Prisoner suits in the U.K.

The Labor government plans a crackdown on “trivial” inmate suits, with Justice minister Jack Straw citing “imaginative” lawyers as a source of problems. Controversial cases have included a £1 million compensation bill to prisoners forced to go cold turkey on narcotics withdrawal instead of being given a heroin substitute, and “one in which a prisoner won a legal battle to have his haircuts paid for by the state while on day release”. [Times Online]

Nancy Pelosi to address trial lawyers convention

She’ll be opening the AAJ annual convention tonight in San Francisco. Charles Krauthammer thinks the coziness between Big Law and certain parts of the political establishment may explain a lot about the faltering status of health care reform.

More: “Media Barred from Speaker Pelosi’s Speech to Trial Lawyers“. And John Steele Gordon at Commentary “Contentions” offers some ideas for health care reform that were probably not included in Pelosi’s speech.

There’s a latex finger cot in my food

Every time a headline comes up along the lines of “Man sues eatery after claiming to find a condom in his soup” — and they come up fairly regularly — I am put in mind of the existence of “finger cots”, small objects made of latex or similar material and often worn by food handlers over individual fingers as an anti-contamination measure. If I were a journalist covering such a dispute, I’d want to ask both sides whether they had ruled out for sure the possibility that the object in dispute was a food handler’s finger cot. Wouldn’t you?

Great moments in lawyer Twitter marketing

Should we assume this Southern California lawyer is even aware of the Twitter account sending out messages in his name? The “Bio” line seems to have been drawn up by someone trained in the Borat school of copywriting:

Bio Hi I am Attorney Robert A. B[…]. I am running a successful personal injury Lawyer in Los Angeles California. My Law firm offer legal representation for……………

As of this evening, 186 Twitter users have seen fit to follow the account.

“Filial responsibility” laws and nursing home bills

A number of states have what are sometimes known as filial responsibility laws which obligate adult children to pay for their parents’ medical and nursing-home care. In Pennsylvania, nursing home lawyers have been known to pursue lawsuits against out-of-state children who are estranged from the parents in question. (Monica Yant Kinney, “If mom can’t pay, adult child must”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jul. 12).

More on these laws: Jane Gross, NYT; Everyday Simplicity; Do Ask Do Tell.