets to back up that claim.
"He wants a lot of money, and he's not entitled to it," said J. Michael
Burman, attorney for Montgomery and Schlesinger. If the lawyers'
figures are accurate, $34 million divided by 118 hours would work out to
$288,000 an hour. (Jon Burstein, "Lawyer wants $34 million for working
118 hours on Florida's case against tobacco companies", Fort Lauderdale
Sun-Sentinel, July 14; more on Florida tobacco fees: April
12, December 27-28).
July 17 -- Ness
Motley's aide-Grégoire. In a single day,
December 8, 1999, Christine Gregoire, the attorney general from the state
of Washington who's been mentioned as a possible AG in a Gore administration,
saw her re-election campaign kitty more than double. The benefactors,
who sent nearly $23,000, weren't Washington residents at all, but rather
two dozen lawyers and their relatives associated with the Charleston, S.C.
law firm of Ness, Motley, which is expected to pocket a billion dollars
or more in fees from the multistate tobacco
settlement that Gregoire was instrumental in brokering. An aide to
Gregoire, who engaged Ness Motley to represent Washington along with the
many other states it represented, dismisses talk of payoffs and calls the
contributions "a reflection that someone has a high regard for an elected
official." "I only wish we had given her more," says Ness superlawyer
Joe Rice, quoted in this article in Mother Jones spotlighting the
sluicing of tobacco-fee money to friendly Democratic pols. (Rick
Anderson, "Tobacco money flows both ways", Mother Jones, July
6).
July 17 -- Challenging
the multistate settlement. In a Cato Institute paper,
Thomas C. O'Brien argues that the anticompetitive provisions of the multistate
tobacco
settlement, such as those curbing entry by newly formed cigarette companies,
should rightly be seen as themselves an antitrust violation and as going
beyond the duly constituted power of the fifty states, which would open
up the possibility of injunctive relief and treble damage remedies "available
in private lawsuits brought directly by injured parties, including smokers
and nonparticipating tobacco companies." (Thomas C. O’Brien, "Constitutional
and Antitrust Violations of the Multistate Tobacco Settlement", Cato Policy
Analysis No. 371, May 18 (summary
links to PDF document)). Also from Cato, Richard E. Wagner of George
Mason University offers another critique of the multistate settlement ("Understanding
the Tobacco Settlement: The State as Partisan Plaintiff", Regulation,
vol. 22, no. 4 (table
of contents; follow links to PDF document). Cato, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and the National Smokers Alliance filed an amicus
brief last week urging the Third Circuit to invalidate the nationwide tobacco
settlement agreement on constitutional grounds. ("Public Interest
Groups Urge Court to Invalidate Tobacco Agreement " CEI press release,
July 13). On collusive aspects of the multistate settlement, see
our commentary for July 29 of last year;
Rinat Fried, "Distributors Challenging Tobacco Deal", The Recorder/CalLaw,
June 30, 1999; and "Puff, the Magic Settlement" (Reason, January).
July 14-16 -- "Are
lawyers running America?". Time's feature story
this week on the Fourth Branch leads with the tale of tobacco/HMO nemesis
Dickie Scruggs' recent appearance before the Connecticut State Medical
Society (see Feb. 22, "P.S."), where
he "was introduced so gushingly that even he was embarrassed. 'You forgot
to mention,' he chided the society's head, 'that I rested on the seventh
day.'" Among bits of new-to-us info about the great legal magnates,
we learned that "Wayne Reaud (pronounced Ree-oh) has used his hundreds
of millions of dollars in fees from asbestos and other 'toxic tort' litigation
to buy the local newspaper and a chunk of downtown real estate in his hometown
of Beaumont, Texas," while Florida's Frederic Levin "concedes his firm's
$300 million take [from tobacco] was
'totally obscene' and says he's giving much of it to charity," having already
had the University of Florida Law School named after him following a big
gift. Who's to be sued next? All sorts of targets, but the
magazine reports that some lawyers "are considering suits against the alcoholic-beverage
industry, which they would hold responsible for drunk-driving deaths and
other alcohol-related losses, using the same 'negligent marketing' allegations
that have been lodged against gunmakers."
