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| ARCHIVE -- APR. 2001 (II) |
April 20-22 --
Quite an ankle sprain. Michele Nations, 26, who
sprained her ankle five years ago when she tripped into a hole at a municipal
park in Tucson, has now been awarded $450,000 by a local jury. Nations'
attorney "says the case hinged on the city's responsibility to post adequate
warning about burrowing animals [such as squirrels and gophers] and to
provide a safe alternative to dodging holes and caved-in tunnels."
An attorney for the city differs, and calls the outcome astonishing: "You
would think in a park -- in a natural space -- people should have to watch
where they're going." (April 19: Maureen O'Connell, "Gopher hole may cost
city $450K", Arizona
Daily
Star; "Jury awards Tucson woman who stepped into hole at a park",
AP/Arizona
Republic). (DURABLE LINK)
April 20-22 --
Thank you, Your Honor. The May Brill's Content
has a cover story (teaser
only online) entitled "Human Portals: How people with an obsession
-- and a website -- are upstaging big media". It tells how weblogs,
link-rich sites regularly updated and often zeroing in on a specialized
theme, are the new Big Thing in online media; typically "curated by one
person", according to editor in chief David Kuhn, they "could teach big
media portals a lot about engaging their audience". Happy to
read all this, we were particularly pleased to turn to the sidebar feature
in which the magazine surveys a group of public luminaries about their
favorite websites, which range from eBay
(Nora Ephron) to 10KWizard.com
(Gretchen Morgenson). And here's Alex Kozinski, distinguished federal
judge on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, on his favorite: "Overlawyered
(overlawyered.com) provides pointers
to legal-system horror stories: the accused rapist who pockets disability
checks for his 'sexual compulsion'; the drunk who climbs a voltage tower
and sues the utility company when he gets injured; the guy who murders
his mom and sues his shrinks for not stopping him. The site is run
by Walter Olson, who likes nothing
better than reporting on legal overkill, and he's compiled serious research
tools for anyone interested in trends and abuses within the civil litigation
system." Thank you, Your Honor! (DURABLE
LINK)
April 20-22 --
Comparable worth in Maine. Despite widespread criticism
of the idea from economists and others, Maine has enacted new rules opening
private employers to a serious threat of legal action if they pay less
to a worker of one gender than to
a worker of the opposite gender "for comparable work on jobs with comparable
requirements related to skill, effort and responsibility".
Some other states have had "comparable worth" or "pay equity" laws on the
books, but Maine is the first to enact regulations giving such laws serious
teeth. "We won", said an official with the state AFL-CIO. "The
business community has not awakened to the fact that this is going to cost
them." Disagreements are all but inevitable as to whether (say) secretaries'
work should be regarded as just as valuable as that of (say) truck drivers,
and the Maine law will allow lawyers to march into such controversies with
class action suits for unlimited damages -- won't that be fun? The
state chamber of commerce did not oppose the enactment. ("Equal pay
advocates tout new state rules", AP/Bangor Daily News, April
4; "Maine Becomes First State Requiring Pay Equity", Women's ENews,
April
3 (via
Freedom
News Daily); Maine Equal Justice Partners, 2000
Docket Report (scroll down to "Pay Equity")).
SEE ALSO May 17, 2000;
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, "Suicide Mission: The Union Push for Comporable
Worth", Capital Research Center
Labor Watch, Dec.
1999; Lawrence W. Reed, "Comparable Worth or Incomparably Worthless?",
Mackinac Center, Sept.
6, 1994. The late Clarence Pendleton Jr., chairman of the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission, called comparable worth "the looniest idea since
Looney Tunes came on the screen" (Simpson's Contemporary Quotations #519).
(DURABLE
LINK)
April 20-22 --
"Lie-tery winners". All sorts of basically decent
people, from cops to grandmothers, would never think of shoplifting or
forging checks but do seem to think it's okay to lie in lawsuits.
"Just ask anyone who has taken more than a handful of depositions or cross-examined
witnesses at trial -- especially witnesses in tort cases. ... the
oath has become virtually meaningless," writes Kirkland & Ellis
partner Michael Jones ("Lie-tery Winners", National Law Journal,
March
22).
April 18-19 --
Mistletoe dangerous even when absent. LeRoy Crawford says
his female boss at the New York Stock Exchange behaved
seductively and made remarks such as "if there were mistletoe, I would
give you a kiss," when giving him a Christmas bottle of cologne.
Things went from bad to worse, and he now wants $1 million in compensatory
damages and $1 million for "special damages as a result of physical and
mental injury". (Peter Noel, "Sex on the floor", Village Voice,
April
11-17).
