Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“White Line Fevers From Mars”

From the annals of fevered pro se cases, a lawsuit filed by Kent © Norman [sic], which advanced various confused legal theories including that then-President Ronald Reagan had caused Norman’s “civil death without legislation”; it also asked that parking tickets be forgiven. An Oregon federal court dismissed the case in 1982 for failure to prosecute, noting in its opinion, among many other oddities:

There is included in the file a process receipt which bears the “Received” stamp of the Supreme Court of the United States. On this form are the notations, apparently written by the plaintiff, “Taxes due” and “D.C. Circuit was green” as well as “Rule 8 … Why did you return my appeal form? Why isn’t the ‘1840’ W. 7th mailbox still next to the 1830 one?” and “Something suspicious about that mailbox.”

(Lowering the Bar, Nov. 26; Norman v. Reagan, 95 F.R.D. 476 (D. Or. 1982).)

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“Jury convicts mom of lesser charges in online hoax”

“A Missouri mother on trial in a landmark cyberbullying case was convicted Wednesday of only three minor offenses for her role in a mean-spirited Internet hoax that apparently drove a 13-year-old girl to suicide.” Numerous critics had assailed the prosecution of Lori Drew as based on overbroad criminalization; we covered the controversy here, here, and here. (Greg Risling, AP/Buffalo News, Nov. 26).

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New Yorker magazine on James Zadroga

I just got to the September 15 issue near the bottom of my pile of unread mail, and there’s an excellent piece of reporting by Jennifer Kahn on the case of James Zadroga, the police officer who worked at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/11 whose death was attributed to exposure to dust and was a symbol for the thousands of plaintiffs in that litigation–until the New York medical examiner found evidence that prescription drug injections were responsible for the lung scarring.  Kahn’s article is tremendously damning on that question.  Zadroga’s name was successfully used to get legislation passed in New York state, and similar legislation (on which I testified) is pending in Congress to open the taxpayer fisc to thousands of questionable claims.

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SecularRight.org

I’ve been taking a hand in a new blog project called Secular Right, which describes itself as follows:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

Recent writings by Heather Mac Donald and David Frum come in for attention. Amusingly, I’m the only one so far posting under his or her real name, although the identities of some of the others are not all that hard to guess under pseudonyms such as “Bradlaugh” and “David Hume”. It should also be apparent that there is a wide range of views represented, including some that are at quite a distance from my own, but that should help keep things interesting. The site has already drawn notice from Ann Althouse (and more), “Tapped”, Eve Tushnet, John Derbyshire/NRO “Corner”, and Gene Expression, among others.

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November 26 roundup

  • Businesswoman takes to her blog to criticize the business practices of a video-production firm, and then the lawsuit arrives [Inc. magazine via MediaBloggers; Vision Media Television v. Leslie Richard/Oko Box]
  • Litigious Minneapolis strip club owner “sued a one-time housemate for, among other things, not returning some pillows and a coat rack.” [Star-Tribune via Obscure Store]
  • Really now, says judge to Coughlin Stoia class-actioneers, $1,365.95/night in travel expenses is a bit rich in this Coke settlement [Krauss, PoL]
  • L.A. attorney Terry Christensen sentenced to three years in Pellicano wiretap scandal [AP/Variety] Did L.A. Times skew coverage toward Pellicano defense? [Patterico, more]
  • New Louisiana lawyer-ad rules: would they restrain lawyers from blogging or posting on Facebook/Twitter? [Coleman, Ribstein vs. O’Keefe vs. Greenfield]
  • Electing public defenders is bad idea to start with, and things get particularly dicey when the local cops throw their support to one candidate [Balko, Reason “Hit and Run”; Jacksonville, Fla.]
  • Online carpooling service? Great idea until the bus authorities get you closed down [Save PickUpPal in Ontario via Coyote; Canada]
  • Horizon Blue Cross agrees to settle suit over coverage of eating disorders, will pay $1.18 million to some policyholders to cover extended bulimia and anorexia treatments, and $2.45 million to class action lawyers led by Bruce Nagel of Roseland, N.J. [NJLJ]

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Hot tea lawsuit has interesting procedural quirk

One can almost fill an entirely separate blog with variations on the McDonald’s hot coffee case. In Manhattan, 77-year-old Rachel Moltner ordered a hot tea from a Starbucks, but had trouble removing the tightly-secured lid, spilling the beverage all over her. (You will recall other lawsuits complaining that the Starbucks lids are not tight enough.) Moltner not only blames Starbucks for her resulting second- and third-degree burns (and recall that the raison d’être of the Stella Liebeck suit was the false claim that only McDonald’s served beverages that were hot enough to cause third-degree burns), but for the broken bones she suffered when she fell out of bed in Lenox Hill Hospital while being treated for burns. Moltner’s asking for $3 million.

Press coverage in the NY Post (h/t P.G.) is short on legal details (though one is encouraged to see Starbucks publicly defending themselves, an apparent change in policy). But I’ve downloaded and uploaded the complaint, which was filed in state court and removed to federal court. The kitchen-sink allegations include a defective cup, defectively hot tea, and a failure to warn. Right now the parties are haggling over federal removal jurisdiction, as Starbucks waited more than thirty days after receiving the complaint–until a formal demand for money was made–to seek removal. This is an interesting example of sandbagging; if defendants remove cases simply on the possibility that alleged damages will exceed the amount-in-controversy requirement, they may incorrectly remove cases that should remain in state court, but if they wait for the formal confirmation from the plaintiff, they may face the allegation that they’ve missed the 30-day window to remove a case–something to consider when plaintiffs’ attorneys complain that defendants reflexively remove cases to federal court that don’t belong there. Moltner has a good argument that Starbucks waited too long to remove, because alleged damages would have clearly exceeded $75,000 despite the lack of an ad damnum clause in the complaint citing a number, but the consequence of such a ruling will be that defendants will be forced to prematurely remove cases that perhaps should not be removed. (Moltner v. Starbucks Coffee Co., #: 1:08-cv-09257-LAP-AJP (S.D.N.Y.)).

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College’s lawsuit: you stole our poetry program

Another academic-poetry litigation brawl: “New England College has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the former director of its master’s-degree program in poetry stole faculty members and students from the New Hampshire institution and re-created the program at Drew University, in New Jersey”. New England College had offered the country’s only master’s program of its sort, but now six faculty members have departed to join the fledgling program at the New Jersey institution. (Chronicle of Higher Education; Concord Monitor).

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