Quotes our editor twice, too. Most memorable line: "Ask Scruggs if
trial lawyers are trying to run America, and he doesn't bother to deny
it. 'Somebody's got to do it,' he says, laughing." (Adam Cohen, "Are
lawyers running America?", Time, July 17)
July 14-16 -- "'Whiplash!'
America's most frivolous lawsuits". Michigan
Lawsuit Abuse Watch is promoting this new
book by comedy writer James Percelay and Jeremy Deutchman (Andrews
& McMeel). Five of the cases from the book are retold at the
M-LAW site, including ones involving a woman who sued a guide-dog service
because the dog it provided did not keep its blind human master from stepping
on her foot and breaking her toe; a man who cut off his hand, believing
it Satanically possessed, refused a doctor's pleas to let him reattach
it, and then sued the doctor later for complying with his instructions;
a college student who tried to "moon" friends from a third-floor window,
fell out and sued for his injuries; a criminal who filed an excessive-force
suit against police after being apprehended for a particularly brutal crime,
and won a $184,000 jury verdict, later thrown out; and a man who spilled
a cold chocolate milkshake on himself, was so startled that he crashed
his car, and sued McDonald's. (All five cases were sooner or later
unsuccessful in the courts.) We haven't seen the actual book yet
(or fact-checked the five cases, although we remember most of them from
when they originally happened) but it seems to be selling pretty well on
Amazon. Also check out M-LAW's "obligatory
disclaimer".
July 14-16 -- Never
too stale a claim. Asbestos, lead paint, small-plane
and machine-tool liability cases have
all demonstrated that American lawyers are willing to trace responsibility
back at least as far as the first decades of the twentieth century if that's
what it takes to find a deep pocket chargeable with injury. So it
shouldn't really have come as much of a surprise when a Texas court entered
a $234 million default judgment against the government of Russia on behalf
of a man whose grandfather's property was confiscated during the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution. Dan Nelson, attorney for claimant Lee Magness, "says
he will start trying to collect by seizing any Russian art exhibits on
tour in this country", and preliminary maneuvers to that effect led to
a temporary delay in two art tours. The Russian government has filed
a protest with our State Department (for more on the foreign-policy repercussions
of the American way of suing, see July 6).
The extreme willingness of our current legal system to revisit very old
transactions in search of grist for litigation -- much in contrast with
an earlier law's concern for repose and finality -- probably made it inevitable
that we'd see the current boomlet of discussion regarding reparations claims
over slavery: if we're already willing to go back 83 years to 1917, why
not a further 52 years to 1865? Besides, some of us have our eye
on the British, who've enjoyed virtual impunity for much too long over
their burning of American homes during the Revolutionary War and War of
1812. (Susan Borreson, "Texans' Default Judgment Against Russians
Stands", Texas Lawyer, Feb. 1).
July 13 -- Class-action
assault on eBay. It's doubtful whether eBay,
the massively popular electronic flea market, would ever have gotten off
the ground had its proprietors been required to warrant the goods being
sold. In April, however, attorney James Krause of the San Diego-based
class-action firm of Krause &
Kalfayan filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California residents who
had bought sports memorabilia, the subject of widely reported fakery, over
the online marketplace. An eight-year-old
provision of California law stipulates that dealers in autographed sports
memorabilia must provide a certificate of authenticity. Krause is
seeking class-action status on behalf
of all California buyers, and is asking for the penalties laid out in the
statute, which according to AuctionWatch "entitles the buyer to ten times
the purchase amount and other damages should an autograph prove to be forged
or come without this certificate". EBay contends that it is not a
dealer or auctioneer but simply provides the modern equivalent of newspaper
classified ads, so that only the individual sellers could properly be held
liable. "If successful, the suit could undermine eBay's business
model," reports the Industry Standard. "Legal experts say
that if the company can be held liable for the actions of its users, it
is likely to face a flurry of suits that would severely handicap its business."
Krause & Kalfayan has also
filed suits on unrelated theories against such firms as Microsoft (see
Dec.
23), Federal Express, Atlantic Richfield, Nine West and Charles Schwab
(complaint and related
news story at Krause & Kalfayan site; Victoria Slind-Flor, "EBay Denies
Auctioneer Status", National Law Journal, July
10; Miguel Helft, "EBay: We're Not Auctioneers", Industry Standard,
May 1; "The Class Action Suit", AuctionWatch, undated).
