June 9-11 -- "Look
for the Kiwi label". Our editor's newest Reason
column takes a skeptical look at the "anti-sweatshop" movement, which is
quickly acquiring a large litigation component along with its substantial
campus-activist presence. Also takes up the curious question of why
Notre Dame, at the behest of its anti-sweatshop working group, banned the
manufacture of its licensed products in New Zealand, not exactly known
as a hellhole of oppressive industrial employment.
(July).
June 9-11 -- Risky?
Who'da thunk it? A jury last month awarded $111.5 million,
which will reach $164 million with interest, to a wealthy horse breeder
and Bahamas resident who bought on margin $6.5 billion in foreign currency
futures through Bear Stearns and sued the investment firm after sustaining
severe losses. The jury found Bear Stearns negligent in not keeping
client Henryk de Kwiatkowski, 76, on a shorter leash and not warning him
more carefully about the risks. Bear argued that de Kwiatkowski was
a sophisticated client eager to gamble
who'd sustained $100 million currency speculation losses on two previous
occasions. The judgment would amount to almost a quarter of the firm's
profits last year. (Colleen DeBaise, "Investor Awarded $111.5 Million
In Trading Case Against Bear Stearns", DowJones.com, May 16; "Bear Stearns
Must Pay Added $52.5 Million To Investor Who Sued", DowJones.com, Jun.
7). de Kwiatkowski said he'd been led astray by relying on the expressed
bullishness about the dollar's prospects of Bear economist Wayne Angell,
a former federal reserve governor; instead the dollar sank. According
to Bloomberg News, Bear chief executive James Cayne, on the stand, countered
that economists are right only 35 percent to 40 percent of the time --
"They don't really have a good record as far as predicting the future"
-- and that the role of the firm's economist was in his view "entertainment".
("Bear Stearns economist painted as entertainer; judge doesn't buy it",
Bloomberg/St. Paul Pioneer Planet, June 3) (see also Dec.
6).
June 9-11 -- Don't
cooperate. In Fairfield Center, Maine, attorneys representing
19 people claiming injury from the toxic
effects of papermaking wastes are advising their clients not to cooperate
with a public health survey intended to assess residents' health concerns,
because the results might be used against their cause. The 19 are
suing Kimberly-Clark Corp.
and Sappi
Fine Paper North America. (Doug Harlow, "Attorneys fight local
health poll", CentralMaine.com (Kennebec Journal/Waterville Morning
Sentinel), May 10).
June 9-11 -- Have
some coffee. "Attorney Arnold Levine -- known for his
in-your-face
style that clearly some take literally -- has sued opposing counsel Jonathan
Alpert, charging Alpert threw a [lukewarm] cup of coffee at Levine" during
a recent mediation session. "Alpert said the allegation is not accurate,
and called Levine's lawsuit 'a stunt.'" Levine is representing the
Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the lawsuit, in which Alpert is suing "on behalf
of season ticket holders who believe they were shortchanged by the football
team". (AP/Miami Herald, "Lawyer drenches foe with coffee;
grounds for another suit", Jun. 7).
June 9-11 -- Jeff
MacNelly, RIP. The nation's finest political cartoonist
has succumbed to lymphoma at age 52. He continued to turn out terrific
work until very nearly the end, as with the Microsoft-themed
entries of April
4, April
27, and May
5. (Richmond
Times-Dispatch, Chicago
Tribune obits;
MacNelly.com).
June 9-11 -- Customer
offense. The Michigan Court of Appeals is considering
a disability-rights claim by supermarket
bagger Karl Petzold, who has Tourette's Syndrome and was dismissed by the
Farmer Jack chain after his coprolalia (involuntary utterance of obscenities
and racial slurs) offended blacks and women who were present. The
store believes Petzold's utterances might subject it to liability under
fast-spreading "customer hostile environment" doctrines. ("Court
to decide if bagger is disabled", Detroit News, May
1).
June 8 -- Judge
cracks wish bone. Microsoft's
refusal to agree that it had done anything wrong helped seal its fate.
(Final Judgment,
at DoJ site; Lisa M. Bowman, "Judge: Break Microsoft in two", ZDNet News,
June
7; ZDNet roundup;
Reason
"Breaking Issues").
