Open thread

Soliciting nominations for topics you’d like us to write about. Let us know here or, if you don’t want to wait for the hassle of comment moderation, on Facebook.

December 8 roundup

  • As governor, Huckabee signed a good tort reform package capping punitive and non-economic damages, and reforming joint and several liability and venue law, but the rest of his economic record is big-government. And David Harsanyi is critical of Huckabee’s claimed opposition to nanny-statism. [Insurance Journal; Human Events; Harsanyi; RCP; Michael Tanner @ FoxNews]
  • Update to the popular Bridezilla flowers lawsuit; florist files opposition. Lots of comments ensue. [Lattman]
  • South Dakota Supreme Court: no, you can’t sue a pharmacy for being a “drug dealer” when plaintiff steals prescription medicine for a disabled friend and injures himself OD’ing on it. [On Point]
  • Former litigator hired to invest $100m in court cases for UK hedge fund. [Times Online]
  • Atkins fallout in Texas and California, as professional anti-death-penalty experts there happily minimize subject IQs to call their intelligent clients retarded. Earlier: Feb. 2005; Sep. 2003. [Science Evidence blog; and again]
  • Heartbalm tort of alienation of affection withstand constitutional challenge in Mississippi. Earlier: Jul. 5; Nov. 2006, etc. [Torts Prof]
  • Bob Woodruff biography: I would have died if my injury happened in the United States because of fear of liability. [Murnane]
  • I’ve updated my paper on Thomas Geoghegan’s new book. [SSRN]
  • Overlawyered holds slim lead at ABA Blawg 100 popularity contest. But why aren’t any of you voting for Point of Law? [ABA Journal]

Buys submerged land, sues to have it drained

Curious goings-on in North Carolina:

Kristin Wallace bought some very wet land as an investment. Eight acres of it, all underneath Lake Lynn.

The Cary woman bought the land for $12,500 last year at a public auction of property with delinquent taxes. Now she is suing to try to force the city of Raleigh or Wake County to buy the soggy land from her or drain it.

“It’s extremely valuable to me,” Wallace said, “dry.”

City and county officials say Wallace, who started investing in real estate less than two years ago, knew the land was lake bottom when she bought it, something she doesn’t dispute.

“It’s bought as is,” said Shelley Eason with the County Attorney’s Office.

(Sarah Ovaska, “Pull the plug on Lake Lynn, suit demands”, Raleigh News & Observer, Dec. 6).

Scruggs indictment VII

With the criminal case itself not furnishing many new developments over the past day or two, attention is turning to the question of what the “buried bodies” might be of which Tim Balducci claimed knowledge (and which prosecutors might wish him to sing about), and also to the possibly overlapping topic of Scruggs’s earlier run-ins with lawyers and other professionals over the splitting of fees. (Balducci represented Scruggs in some fee disputes, as did the Jones firm that later sued him over fees.) Also drawing much attention is the question of whether an intensified ethical searchlight will make life hot for the Mississippi political figures who’ve participated most extensively in Scruggs’s litigation campaigns over the years, namely former Attorney General Mike Moore and present AG Jim Hood.

The U.S. Chamber-backed stable of publications that includes Legal NewsLine has been digging into these topics. At the SE Texas Record, Steve Korris relates details of Scruggs’s lengthy and bitter dispute over asbestos fees with attorneys William Roberts Wilson Jr. and Alwyn Luckey, in which Scruggs was represented by John Griffin Jones. Jones’s associate Steve Funderburg in March of this year confronted Scruggs in dramatic fashion in an email over his sense of having been done out of Katrina fees:

“I have looked in the mirror all weekend and tried to figure out how I could be so stupid,” he wrote. “John and I DEFENDED you in fee dispute litigation for God’s sake.”

He wrote, “We DEFENDED you when people said you were greedy, or were a back stabber, or a liar, or anything else.”

He wrote, “You have developed a good routine. It worked. But go to your grave knowing that you have shaken my belief in everything I hold dear.”

He wrote, “I did not believe that people like you really existed. I am ashamed and will always be ashamed of having defended you and protected you.”

See also Y’All Politics for discussion.

Read On…

Operation Lucky Bag

Find a wallet, go to jail? New York undercover cops have been leaving wallets and purses around in public spots in the city, then arresting anyone who picks them up and doesn’t present them to a nearby uniformed officer. Some arrestees have otherwise clean records and say they intended to use ID inside the bags to notify the rightful owners. Putting money inside the bags didn’t lead to serious enough charges, in the coppers’ view, so they began salting them with live American Express cards so that the finders could be charged with grand larceny, with four years behind bars. (N.Y. Daily News, more, N.Y. Times, Fox News, ABC News, Gothamist).

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t files: “Cyber-bullying”

School districts have learned that they cannot discipline students for abusive Internet postings they make off-campus. Layshack v. Hermitage Area School District, No. 074465 (pending 3d Cir.); Dwyer v. OceanPort School District No. 03-6005 (D. N.J.) ($117,500 settlement to student suspended over web site). “Lawyers say school districts are in a legal quandary: If they punish a student for something they did off school grounds, they could get hit with a freedom of speech claim. If they do nothing, they could get hit with failure to act litigation.” (Tresa Baldas, “As ‘cyber-bullying’ grows, so do lawsuits”, National Law Journal, Dec. 10).

