Many thanks to Daniel Schwartz who has been filling in over the past week. Check out his work at his Connecticut Employment Law Blog.
A comment about comments
I mostly leave regular visitors alone to say what they want in our comments section, whether or not I agree. That being said:
Given this site’s subject matter, we often find ourselves talking about cases of injury or death that pose unthinkable tragedies to the persons and families involved. Given the identifying material in the stories, it is inevitable that members of those families, or others who deeply care about the injured persons, or the persons themselves, will at some point come to the site and read what we have said.
When we voice our disagreement with the claims made in resulting lawsuits, it can be helpful to imagine those family members’ faces as being among those in the audience, and let our words be shaped accordingly. I’m sure I sometimes fall short of following this advice myself, but when I do follow it, I always feel like more of a grown-up.
Update: unlawful to test for mad cow
By a 2-1 margin with Judge David Sentelle dissenting, a panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the USDA’s rule prohibiting companies from testing beef they own for the dread disease. The rule had been challenged by Creekstone Farms, a Kansas-based meat exporter. (Legal Times “BLT”; opinion in PDF; earlier).
Gov. Palin as judge-picker
Jeralyn Merritt @ TalkLeft and Jonathan Adler @ Volokh identify one data point.
P.S.: via comments, Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch has more.
College should have warned student not to run on street
From the “Not About the Money” files; reader D.W. writes:
Seguin is about 35 miles east of downtown San Antonio. The deceased student/athlete was an adult, chose to run on a busy street despite ample on-campus facilities, and chose to run with traffic instead of facing it. The story doesn’t say, but the street in question is actually US90, possibly the heaviest traveled street in town aside from I-10. So naturally it’s the university’s fault she was struck and killed. Oh well, it could have been worse, at least they were only held 5% responsible.
(Ron Maloney, “Jury finds TLU partially responsible”, Seguin (Texas) Gazette-Enterprise, Aug. 29; more background here and here).
“Zapped Amtrak trespasser sues”
Brian Hopkins, 25, of Astoria, Queens, New York City, “who survived an electric shock and fire two years ago when he climbed atop an empty, stopped Amtrak train after a night of bar hopping in Boston is suing the railroad – because Amtrak didn’t do enough to protect trespassers like him.” (Kathianne Boniello, New York Post, Aug. 31).
“Worse than Katrina”?
Veteran law blogger Ernest Svenson (Ernie the Attorney) is bunkered down in the Uptown section of New Orleans, and blogging Hurricane Gustaf here.
P.S. Hurricane blogger Brendan Loy says recent hours have been favorable to the Crescent City’s chances: the storm has not intensified as feared and is taking a course to the west of the city.
Juror privacy and voir dire, cont’d
If you apply for a job handling million-dollar financial exposures or life-and-death safety risks, your prospective employer generally won’t be allowed to ask at the interview what prescription medications you may be taking. On the other hand, if you’re called as a potential juror on a case, the lawyers may enjoy carte blanche to probe and dig to their heart’s content, and you may be obliged to answer the questions proposed by their jury consultants. “A secondary reason for asking is strategic — to bounce jurors they don’t want and use medications as an excuse.” How about requiring the voir dire inquisitors to restrict themselves to the same formulas employers are supposed to use to avoid ADA liability, e.g., “Is there any reason why, with suitable accommodation, you would not be able to concentrate, sit for long periods of time, apply unclouded judgment, and do the other things expected of jurors?” (Julie Kay, National Law Journal, Aug. 26).
When docs treat women as “pre-pregnant”
The New York Times’s Tara Parker-Pope doesn’t pick up on the tort incentives that might cause this to happen, but Glenn Reynolds does.
Christiansen, Pellicano convicted in wiretap case
The high-level Hollywood lawyer plans an appeal. A Los Angeles lawyer says his colleagues will have to “be more careful than in the past” about employing private investigators who use unlawful means to dig up dirt on opponents. A private investigator confirms his lawyer-clients are beginning to ask things like “I need you to keep it on the up-and-up”. Won’t that cramp their style? [L.A. Times]