June 8 -- Latest
wrongful-birth case. Last month (May
9) we reported on a Phoenix trial where Mom was suing doctors for the
cost of raising her unwanted son because they hadn't identified her pregnancy
fast enough for her to have a convenient abortion. Yesterday's Boston
Globe
reports on a case from suburban Revere in which Jennifer Mosher is suing
her obstetrician over a sterilization
effort that fell short, leaving her with a healthy but unwanted toddler
named Samantha; she's now suing for the cost of raising the child, including
tuition at a private college. (Raja Mishra, "Malpractice suit weighs Revere
girl's worth", June 7).
June 8 -- From
our mail sack: poetry corner. Reader Paul W. Green
of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona writes to say that Smith
& Wesson's recent "settlement of" (capitulation to) the siege of
its business by lawyers sent him back to reread Rudyard Kipling's poem
"Dane-geld",
inspiring him to pen this updated version which he entitles "Lawyer-loot".
It is currently a temptation for those skilled in litigation
To address a certain industry and shout:
"Your products are much hated and have been at length berated;
Unless you settle, we shall clean you out!"
And that is called demanding lawyer-loot,
And the creatures that seek it will swear,
That you've only to pay 'em the lawyer-loot,
And from suits they will henceforth forbear.
It is currently a temptation for those slapped with litigation
To back off and decline to take a stand:
"Though you are not in the right, it would cost too much to fight.
We will therefore settle for what you demand."
And that is called paying the lawyer-loot,
But the unvarnished fact must be faced,
That once you agree to pay lawyer-loot,
You won't see the end of the case.
For litigious devolution is a covert revolution,
To make supreme the power of the bar.
So when they file a suit and seek obscene amounts of loot,
To respond thus is the better course by far:
"We reject your extortion of lawyer-loot,
You dapper-clad robbers of cash,
We'll deny you your stake as the people awake,
And they soon will settle — your hash!"
June 8 -- Bulletin
board discussions. Participants on the Anandtech
Forums are currently discussing the Massachusetts golf club case mentioned
here yesterday. A few of the other bulletin board mentions this site
has had lately: Motley
Fool, Professional
Pilots Rumour Network, Free
Republic, BladeForums.
June 8 -- "Dear
Dr. Laura..." "Dr. Laura is a talk show host. She
knows a great deal about God's will, so one listener wrote in for some
advice: ...'I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to
kill him myself?'" (author unknown, reprinted
at AndrewTobias.com).
June 7 -- Update:
Massachusetts golf club case. Last fall a Boston
jury returned a whopping $1.9 million judgment in a sex discrimination
case brought by discontented women who said the Haverhill Golf and Country
Club wasn't allowing them prime tee times, full memberships, and other
privileges (see October 30-31).
Presiding judge John C. Cratsley, among other dictates, mandated that the
members of the club's board enroll in six hours of gender-sensitivity training.
Now the atmosphere at the club is icy in the extreme, with both the litigants
and their husbands shunned as fairway partners. "We thought [the
lawsuit] would make it better," says one of the women who sued. "But it
made the atmosphere worse." Was this really supposed to have come
as a surprise? (Lynn Rosellini, "'Those women' vs. the 'Neanderthals'",
U.S.
News & World Report, June 12).
June 7 -- Dangers
of linking. "Linking
is getting dangerous, as I've learned firsthand. In March, I wrote an article
called 'What Cyber Patrol doesn't want you to see' about a program that
reveals the zany secret blacklist of off-limits websites maintained by
Cyber Patrol, a blocking program sold by toy-maker Mattel. Cyber Patrol
doesn't just block porn: student organizations at Carnegie Mellon University
and Usenet discussions such as alt.journalism, soc.feminism, and, inexplicably,
fj.rec.food, were also verboten. In my article, I linked to the blacklist-viewing
program, and quickly found out that Mattel didn't like being criticized.
In response I received a copy of a temporary restraining order and a subpoena
from Mattel telling me I had violated U.S. copyright laws."
(Declan McCullagh, "Who's Next?", The New Republic Online, May
23; and see Eric J. Sinrod, Jeffery W. Reyna and Barak D. Jolish, "Linking
Down the Wrong Path", Upside, Jan. 18). Plus: commentary
on Dialectizer case (see May 18-21) (Julia
Lipman, "The big price of having a little fun on the Web", Boston.com digitalMass,
May 24).