Bonus:Weird
eBay Auctions (WhatTheHeck.com) (& update Nov.
22-23: judge certifies class action)
July 13 -- Nader
on the Corvair. The litigation advocate's presidential
candidacy makes a good occasion to revisit his original claim to fame,
the Corvair episode. The car's
safety record turned out in hindsight far better than you'd have guessed
reading Unsafe at Any Speed, but "being wrong on the Corvair hasn't
hurt Nader's career one bit," writes Ronald Bailey, science correspondent
for Reason. ("'Saint Ralph's' Original Sin", National Review
Online, June
28).
MORE LINKS: Bill Vance, CanadianDriver.com
("The Corvair's handling would later be exonerated, but the damage had
been done"); Corvair Society of America
(CORSA); Brock Yates, Car & Driver, reprinted in CORSA'sThe
Windmill, Nov./Dec.
1971, and Charles B. Camp, "Popularity of Nader Declines to Its Nadir
Among Corvair Owners", Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1971, reprinted
at Rick's Corvair Scrapbook; Thomas Sowell, "Lawsuits and Legal Visions",
1987 speech at Shavano Institute Seminar, reprinted
at tsowell.com; Andrew Gurudata, "Great
Car At Any Speed", Corvair
Webring; Corvair Project.
July 13 -- Access
to something. Federal prosecutors are investigating claims
that attorney Denice Patrick of Lynnwood, Washington, outside of Seattle,
violated ethics and conflict-of-interest
rules. Specifically, they're looking into allegations that while
employed to write legal decisions for the federal Social Security Administration,
she also "moonlighted for more than a year as a private lawyer who devoted
much of her practice to bringing claims against the agency." Ms.
Patrick, whose attorney denies the charges and says they're being brought
against her in retaliation for whistleblowing about agency wrongdoing,
has been active on a Washington State Bar Association panel promoting "access
to justice". (Sam Skolnik, "Lawyer allegedly violated ethics",
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May
22).
July 12 -- Battered?
Hand over your kids. Latest advance in child protection:
seizing and placing in foster care children whose moms are abused by their
husbands or boyfriends or vice versa. New York City can remove kids
from their homes if either parent is believed to "engage in acts of domestic
violence," such as slaps, kicks, shoves, or more serious violence, whether
or not these acts are directed at the children. "Often," reports
the New York Times's Somini Sengupta, the parent
who loses children this way "may have done nothing wrong or negligent,
but simply lacked the financial or emotional resources to leave an abusive
partner." The rules encourage victims of abuse to conceal it, fearing
their kids will be taken from them if they tell medical or social workers.
And while it's clearly not good for a child to observe parents engaged
in domestic battles, advocates say the city underestimates the trauma to
kids of being yanked out of the home they know and sent to live among strangers.
(Somini Sengupta, "Tough Justice: Taking a Child When One Parent Is Battered",
New York Times, July 8 (reg)).
Update Oct.
31, 2004: New York high court ruling favorable to mothers; Dec.
19, 2004 city agrees to change policy.
July 12 -- Forum-shopping
in South Carolina. Last year, AP reports, the big railroad
CSX
paid out about $5 million in five accident lawsuits filed in Hampton
County, S.C., and it faces another 15 cases pending in the county,
all represented by the Hampton law firm of Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth
& Detrick. However, none of the five accidents being sued over
had actually taken place in Hampton County; all had been taken there from
elsewhere in search of the plaintiff-friendly brand of justice handed out
in the impoverished county, where 40 percent of residents have not graduated
high school. "They are poor people who don't like big corporations,"
said Dick Harpootlian, a prominent plaintiff's lawyer in the state capital,
Columbia, as well as chairman of the state's Democratic Party. "We
don't mind being there if we belong there, but these cases are being valued
at between two and three times what they would elsewhere," said Jim Lady,
a lawyer for the railroad, who adds that it would be equally unfair if
the law permitted his client to remove all cases to Lexington
County, where jurors are known as being as conservative as those in
Hampton are liberal. Now a move is afoot in the state legislature
to curb forum-shopping by giving plaintiffs a choice of at most three venues:
the one where the accident took place, the one where they live, or the
one where the railroad is headquartered. Trial lawyers are
upset: "If they are paying us more than what they are paying elsewhere,
it's because they are not paying fairly in other counties," says Johnny
Parker, a lawyer with the Peters firm in Hampton. State Sen. Brad
Hutto (D-Orangeburg), whose district includes Hampton County and who also
happens to be a trial attorney, says that the move "smacks of special-interest
legislation ... Every courthouse in this state is presided over by a judge.
