“I cannot rip out the hearts of those who hurt you. I cannot hand you their severed heads”. But Rochester, N.Y. injury-law advertiser Jim (“The Hammer”) Shapiro could promise to “squeeze them for every dime I can”:
For more, see Apr. 15, 2005. Shapiro’s ethically-challenged and now-defunct legal practice did a notably poor job of living up to its promises; see Jun. 17-18, 2002, May 24, 2004, etc.
“Let kids sue parents”
Such a grand idea from an anti-smoking campaigner up North: “Children should be able to sue their parents for exposing them to harmful second-hand cigarette smoke, an Alberta doctor says.” Dr. Larry Bryan, who worked on a provincial commission that planned out anti-tobacco measures, “says banning puffing in cars or homes would be very difficult to enforce. But he believes the message would come across loud and clear if smokers were held legally responsible for their actions through exposure-related lawsuits. “(Michelle Mark, “Let kids sue parents”, Edmonton Sun, Feb. 4).
Meanwhile, regulation creeps forward on other fronts: “Texas will join a handful of states that prohibit foster parents from smoking in front of children in their homes and cars when a new state rule takes effect January first. Under rules passed this year, foster parents can’t smoke in their homes if they have foster children living there. They also can’t smoke while driving if children are in the car. Other states with similar smoking laws include Vermont, Washington and Maine.” Roy Block, president of the Texas Foster Family Association, says rules of this sort discourage Texas families from stepping forward to offer themselves as foster parents; most states do not exactly enjoy a surfeit of applicants well-qualified on other grounds (“Texas To Prohibit Foster Parent Smoking”, AP/WOAI, Dec. 4).
New Times column — warning labels everywhere
My new column is up at the Times Online on the problem — long familiar to readers of this site and Americans in general, somewhat less so in the U.K. — of overzealous warning labels. My jumping-off point is the new book Remove Child Before Folding, earlier mentioned here and for sale here. (Walter Olson, “Keep your children away from open flames”, Times Online, Jan. 28).
Today is also the day the Times unveiled its redesign: check out the front page, the law page, and this interview with the designers.
February 5 Roundup
- First Democratic earmark for trial lawyers. [Point of Law; Grace]
- Philip Howard on the lack of trust in the American justice system. [Common Good/NY Sun]
- Cooperman pleads guilty to Milberg Weiss kickbacks. Anonymous commenter at WSJ Law Blog: “Mr. Taylor of Zuckerman Spaeder contends that Mr. Cooperman’s statements “have never been credible.” Then why on God’s green earth did Milberg Weiss repeatedly use Mr. Cooperman as a plaintiff in the first instance for so many years if he was not credible? Is Mr. Vogel, another plaintiff whom Milberg Weiss repeatedly used for decades who also has pled guilty similarly not credible? Milberg Weiss certainly has a penchant for finding “not credible” plaintiffs for representing class interests.” [Point of Law; WSJ Law Blog]
- Bone-screw litigation and informed consent claims. [Drug and Device Law Blog]
- Dan Markel has a more theoretical look at the car-wash “forgiveness” case. [Prawfsblawg]
- Getting rich on backdating (but not the way you think) [Ribstein]
- Jury selection in San Francisco [Cal Biz Lit; see also NLJ]
- Hawaii losing doctors; gov calls for reform; 86% of Hawaii med-mal claims without merit [The Honolulu Advertiser]
- The miracle of joint and several liability: Police chase injuries put city on hook $4.5 million, because city held a 10% responsible for felon’s car accident. [The Olympian]
- Judge Harry Hanna becomes star for his slap on the wrist to Chris Andreas, but, more jaw-dropping: Ninth Circuit Judge Bea defends the double-dipping lawyer. [Point of Law; Legal Pad; WSJ Law Blog photo of Andreas t-shirt]
- The Guardian v. AEI. [Adler @ Volokh; Frum; Point of Law]
Slow typist sues law school, cont’d
The Ann Arbor News covers Adrian Zachariasewycz’s complaint against the University of Michigan Law School (see Jan. 27), and quotes me along the way:
In addition to seeking unspecified monetary damages, Zachariasewycz wants the law school to study his scores and provide a letter or make a verbal statement to prospective employers saying that his typing was a factor in his exams.
“I paid a lot of money to go to law school,” Zachariasewycz said. “I interrupted my career. I worked very hard. And I got a big zero out of it.”
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City, is founder of overlawyered.com, which posted a comment about the case and other lawsuits Olson believes have “eyebrow-raising potential.”
“It’s hard to figure out what’s been done to him that’s unlawful,” Olson said.
Olson said he thought it first had something to do with rights of the disabled.
“But it looks like he’s just an ordinary bad typist like a lot of the rest of us.”
(Jo Collins Mathis, “U-M law school sued over grad’s poor typing skills”, Ann Arbor News, Feb. 2).