June 7 -- "Foreman
Who Slept on Job Wins Reinstatement". "Douglas County
District Judge Gerald Moran has ruled that John Hauschild should get his
job back because the city did not properly disclose the evidence against
him before a pre-termination hearing. Hauschild was fired
last June [from his job as foreman at the city of Omaha's wastewater treatment
plant] after being caught taking naps at work by a tiny camera that was
secretly installed in his computer. In 15 days, the city alleged, the camera
caught him sleeping during part of every day." Hauschild appealed
the firing to the city's personnel board, saying he had a sleeping disorder,
and then to court when he lost before the board. (Angie Brunkow,
Omaha World-Herald, June 6).
June 7 -- Sooner
get rich. Oklahoma isn't an especially big state, but
lawyers who represented it in the multistate tobacco
litigation are set to waltz off with a remarkable $250 million fee
award, not an unsubstantial sum alongside the estimated $2 billion that
the state itself expects eventually to receive under the national settlement.
The lawyers argued to the arbitration panel that their efforts on behalf
of the Sooner State were really distinctive, really unusual, really productive,
and so forth. Six national law firms, including the much-fee'd Mississippi
firm of Richard Scruggs which also represented many other states, will
share the bounty with four local firms: Riggs, Abbey, Neal, Turpen, Orbison
& Lewis of Tulsa and Oklahoma City; John Norman and Associates of Oklahoma
City; Pray Walker Jackson Williamson & Marlar of Tulsa; and Preston
Trimble of Norman. ("Tobacco Settlement: Four state-based law firms
share in $250 million award", Tulsa World, May 18; Aileen Gallagher,
"Oklahoma Tobacco Lawyers Earn $250 Million", American Lawyer Media, May
18).
June 7 -- Welcome
Montreal Gazette readers. Doug Camilli's column,
June
5, mentioned our recent deer item from Texas.
June 6 -- Sudden
deceleration. Score another sharp setback for the notion,
still dear to some trial lawyers and TV newsmagazines, that cars experience
"sudden acceleration", taking off on their own though their owners are
pressing hard on the brakes. The National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration has flatly
denied a request that it reopen a probe of such reports, and the stinging
language of its recent 34-page memo to that effect, prepared by its Office
of Defects Investigation, raises the question of why the American legal
system continues to generate unending litigation
against carmakers on a theory that by now evokes barely concealed derision
from the government's own safety experts.
In 1986, sales of the Audi 5000 collapsed after CBS "60 Minutes" aired
a sensational show charging the German-made car with sudden acceleration.
In that case, as in those that came later, studies by NHTSA and by safety
agencies in other countries found no defect in the car and instead assigned
the blame to "pedal misapplication" -- put more plainly, drivers' tendency
to hit the gas pedal when they think they're hitting the brake.
Theories that seek to blame mechanical defects for sudden acceleration
face the difficulty of positing that something has gone wrong simultaneously
with a car's brake system as well as its power (since regular foot pressure
on the brake can readily overpower a gas pedal stuck at full throttle)
while in both cases leaving no trace behind of a distinctive "failure state"
for later investigators to discover.
But alarmism over the issue simply will not die -- not so long as expert
witnesses hired by trial lawyers keep developing new theories to take to
juries. In February of last year a segment on NBC's "Dateline" gave
extensive,
highly sympathetic coverage to the contentions of a plaintiff's expert
named Sam Sero, who blames sudden acceleration on malfunctions in the electronics
in cars' cruise control systems. A few months later Little
Rock, Ark. attorney Sandy S. McMath, representing plaintiffs in a sudden
acceleration case against Ford, filed the petition with NHTSA asking that
it take another look at the phenomenon in light of Sero's theories.
Bad move. In its response to the petition, NHTSA could hardly
have been more scathing. The proponents of the theory, it said, "have
never produced credible evidence" that it has led to a single incident
of sudden acceleration. "The theory propounded by Mr. Sero, and others,
has never been published nor is there any literature in the automotive
engineering field supporting it". The evidence for the pedal misapplication
finding remains "compelling". In an unusual swipe at Mr. Sero,
a licensed electrical engineer formerly with the Allegheny Power Company,
the agency said he "has no professional experience in the auto industry
and no human factors training". McMath, the lawyer who petitioned
for the probe, admits being stunned by the vigor of the agency's response.