If CSX doesn't like the result of a court case, they have the right to
appeal. It's not the law firm that's being punished, it's the person bringing
the suit." The Virginia legislature some years back enacted similar
legislation curbing the ability of lawyers from around the state to file
railroad suits in the city of Portsmouth, where juries had a reputation
for big-ticket verdicts. (Associated Press, "Bill would make generous
Hampton County juries unavilable in many railroad suits," South Carolina
state/regional wire, June 12).
July 12 -- Suing
Nike for getting hacked. Some Web-watchers have been predicting
(see Feb. 26) that lawsuits may be forthcoming
attempting to lay the costs of hacker attacks on deep-pocket entities that,
it's argued, should have done more to prevent them. Now a Web
entrepreneur named Greg Lloyd Smith says his lawyers are drawing up a complaint
against Nike. "His beef: When Nike's website was hijacked [last month],
whoever hijacked the domain re-directed Nike.com's traffic through Smith's
Web servers in the U.K., bogging them down and costing Smith's Web hosting
company time and money." (Craig Bicknell, "Whom to Sue for Nike.com
Hack?", Wired News, June
29; "Webjackers Do It To Nike", Wired News, June
21).
July 11 -- Australia:
antibias laws curb speech. An official civil-rights tribunal
in New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia, has ruled that
the Australian Financial Review committed an unlawful act of bias
when it published an article on its opinion page making slighting comments
about Palestinians. The offending piece, a short item by journalist
Tom Switzer, had suggested that Palestinians had engaged in acts of terrorism,
could not be trusted in Mideast peace talks, and remained "vicious thugs
who show no serious willingness to comply with agreements". The tribunal
"found it was irrelevant whether the author intended to incite racial hatred
or whether anyone had in fact been incited", and dismissed a free-comment
defense as irrelevant. It has yet to decide on a "remedy" for the
speech;
among its powers are to order a retraction and apology, and to order the
paper, which is owned by the John Fairfax Group, to "implement a program
or policy aimed at eliminating unlawful discrimination". (Mike Seccombe,
"Finding 'restricts' freedom of speech", Sydney Morning Herald,
Jul. 10) (via Freedom
News Daily).
July 11 -- "Report
on medical errors called erroneous". You read it here
first (see Feb. 22, Feb.
28, March 7 commentaries): more critics
are stepping forward to find fault with that highly publicized study alleging
that "medical errors" kill between
44,000 and 98,000 patients a year. In the Journal of the
American Medical Association, three doctors associated with the University
of Indiana's Regenstreif Institute explain why they believe the study is
so constructed as to exaggerate the avoidable damage done by medical mistakes,
and study author Lucian Leape, of Harvard's School of Public Health, responds
with a defense. (Rick Weiss, "Report on Medical Errors Called Erroneous",
Washington Post, July
5; Clement J. McDonald; Michael Weiner; Siu L. Hui, "Deaths Due to
Medical Errors Are Exaggerated in Institute of Medicine Report" (text)
(pdf);
Lucian L. Leape, "Institute of Medicine Medical Error Figures Are Not Exaggerated"
(text)
(pdf),
JAMA,
July 5 (table
of contents))
July 11 -- ADA's
unintended consequences. The Americans with Disabilities
Act was supposed to improve the employment outlook for disabled
persons, but instead their participation in the labor force has plunged
steeply since the act's passage compared with that of the able-bodied.
Thomas DeLeire, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Harris
Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, analyzed data for a sample of
men aged 18 to 65 and found that labor force participation fell after the
act for virtually every identifiable subgroup of disabled men, but that
the relative slippage was worst for those with lower levels of job experience
and education, and those with mental impairments. DeLeire believes
the law has imposed on employers perverse incentives not to hire and retain
disabled workers, since they now risk the possibility of costly and uncertain
disputes should they differ with the worker about what constitutes "reasonable"
(and thus obligatory) accommodation. ("The Unintended Consequences
of the Americans with Disabilities Act", Regulation, v. 23, no.
1 -- table
of contents links to pdf
document).
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