Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Quoted more on Sotomayor

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Lochhead quotes me on the Supreme Court pick:

“It’s not as if I think Obama’s incapable of nominating someone who is more adventurous and more activist by nature,” said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Maybe we should save the all-out blast for when he nominates that one.”

I also have a comment on Ricci v. DeStefano, the lawsuit that arose from relatively blatant discrimination by the city of New Haven against non-minority firefighter applicants. I would not be surprised to learn that Sotomayor’s views on reverse discrimination differed widely from my own, but still note that it’s vaguely incongruous to treat as Exhibit A for a charge of judicial activism an instance in which the judge and her colleagues ducked a case.

Finally, my postings on the Sotomayor nomination continue at Point of Law, including an item on a Connecticut school discipline case where the nominee has drawn fire for (as part of a unanimous panel) siding with the school authorities. More: Jake Tapper, ABC.

Filed under: , ,

“A Stimulus You Can Believe In”

I summarize my recent testimony on the Hill in today’s American:

As I discussed in recent testimony on Capitol Hill, if one takes conservative estimates from these economic studies and adds it all up, the total cost to the economy from excessive litigation can be estimated to be between $600 billion and $900 billion a year, the vast majority of which is simply wealth destruction. That is between 4 and 6 percent of GNP, a tort tax of between $8,000 and $12,000 a year for an average family of four.

The entire hearing is on YouTube, or you can watch a highlight reel.

Filed under: , ,

Cases that could never live up to their headlines dept.

“Inventor of Vibrating Toilet Seat Sues Google Over Allegedly Defamatory Search Results” [Citizen Media Law]

P.S. Also in the news this morning, a less colorful lawsuit against Google over search results: the principals of the New Haven, Connecticut personal injury law firm of Stratton Faxon are incensed that when you search on their firm’s name in Google, you get along with the results an auto-generated ad from a competitive firm.

Filed under: , , ,

Continental charges pilots with sham divorces

Continental Airlines says nine pilots got “paper” divorces from their spouses and then remarried after securing lump-sum distributions from the carrier’s retirement plan. Federal regulators have in the past indicated that plan administrators should disallow sham transactions intended to qualify for tax-favored retirement benefits. Two pilots have now countered with charges that the airline invaded their privacy when it investigated whether their divorces were really what they seemed. [Houston Chronicle and followup]

Filed under: , , ,

CPSIA and your tag sale

paperdollsfrench2Readers of this site may have known already, but the Kansas City Star spells it out for its readers: “the notoriously broad and confusing federal Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act applies to you and your front yard.” As the CPSC’s 27-page booklet for resellers (PDF) warns, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Which is especially problematic since even if you do study up on it, as Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops, reminds us, “the way it was written, it’s almost impossible to abide by this law.”

Filed under: ,

“Expert Skier Assumed Risk of Injury, N.Y. Court Finds in Barring Suit”

Say not that the assumption-of-risk doctrine is defunct: “As a self-described expert skier with 13 years’ experience, Brian W. Martin, 17, was well aware of the risks associated with rail sliding and had acknowledged falling before while attempting to execute a rail maneuver, an Appellate Division, 3rd Department, panel ruled last week in Martin v. State of New York, 505999.” [NYLJ]

Filed under: ,

Welcome New York Times readers

I’m quoted today in the Times (and this site is linked — way to go Times!) in John Schwartz’s piece on Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions in civil litigation, where she comes across as generally on the liberal side, but not an anti-business crusader (see also Adam Liptak’s Times account). Here’s what I said:

Some of the attacks against the judge’s business rulings turn a complex legal record into a caricature, said Walter K. Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative organization, and the editor of a blog, Overlawyered.com. While expressing some qualms about Judge Sotomayor’s views, Mr. Olson said “she will not be as liberal as many of the Republicans are saying — but no one could be that liberal, even if they tried.”

For more of the reasons that enter into this opinion, see my roundup yesterday at the Manhattan Institute’s Point of Law, where I and others have been blogging on many angles of the Sotomayor nomination, with more to come.

Filed under: ,