You'd think "Dateline", of all programs, would tread gingerly in cases
where there's a danger it might get sold a bill of goods on issues of auto
safety (our take on the "exploding GM truck" scandal: Washington
Post,
National Review).
But aside from the embarrassment of having lent its credibility to sudden
acceleration alarmism, the network perpetrated a specific additional unfairness
that deserves to be noted for the record. At the time "Dateline"
produced its segment, a sudden-acceleration case called Manigault
v. Ford Motor Co. was working its way through the Ohio courts, and
going very badly indeed for Ford: Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Anthony
O. Calabrese Jr. had just issued -- as "Dateline" described it -- "a blistering
ruling, saying Ford had 'perpetrated a fraud upon the court' and may have
'misled the government.' 'In ordering a new trial,' he wrote: 'it seems
certain, that further death and injury is likely to occur unless and until
the truth about the causes of sudden acceleration events becomes public
knowledge.'"
Strong stuff, and hugely damaging to Ford's public image, which is why
the automaker must have cast a sigh of relief when in June, four months
after NBC aired its show, an appeals court in a 24-page opinion completely
reversed Judge Calabrese, ruling that Ford had adequately informed the
court of what it knew on sudden acceleration. No "fraud on the court",
no "certain[ty] that further death and injury is likely to occur", no new
trial, no nothing.
At this point NBC could still argue plausibly that it hadn't erred by
giving such dramatic play to Judge Calabrese's findings against the carmaker;
a ruling may later be overturned on appeal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't
newsworthy when it happened. But the least a network could do in
those circumstances would be to let its viewers know that the ruling was
overturned -- right? Since Ford's victory on appeal in Manigault,
company spokesman Jim Cain says the automaker has repeatedly asked "Dateline"
to run an update informing viewers of the appeals court's having thrown
out the earlier, "blistering" ruling charging it with fraudulent concealment
of safety hazards. Nearly a year later, Cain says the show
has run not one word to correct or update viewers' misimpressions.
Meanwhile, MSNBC's website continues to run the
original "Dateline" story, again with nary a hint of a correction or
update. (Harry Stoffer, "NHTSA: No sudden-acceleration probe", Automotive
News, May 15; "Vehicles that take off on their own?", NBC News/MSNBC,
Feb. 10, 1999; "Appeals court rules in favor of Ford in cruise control
suit", AP/Auto.com, Jun. 21, 1999; Ford protest letter to NBC before broadcast
of its show,
reprinted at Brill's Content site; NHTSA
report, issued April 6 under File # DP99-004 and published in Federal Register
Apr.
28).
Update Dec. 30, 2002: Ohio
Supreme Court orders new trial. (DURABLE
LINK)
June 6 -- Predestination
made him do it. "The man who is serving a life sentence
for the shooting of Pope John Paul II is requesting clemency, following
the Pope's revelation that the third secret of Fatima was a prophetic vision
of his assassination attempt. Mehmet Ali Agca argues that since his
crime was "preordained," he should be absolved
of all responsibility." Experts in both canon law and Italian
criminal law are skeptical about the 43-year-old Turk's claim. (Marina
Jimenez, "Assailant asks Pope's clemency, cites Fatima", National Post
(Canada)/Reuters, May 30).