April 18-19 --
Randomness of case assignments questioned. San Francisco
assigns cases for pre-trial motions to one of two judges, and it seemed
that the plaintiff's firm of Wartnick, Chaber, Harowitz & Tigerman
kept getting lucky by drawing the more favorable judge to hear its asbestos
cases. Lucky, indeed: over the past two years, 94 percent of the
firm's cases were assigned even numbers, instead of the odd numbers that
would have sent the cases to the other judge. (Dennis J. Opatrny,
"Playing the Numbers", The Recorder, April
9).
April 18-19 --
"Guests sue inn for overbooking". When five Massachusetts
couples arrived at Vermont's romantic Woodstock
Inn for an investment club weekend last April, they found the inn had
inadvertently overbooked its rooms, and three of the couples had to stay
at a local B&B. The inn proprietors were terribly apologetic
and treated all five couples to the weekend's lodging for free, as well
as giving them a free dinner. Nonetheless, four of the couples are
suing for a sum "substantially in excess of $25,000" in a Boston court.
(AP/Boston Globe, April
17).
April 18-19 --
Tempest in an arsenic-laced teacup? President Bush
deserves credit for standing up to demagogues by pulling back this bad
regulation:
Steve Chapman, "Who's really poisoning our drinking water?", Chicago Tribune,
April
12; George Will, "The costs of moral exhibitionism", Washington Post,
April
15; Jason K. Burnett and Robert W. Hahn, Brookings/AEI Joint Center
study, "EPA's Arsenic Rule: The Benefits of the Standard Do Not Justify
the Costs", abstract, Jan.
2001; Mercatus Center (George Mason U.) Public Interest Comment series,
Sept.
19, 2000; Michael Kinsley, "Bush is right on arsenic. Darn!",
Washington
Post,
April
13; Michael Y. Park, "Study: Arsenic Rule Would Have Increased Deaths",
FoxNews.com, April
17; Nick Schulz, "Poisoner-in-Chief Is Saving Lives", American Spectator
Online, April
17; Diane Rehm show transcript (National Public Radio), March
28.
April 17 -- Reparations:
take a number. National Journal columnist
Stuart Taylor Jr. traces the link between demands for compensation for
century-old evils such as slavery and colonization and legal battles over
liability for decades-ago sales of products like lead paint and asbestos
("Paying Reparations for Ancient Wrongs Is Not Right", The Atlantic/National
Journal, April
11; our take, Reason, Nov.
2000). The group of lawyers mapping out slavery-reparations suits
are scheduled to huddle on strategy today in Washington, and say they plan
to name businesses as well as the U.S. government as defendants (Jamal
E. Watson, "Lawyers plan suit for slavery reparations", Boston Globe,
April
13). The conservative magazine Insight has given uncritically
positive coverage to demands for compensation over Japan's World War II
mistreatment of American servicemen, despite the clear laying to rest of
such claims by postwar treaty. You'd think victims of the crimes
of communism over its long reign would be even better placed to score positive
ink in the conservative press, but we seem to hear little about them --
not that we would want to load up the reparations bandwagon even further,
you understand (Stephen Goode, "New book documents Japanese exploitation",
Insight,
undated).
April 17 -- A Pulitzer
for Dorothy Rabinowitz. The Wall Street Journal editorialist,
whose searing commentaries on dubious
child-abuse prosecutions have helped expose some of the most glaring
injustices to flow from sentimentalism and credulity in our legal system,
snags one of this year's Pulitzer Prizes for her commentaries
on American society and culture (Yahoo
Full Coverage -- Pulitzers). OpinionJournal.com keeps an archive
of her media criticism; her articles on abusive prosecution, when online
at all, are found at far-flung corners of the web ("A Darkness in Massachusetts"
-I-,
-II-,
-III-
(RickRoss.com);
more
columns on Amirault case; "Through
the Darkness" (the Grant Snowden case, forever linked with the name
of Janet Reno) (DennisPrager.net); Wenatchee case -I-,
-II-).
April 16 -- "Woman
settles hot pickle lawsuit with McDonald's". Or
at least its local franchisee: "A woman who claimed she was permanently
scarred by a hot McDonald's hamburger pickle has settled her lawsuit against
the restaurant chain. MAR Inc., which does business as McDonald's
in Knoxville, admitted no wrongdoing in the agreement signed by a judge
Thursday. Other details of the settlement are to remain confidential.
" (see Oct. 10, 2000) (AP/CNN, April
13).