December 7 roundup

  • Speaking of privacy, consider what happens when lawyers get a hold of your email. (When will we see law professors eager to create new causes of action consider the privacy-destroying implications of ediscovery?) [Fulton County Daily Report/law.com; Toronto Globe & Mail; Point of Law] Earlier: Jan. 9 and links therein.
  • Speaking of privacy and reputation, Mary Roberts goes to trial, but Above the Law doesn’t mention our coverage (June 2004; Sep. 2005; Feb. 6; Mar. 19; May 17), and misses the juicy details.
  • Oy: “Woman who ‘lost count after drinking 14 vodkas’ awarded £7,000 over New Year fall from bridge.” News from the compensation culture not entirely bad: damages were reasonable, and the court did hold the woman 80% responsible, the exact opposite of the McDonald’s coffee case. [Scotsman.com]
  • No good deed goes unpunished: Sperm donor liable for child support, judge rules. [Newsday/Seattle Times]
  • Bad attorney gets fired, sues DLA Piper for discrimination, represents herself pro se, demonstrates firsthand why she got fired: law firm wins on summary judgment. [ABA Journal; update: also New York Law Journal]
  • Romney on tort reform; McCain on medmal. [Torts Prof Blog; Torts Prof Blog]
  • Another day, another Borat lawsuit. I’m still waiting for the consumer fraud lawsuit from moviegoers upset that it was not actually a Kazakh documentary. [Reuters; earlier]

Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation

Daniel Solove’s solution to the potential problem of damning information on the Internet is to open up the libel laws and to remove the Communications Decency Act safe-harbor for site owners. As Amber Taylor points out in a provocative review, one could take this chain more seriously if Solove more directly considered the real-world consequences of such a rule, and the amount of true speech it would shut down because of the potential legal expense of defending speech in the absence of bright-line rules. Eric Turkewitz’s review finds his blogger identity trumping his plaintiffs’ attorney identity to also oppose the expanded litigation that Solove proposes. David Giacalone is more favorable, though also unwilling to endorse Solove’s policy prescriptions.

Scruggs indictment VI

Plenty of news today, and some links to commentary:

As part of Timothy Balducci’s guilty plea, the feds confirm that Balducci has been “substantially” assisting them in their case against the other defendants. Per the sub-only WSJ: “People familiar with the case said the government has recordings of Mr. Scruggs that include evidence beyond that alluded to in the indictment.” Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker observes that the feds might have interviewed Balducci on any number of other matters, such as where “there are bodies buried,” in his own memorable phrase.

A Jan. 22 trial date has been set in the case.

Where’s John Keker? wonders Folo: “[Billy] Quin was sure doing all the talking for Team Scruggs yesterday”.

David Rossmiller employs the verb “to Scruggs”, and numerous commentators read the lawyer’s withdrawal from representation of Katrina cases as a step he would not have taken had the new criminal charges not loomed very seriously indeed.

Y’All Politics keeps wondering where AG Jim Hood is. It also notices that former Mississippi AG Mike Moore, a figure well known to longterm readers of this site, seems to be involved with the doings of the now Scruggs-less Scruggs Katrina Group. Martin Grace finds irony in that lawyer consortium’s approach to its own issues of “emergency management”, as well as in its solicitation of whistleblowers.

X Curmudgeon notes Scruggs’s long history of skating close to the edge on use of confidential informants: “some lawyers would argue [that] his success has depended heavily on his willingness to break the rules, or to play outside the rules.” Regarding John Grisham’s statement that his friend Scruggs would not have gotten involved in a “boneheaded bribery scam that is not in the least bit sophisticated”.

Isn’t it great having friends like John Grisham? In other words, if it had been a SOPHISTICATED bribery scheme, then, yeah, sure, he could see Dickie doing that. But not a boneheaded scam.

White Collar Crime Prof speculates about the shape of a Scruggs defense based on the twin themes of “it’s too boneheaded for smart guys like us”, and hanging Balducci out to dry.

Not to mention hoping that the tape recordings aren’t too damning.

Update: A new post from David Rossmiller ties together several loose threads mentioned above relating to Katrina litigation, confidential informants, the Renfroe documents and AG Hood. Our earlier coverage, by the way, can be reached by links from here.

Black hydrants and unintended consequences

The state of Texas recently enacted legislation requiring that all non-working fire hydrants, defined as those pumping less than 250 gallons of water per minute, be painted black so that firefighters do not waste time during emergencies hooking up to futile sources (and presumably so that nearby homeowners can also assess their risk before a fire). Alas, the new law has had an unintended consequence, according to this Sept. 18 press release (PDF) from the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association of Texas:

Unfortunately, some water utilities in Smith County have over-reacted to the legislation by painting all fire hydrants black, most of which are functioning hydrants that pump well over 250gpm. “The utilities are painting all hydrants black to protect against liability,” said, Cody Crawford, Fire Chief of Chapel Hill Fire Department. “While this makes sense to the lawyers, it doesn’t make good common sense and it puts homeowners at risk.”

Crawford goes on to give his opinion that the practice “creates more liability than it removes”; presumably the water utilities’ lawyers disagree with that assessment (h/t reader Eric Bainter).