June 5 -- Sunday's
Times
on Fred Baron. New York Times reporter Barry Meier
profiles the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's incoming president,
whose career "has mirrored the transition of many trial lawyers from scrappy
advocates for workers and consumers to wealthy businessmen eager to influence
policies and politics." A leading Gore fundraiser, "Mr. Baron, who
was also a major contributor to President Clinton, plays golf with the
president and dines several times a year at the White House," as well as
hosting a big annual bash for the Democratic National Committee at his
second home in Aspen, Colo. But he "remains haunted" by the disclosure
of the now-celebrated secret memo advising Baron & Budd clients what
to remember and what not to about their exposure to asbestos; the piece
quotes this site's editor who says that for ATLA to elect Mr. Baron president
given the ethical questions raised
by the coaching memo "suggests a boldness on their part or an imperviousness
to public criticism" (but the Times misspells our editor's name--
ouch). Mr. Baron has "struck back at his accusers with zeal," using
legal charges and the threat thereof as part of his armory. "To defend
himself he has hired legal troubleshooters like Abbe Lowell, the chief
investigative counsel for the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee
during the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton." (Barry
Meier, "Fund-Raiser May Be Achilles' Heel for Gore", June 4 (online version
bears the date June
3)). For our account of the memo episode, see "Thanks for the
Memories", Reason, June
1998; also see August 1998 coverage in the alt-weekly Dallas Observer,
"Toxic
Justice" and "The
Control Freak", the sidebar, "Hey, No Coaching", to another Baron profile,
Alison Frankel, "Traitor to his Class", American Lawyer, January
6; and our March 23 commentary and links
there.
June 5 -- Jarring
discord. The Audubon String Quartet is in the throes of
a messy public divorce that began in February when three members of the
chamber music ensemble sought to oust the fourth for undisclosed reasons.
A judge issued a temporary order that first violinist David Ehrlich be
readmitted pending further consideration of his claim that the dismissal
violated his rights; the other three say he was an employee
at will and that it's crucial that a string quartet be permitted freedom
of association given the intimacy with which it must operate. The
high point of unpleasantness so far came with a motion by Ehrlich's attorney
that cellist Tom Shaw, violist Doris Lederer and second violinist Akemi
Takayama be "fined and imprisoned" for allegedly flouting a court order
prohibiting them from playing previously scheduled engagements without
him. As the dispute grinds on Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., where
the ensemble has been in residence for 15 years, has severed its ties to
the group. (Roanoke Times coverage March
22 and other coverage (fee-based
archive)). Updates June
14, 2001: new rounds of litigation in the case alarm musical community;
Nov.
13, 2001: judge awards Ehrlich more than $600,000 in damages.
June 5 -- Year's
most injudicious judges. National Law Journal's
third annual compendium of bad bench behavior
includes 10 judges stripped of their robes after such doings as racial
and ethnic slurs, emailing off-color material including a video clip of
naked skydivers, reducing all fines to a token $1 in order to punish town
officials for not picking up the judge's health insurance, and switching
price tags in a store. Also includes the sad sagas of the New Hampshire
Supreme Court's Stephen Thayer (see April
5) and Washington state's Grant L. Anderson (see January
19). (Gail Diane Cox, "How Could They Do It?", April 26).
June 5 -- Unwanted
medical duties. Teachers
and school officials are upset that special-ed laws are being interpreted
to require them to perform intimate nursing tasks such as tube-feeding,
mucus-clearing and colostomy-bag-emptying as part of disabled
students' right to classroom accommodation. "More than 500 staff
members and every bus driver in the 28,000-student Loudoun County, Va.,
district recently learned to administer glucose injections after [a diabetic]
girl's family won that right through the U.S. Department of Education's
Office for Civil Rights (OCR)." "The NEA and the American Federation
of Teachers, the two largest teachers unions, strongly oppose teachers
tending to student health needs. 'They're fearful they will hurt a child
by doing something incorrectly or be held personally liable,' [the NEA's
Dennis] Friel says. 'They feel they are being asked to do things they didn't
think would be part of their career selection.'" (Linda Temple, "Disputed
duties: Teaching the disabled", USA Today, Feb. 15).
June 2-4 -- "More
lawyers than we really need"? As lawyers descend on the
town of Walkerton, Ontario, in anticipation
of the chance to sue over a deadly E. coli outbreak, Ralph Pohlman
in today's (June
2) Toronto Sun gets a queasy feeling about the way things are
headed with the profession, and recommends reading this website to "feel
a whole lot better" (link likely to disappear soon).
June 2-4 -- "Victim
of the century"? The Washington Post reports that
the state of Virginia lost a nearly 10-year battle over disability payments
with Anthony M. Rizzo, Jr., a former high
school principal in Fairfax, "who contends that he has a permanent
'psychosexual disorder' that makes him unable to supervise women without
trying to coerce them into having sex
with him. He sought disability benefits after he was fired in 1989 from
his job as principal of Edison High School for sexually harassing female
teachers." Two juries have hung so far on rape allegations against
Rizzo, who declines psychiatric evaluation related to the disability claim
because of the ongoing criminal proceedings. State officials initially
denied his application for benefits on the grounds that the disability
program should not reward "reprehensible"
behavior, but "lost on a technicality in 1998 when the state Supreme
Court said they missed a deadline for making a decision on his claim."