April 16 -- New
batch of reader letters. Our
correspondents tell why the law makes it perilous to hire a home renovation
contractor in New York, ask about buying T-shirts from us, wonder whether
Indian-derived place names such as Wichita and Massachusetts are next up
for abolition, lament American law's resistance to the obvious fairness
of the loser-pays principle, and hail a Supreme Court decision upholding
employment arbitration.
April 16 -- Big
numbers. It is a truth universally acknowledged that if
the injuries resulting from a transportation accident are sufficiently
severe, a wealthy business must have been at fault. Teledyne Continental
Motors of Mobile, Ala. has agreed to pay $27 million to settle a suit on
behalf of survivors of five skydivers
killed in the crash of a Cessna, though its attorney said the company's
oil tube design does not cause engine failure as the plaintiffs alleged
(Joe Lambe, "$27 Million Settlement in Skydiving Plane Crash", DropZone.com,
March
16; "Poor Preflight Probably Killed Skydivers: NTSB", Aero-News.Net,
June
29, 2000). An Indiana appellate court has upheld a $55 million
jury verdict against the Kroger Co. over a truck accident at a company
terminal, rejecting the company's contention that the award was excessive
and in conflict with workers' compensation
laws (the injured man, a truck driver, worked for a wholly owned subsidiary
of the large grocery chain). (Margaret Cronin Fisk, "Finding No Direct
Employment Relationship, Indiana Appellate Court Upholds PI Award",
National
Law Journal, March
28). A Los Angeles jury has just voted $55 million against
General Tire, a unit of Germany's Continental Gummi-Werke, over a "tread
separation" accident (if you thought those were unique to Firestone, think
again). (Myron Levin, Los Angeles Times, April
14; "Jury orders tire maker to pay $55 million", AP/CNN, April
14). Among the plaintiff's lawyers in the case was Brian Panish,
famed for his 1999 feat in getting another L. A. jury to award $4.9 billion
against GM, later reduced to $1.2 billion. And another well-known
maker of replacement tires,
Cooper Tire, got hammered the same week for $10 million in El Paso ("Jury
OKs $10M Award Vs. Cooper Tire", AP/FindLaw, April
13). Also see Margaret Cronin Fisk, "Two Tire Companies
Punctured by Juries", National Law Journal, April
24, with more details about both tire cases.
April 13-15 --
It was the bar's fault. "A 20-year-old Jamison man,
who was shot last summer, says a Warminster bar is partially to
blame for the incident. Had he not become drunk from alcohol
consumption that night, Martin Joyce's judgment would not have been impaired,
he would not have approached an unknown man for change and he would not
have been shot, alleges a suit filed in Montgomery County Court."
(John Corcoran, "Intoxication caused judgment error, suit claims", Doylestown,
Pa. Intelligencer-Record,
April
11).
April 13-15 --
Anti-Ritalin lawyers still acting out. Despite some early
setbacks, tobacco-veteran lawyers including Richard
Scruggs, John
Coale and Marc Saperstein continue
to seek megabucks damages against drugmaker
Novartis (formerly Ciba-Geigy) over the widespread prescribing in schools
of Ritalin, the drug meant to combat attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity,
and related conditions. There's a strong case to be made against
the thoughtless overuse of this drug, but how characteristic of our litigation
system that it proposes to take decisions about its use out of the hands
of both medical professionals and parents, instead inviting the lawyers
to shop around until they find a few sympathetic courts and a jury or two
willing (effectively) to ban the drug through punitive damages. PBS
"Frontline" covered the issue recently ("Medicating
Kids") and its website includes a section on the litigation ("ADHD
Lawsuits") which points out a noteworthy recent development: on March
8 of this year federal judge Rudi Brewster threw out a suit seeking class-action
status on behalf of everyone in California who had used or bought Ritalin,
and also "ruled that activities by defendants intended to advance the medical
understanding, diagnosis and treatment of ADHD were free speech protected
under California's anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation)
statute." This latter is significant because efforts by businesses
to engage in medical promotion or policy defense of products, trade association
activity etc. are now routinely sued over by trial lawyers in themselves
(conspiracy! public brainwashing! tobacco all over again!)
and anti-SLAPP statutes might prove useful in rebuffing such causes of
action.
MORE: Sept. 18 &
Sept.
22, 2000; Nancy Shute, "Pushing Pills on Kids?", U.S. News,
Oct.
2, 2000; Shankar Vedantam, "A symptom of the times? ADD, Ritalin focus
of suits", Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec.
11, 2000; Bob Seay, "Ten Questions for the Lawyers", About.com ADD
site, Sept.
16, 2000.
