Thanks to our readers for the more than respectable showing Overlawyered made in the “Best Law Blog” section of the 2008 WeblogAwards. The winner was the very deserving Volokh Conspiracy.
Also while we’re on popularity, my piece yesterday at Forbes on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) is #6 top rated among the magazine’s articles at the moment. Thanks!
…just to pay Cook County’s outlays on lawsuits and settlements? Earlier here.
Well, that sounded plausible enough. Who knew there’d turn out to be more to the story?
Asks Dan Slater at the WSJ Law Blog.
I’ve got a new opinion piece up at Forbes.com on one of the worst pieces of legislation I’ve seen in many a year, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and the need to repeal it before it capsizes tens of thousands of small businesses:
Hailed almost universally on its passage last year–it passed the Senate 89 to three and the House by 424 to one, with Ron Paul the lone dissenter–CPSIA is now shaping up as a calamity for businesses and an epic failure of regulation, threatening to wipe out tens of thousands of small makers of children’s items from coast to coast, and taking a particular toll on the handcrafted and creative, the small-production-run and sideline at-home business, not to mention struggling retailers. How could this have happened?
(cross-posted from Point of Law). For our earlier coverage, follow our CPSIA tag.
P.S. The piece as first posted included a Vermont publication’s quote attributed to David Arkush of Public Citizen; that organization almost immediately wrote in to point out that Arkush has disavowed the quote in question, so I substituted a different one. The conversation at Greco Woodcrafting tracing the matter is well worth a close look.
If rudeness and sarcasm are indeed now actionable in Texas, as Amy Modica in her suit seems to be hoping they are, a lot of bloggers will have to stay out of the state.
Hey, we took a risk suing the ailing auto giant on behalf of its investors, say the entrepreneurial lawyers. The company might have gone bust while our suit was pending, and then where would our payday have come from? But a judge cut the fees from a requested $60 million to a mere $45 million. “That adds up to a rate of $1,825 per hour, said U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen for the Eastern District of Michigan,” notes AP. At least they’re not overpaid executives.
Just as the earlier one settles, comes word that pediatric dentist Yvonne Wong of Foster City, Calif. has sued the parents of a patient for posting a negative review about her services. [Citizen Media Law] More from Mike Masnick at TechDirt: “Lawyer Who Sues Yelp Admits He Had No Idea About Section 230 Safe Harbors”.
A Twitter user found this “AttorneyOne” promotion site for “Hudson Plane Crash”, which Patrick @ Popehat (aka SSFC) mentions funnily. On closer examination, however, one finds that this site was not thrown up in response to USAir #1549’s dramatic landing in the Hudson River. Its URL contains the words “Summit” and “Ohio”, meaning that it was aimed at plane crashes connected with this community in northeastern Ohio. Indeed, it was a website prearranged just to be sitting there should a plane crash take place connected with the town of Hudson, Ohio. A bit of URL-tinkering confirms that one can generate a similar AttorneyOne page hawking attorneys’ services for a hypothetical plane crash in Chillicothe, Ohio. So don’t compare this sort of thing to online ambulance chasing. It’s more like camping out online and waiting for the accident to come to you.
Hope that clears things up.
P.S. Considerably more on the topic from Eric Turkewitz here and here (congratulations, Jonathan C. Reiter) and from Robert Ambrogi. And while I originally credited this Twitter user with stumbling across the find, it appears it was first found by Greg Lambert of Three Geeks and a Law Blog and passed on from there.
Cal Law’s Legal Pad speculates on some of the reasons why the felonious class-actioneer may have parted ways with his high-profile criminal defense lawyer (via California Civil Justice Blog).