More recently they cited his refusal to cooperate with psychiatric evaluation
as reason to cut off his benefits, but he's now sued to get the payments
reinstated. (Patricia Davis, "DNA Tested in Sex Abuse Case Against Ex-Fairfax
Principal", Washington Post, May
31; Timothy Noah, "Victim of the Century", Slate, May
31).
June 2-4 -- Another
Mr. Civility nominee. Wall Street Journal
news side recently profiled husband-and-wife litigators Stanley and Susan
Rosenblatt, currently angling for punitive damages in a much-publicized
tobacco
trial in which they purportedly represent the class of all sick Florida
smokers (see July 8, 1999), and before
that best-known for settling a class action against tobacco companies on
behalf of flight attendants in a deal that "has yet to yield any tangible
benefits for the Rosenblatts' clients, while netting the Rosenblatts $49
million in fees and expenses" (see Sept.
28, 1999). "After the fee was received, one associate who had
worked for the Rosenblatts for 13 years asked for a bonus. She was
abruptly fired and has hired a lawyer
to sue the Rosenblatts, who have been quietly negotiating a severance package
while preparing for the punitive phase of their tobacco case." A
prominent figure in pro-litigation circles, Alan Morrison of Public Citizen
Litigation Center, intervened trying to block the settlement of the flight
attendant case. "'You are scum. You are absolute scum. You are dreck,'
Mr. Rosenblatt told Mr. Morrison before the start of a court hearing over
the deal's fairness, according to Mr. Morrison." Mr. Morrison now
forgivingly calls Rosenblatt "a fabulous thorn in the side of the tobacco
industry" and says "His methods are different from mine, but I probably
wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as [far as] he's gotten". (Milo Geyelin,
"Suing Tobacco, Florida Firm Takes Own Path", Wall Street Journal,
May 15, fee-based archive).
June 2-4 -- The
forbidden cookout. In Flint, Mich., Whittier Middle School
teacher Lamar Davis was suspended for two weeks and given a written reprimand
for inviting students to a barbecue at his home without first clearing
the action with administrators.
(Matt Bach, "Teacher vows to hold barbecue after return from suspension",
Flint Journal, May 23) (via Reason
Express,
Progressive
Review).
June 2-4 -- Testimony
"not credible", gets $192K anyway. A New York Court
of Claims judge has ordered the state to pay $192,464 to a construction
worker injured in a 1991 roof fall even though she found his testimony
to be not credible in significant respects. Bogdan Wielgosz was working
as a roofing assistant for a construction company at the Manhattan Children's
Psychiatric Center when he fell and suffered back and wrist injuries.
At trial, presiding judge Susan Phillips Read found Wielgosz's testimony
"dubious" regarding some of the long-term practical effects of his injuries
as well as regarding his reported earnings before the incident, reports
the New York Law Journal. For instance? "The claimant
said he had not driven since 1994 because of injuries suffered in the accident,
but was then confronted with an accident report in which he claimed back,
neck and head injuries stemming from an incident in 1995." Judge
Read's decision took pains to "emphasize" at the outset that she "did not
consider claimant to be a credible witness: the frank inconsistencies and
discrepancies in his testimony were too numerous to chalk up entirely to
lapses in memory or nuances of language lost or misapprehended in translation.'"
However, she ruled that objective evidence of Wielgosz's injuries, combined
with an earlier finding of liability on the part of the state, nonetheless
warranted an award of $32,881 for past medical expenses, $9,583 for lost
income and household services, and $150,000 for past pain and suffering,
to which was added 9 percent interest. (John Caher, "State Must Pay
Injured Construction Worker", New York Law Journal, Feb.
16).
June 1 -- Welcome
CEO Express readers. The premier
desktop portal for busy decisionmakers names us as today's Great
Site of the Day, as do its associated sites JournalistExpress
and MDExpress.