UK “compensation culture” debate
Marcotte encore
John Edwards’ selection as his blogger-in-chief of Pandagon‘s Amanda Marcotte has mushroomed into what National Journal “Beltway Blogroll” terms “the first blog scandal of campaign 2008,” made more piquant by Marcotte’s quick move (documented in our Friday post) to delete her bizarrely abusive rantings about the Duke case once they began to attract attention. I should note that in our very active comments thread, Ted takes a different view than I do of the affair, and I explain in turn (in a comment kindly quoted by K.C. Johnson) why I think the episode does reflect poorly on Edwards’ campaign:
John Edwards’s life in the law and experience with the justice system is his major resume item dating back beyond the past few years, as well as the major reason this site has given his career extensive coverage. Moreover, the Duke case, which looks ever more like the Scottsboro Boys case of our era, has been convulsing his own state of North Carolina for month after month. Edwards’ dodging of the case — his apparently successful stifling of any urge to speak out at the plight of the falsely accused — might on its own stand as merely cowardly. Marcotte’s hiring, on the other hand, throws an even less attractive light on it, rather as if, in Scottsboro Boys days, an on-the-sidelines Southern senator took on as a major spokesperson someone who’d been yelling the Boys’ guilt from the rooftops in the most crudely prejudicial language.
On Marcotte’s quick removal of her Duke comments, Dale Franks at Q and O makes the legitimate point that there’s nothing intrinsically improper in bloggers’ going back to amend or delete past posts that they now realize are mistaken or which no longer reflect their evolving views. And Ted cautions, also quite fairly, against evaluating a blogger’s fitness for a real-world post by pointing to the most inflammatory of his or her thousands of past posts.
Part of what lends the Marcotte episode such a comic aspect, however, is the timing and nature of her post and later revision. Her vitriolic rant asserting the lacrosse players’ guilt was posted a mere two weeks ago, almost certainly at a point after (as the Atlanta airport reference indicates) she had already entered talks with the Edwards campaign and thus had reason to know that she might soon come under the heightened scrutiny accorded to an official spokesperson. These were not the impulsive utterances of a Net Newbie. Moreover, the temperate-sounding new “official stance” with which she replaced the scrubbed post is ludicrously different in both tone and content from the rant it replaced; at a quick reading, one might even take it for a defense of the lacrosse players. A closer examination of its dodgy language, however, reveals that she does not actually take anything back; there is no indication that she has reconsidered her view of Jan. 21 or sees it as being in need of actual correction.
As for whether Marcotte was just having a bad day and slipped into an abusiveness that is unrepresentative of her usual tone, even a cursory glance through her output at Pandagon makes clear that there is much more embarrassment for the Edwards campaign to come: a few examples are collected at LieStoppers (scroll to “Earlier Comments”), Michelle Malkin, and Creative Destruction.
Some further commentary: Common Sense Political Thought, Protein Wisdom, Mark Steyn @ NRO (“There are two Americas: one in which John Edwards gives bland speeches of soporific niceness, the other in which his campaign blogger unleashes foaming rants of stereotypically obsessive derangement.”), Patterico (& welcome Michelle Malkin readers).
Litigious Princetonians
One of my favorite pop-culture bloggers, fellow Chicago Law graduate Adam Bonin, spots a line in today’s New York Times Vows column—
As their dating progressed, Ms. Wu researched Mr. Nobay online and learned that in 1998 he sued Princeton, unsuccessfully, for defamation after the university notified medical schools he had applied to that his applications contained misrepresentations and altered his academic record. (In court, he admitted misstatements but says he still believes some of what Princeton presented was inaccurate.)
—that obviously merited further investigation. Sure enough, AP reported in 1998:
The graduate, Rommel Nobay, had admitted he told numerous lies and half-truths in applying to Princeton and later to medical school. He claimed that he was part black and a National Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had donated half their beggings to support his dream. … Nobay, 30, a computer science teacher from New Haven, admitted that he was not, in fact, a Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had not helped send him to school. He also acknowledged that he doesn’t know whether he has any black blood.
Bonin notes an early 1990s suit by Princeton student Bruce L. Miller, who received $5.7 million after getting himself drunk and losing three limbs in a climb-a-train-plus-touch-high-voltage-wires-electrocution accident. (Regular Overlawyered readers know that this sort of suit doesn’t require a Princeton education.) But Bonin forgets to mention the drink-and-fall-off-the-Princeton-bell-tower lawsuit.
Infant mortality statistics
As I’ve noted other times on Overlawyered, United States infant mortality statistics are artificially high relative to other nations, because of the way they are tabulated. In the US, heroic efforts are taken to save the lives of premature infants; when those efforts fail, the infant mortality statistic goes up; other nations with rationed single-payer health care consider the same child “stillborn” and do not register the death in the infant mortality statistics.
Amber Taylor points out that I may have missed part of the story, and a part that I should be especially sensitive to: the effect of legal rules creating financial incentives to count stillborns as infant deaths. (& Apr. 8: response to the latter point from Linda Gorman of the Independence Institute).
More Super Bowl litigation threat coverage
More newspapers are covering the story raised by our January 31 post about the NFL forbidding Super Bowl parties and promotions. Notwithstanding the NFL threats, my heavily-blogger-attended annual Super Bowl party is still going forward, complete with the title “Super Bowl” on the Evite. (Stephanie Simon, “No sanctuary for Super Bowl flock”, LA Times, Feb. 3 (churches); Liz Benston, “Casinos not best seat in house for big game”, Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 2 (casinos)). (OT personal note: the latter story quotes my friend “Steve Fezzik”, who I knew when he was just an actuary with a real name, and who almost convinced me to leave the law in 2001 to team up with him as a professional gambler.)