April 13-15 --
"2000's Ten Wackiest Employment Lawsuits". Gerald
Skoning of Chicago's Seyfarth Shaw compiles an annual roundup of the most
bizarre cases in employment law.
Among this year's highlights: a Minneapolis woman took a job in a sex-toy
store and then filed a hostile-environment harassment
lawsuit because of all the dirty talk she had to listen to; an Ohio
court allowed a worker at a mental health facility to proceed with his
reverse disability-discrimination
claim that he had been singled out for mistreatment as the only employee
at the facility without a mental disability; and a Boeing employee claimed
that the company's objection to his working in the nude was a failure to
accommodate his religion, shamanism ("2000's 10 Wackiest Employment Lawsuits",
National
Law Journal,
March
29).
April 12 -- Zero-tolerance
spiral. The WSJ's OpinionJournal.com "Best
of the Web" feature has lately made it a special project to collect
reports of zero tolerance
excesses, which are fast mounting beyond our ability to record them.
F'rinstance, there are the school officials in West Annapolis, Md., who
have banned kids from playing tag during recess, citing the school's "no-touching"
policy (Kimberly Marselas, "City school bans students from playing tag",
Annapolis Capital, March
26); and the honor student given an in-school suspension in West Monroe,
La., for drawing a GI Joe-style commando with canteen, knife and grenades
(Emeri O'Brien, "3rd-grader suspended for drawing", Monroe, La. News-Star,
March
24; "Soldier drawing gets wide attention", March
27). A 16-year-old student at Legacy High School in Broomfield,
Colo. "may be charged with a felony after school officials found an unloaded
BB gun in his car." (Christine Reid, "Student may face felony charge over
unloaded BB gun", Scripps-Howard, April
8). And in the continuing search for ways to build character
in the leaders of tomorrow, some favor snitchlines: "Cedar Rapids police
are believed to be the first in Iowa to create a student hot line to take
tips on illegal activity. Teens who call about classmates they believe
to have alcohol, drugs or weapons
on school property get $50 if the police recover anything." (Kate Kompas,
"Teen crime hot line offers cash", Des Moines Register, April
5).
April 12 -- "The
Last Tycoon". This Baltimore City Paper profile
from last August, which we missed at the time, says contingency fees to
Peter Angelos's law firm topped $100 million for asbestos
work on behalf of Bethlehem Steel workers alone, with more riches expected
to flow in from fen-phen, lead paint and those supposedly deadly cellular
phones. "When it comes to Baltimore's politics
and finances, it seems, almost nothing happens without Peter Angelos. ...
in 1999, 10 lawyers and lobbyists were registered with the State Ethics
Commission on his behalf." The minority leader of the state house
describes the Orioles owner's power in Annapolis as "absolutely magical"
and "amazing ... It's all based on huge amounts of money flowing [from]
Peter Angelos' pocket and into the coffers of the Democratic Party.'" (Molly
Rath, Baltimore City Paper, Aug.
16, 2000)(more).
April 11 -- Lost
his live client, had to substitute dead one instead.
In St. Louis, where lots of dead people are registered to vote, "a dead
man was listed as the chief plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Election Day
in November," according to the L.A. Times. "He was having
trouble voting, the suit said, due to long lines at his polling station.
So he petitioned a judge -- successfully -- to keep city ballot boxes open
late. ... The lawyer who filed the suit explained the mix-up by saying
he had intended the plaintiff to be Robert 'Mark' Odom, an aide to a Democratic
candidate for Congress." However, "Odom had voted, without a wait,
by the time the suit was filed," and the papers had been prepared with
his name on them. But as California judge William W. Bedsworth suggests,
this supposed explanation if anything makes the case more egregious: the
lawyer "'explained' how he filed a suit on behalf of a dead person by saying
that the plaintiff turned out not to have had his rights violated, and
the only available person with the same name happened to be dead.
And this caused not the batting of an eyelash in St. Louis. No immediate
suspension, no call for disbarment,
no investigation into how he got a judge to sign this thing". ("Meet
Me in St. Louis", The Recorder,
April
9).
April 11 -- Update:
"metric martyr" convicted. In the first such prosecution
in Britain, greengrocer Steven Thoburn of Sunderland has been convicted
of violating a 1985 compulsory metric system laws by selling bananas in
pounds and ounces (see Jan. 22) ("'Metric
martyr' convicted", The Guardian,
April
9; "Bananas" (editorial), Daily Telegraph (editorial), April
10; footrule.org, of which the
late Jennifer Paterson (TV's "Two Fat Ladies") was an honorary member).
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