June 1 -- Somebody
to sue. Four case studies in creative defendant selection,
with apologies to Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane:
Don't you want somebody to sue ... After the 1996 crash near
Dubrovnik, Croatia, that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others,
lawyers representing victim families faced an obstacle in the form of various
laws sharply restricting the filing of actions against many of the more
obvious candidate defendants: the U.S. government and its employees, military
contractors such as planemaker Boeing, the government of Croatia, and so
forth. But never despair: in a recently filed suit, lawyers for survivors
announce they've found the real culprit in the crash, namely Denver-based
Jeppesen Sanderson Inc., publisher of aeronautical
charts which they say were confusing and understated the dangers of flying
into the Dubrovnik airport. The map publisher "denies any wrongdoing
and says it merely publishes approach data provided by civil aviation authorities
around the world." ("Suit Alleges Jeppesen Charts Contributed To Air Force
Crash", AVweb, March 2000 ("Briefs...")).
Don't you need somebody to sue... The Cincinnati Enquirer,
in its retrospective on the catastrophic Beverly Hills Supper Club fire
of 1977, reports that then-obscure injury lawyer Stanley Chesley, representing
victim families, came up with the idea of suing not just the owners of
the ill-fated nightclub but scores of companies that made such items as
carpets and paneling, upholstery and plastic pipes within it, on the grounds
that all their products, by burning,
contributed to smoke and flame. "'In all fires, they sue those people now,
but it was novel then,' said William O. Bertelsman, the victims' co-counsel
until becoming a federal judge. ...Victims' lawyers could not prove who
made which aluminum wire or plastic furnishing, so they sued every manufacturer
in each industry on the assumption anyone might have supplied the materials.
...'The big innovation,' complained attorney Jacob Stein, who opposed Mr.
Chesley in Beverly Hills and since, 'was that they sued a huge number of
people who had no liability and were willing to pay you several hundred
thousand dollars to make you go away.'" Chesley went on to become
a wealthy political kingmaker (see March
30) and "Master of Disaster" (Ben L. Kaufman, "Litigation
Bulldozed Traditional Legal Routes"; "The
Master of Disaster", part of Cincinnati Enquirer special
series).
Wouldn't you love somebody to sue... Having already bankrupted
at least 22 companies that mined or sold asbestos or asbestos-containing
products in past decades, lawyers are now suing a further estimated 2,400
companies that might in some way have exposed workers and others to the
once ubiquitous insulation material, including Campbell Soup and Colgate-Palmolive
(workers "handled or worked near equipment that contained asbestos"); Gallo
Winery and Gerber Products; Ford and GM (brake linings); Alcoa (sued because
its aluminum brake linings "allegedly cut into asbestos insulation, releasing
fibers into the air"; and hospitals, colleges and other institutions that
used ceiling tiles or insulation of which the naturally occurring mineral
was an ingredient. "You have to look under every stone", says New
York plaintiff's lawyer James Early. According to the Wall
Street Journal's news side, "[t]he bulk of new cases involve plaintiffs
who aren't ill but have some scarring that they fear will lead to future
problems." The Allwood Door Co. is named in half a dozen lawsuits
filed by construction workers "because it sold fire-barrier doors made
by another company in the 1960s and 1970s". The doors in question
were wood-sheathed, but contained asbestos in their mineral core; company
president Bob Howell says he didn't know the substance was even present
within the doors. (Susan Warren, "Asbestos Suits Target Makers Of
Wine, Cars, Soups, Soaps", Wall Street Journal, April 12, fee-based
subscriber archives).
...You better find somebody to sue. After Robert
Longoria's car collided with a deer along a semirural stretch of road in
Brazoria County, Texas, his lawyer, Robert Kwok, sent a demand letter seeking
money for his back injury and whiplash to a local subdivision association,
alleging that some of its homeowners had taken to feeding the deer and
could therefore be held legally responsible for their presence in the area.
The residents resisted and Kwok's firm has announced that it will not pursue
the claim against them "at this time". (Steven Long, "Buck Off",
Houston Press, April
27) (via Citizens Against
Lawsuit Abuse Houston). (DURABLE
LINK)
June 1 -- 500,000
pages served on Overlawyered.com. Eleven months
after we started, it's clear someone's reading us... why not pass the word
to a friend and help us reach a million even faster? Thanks for your
support!
