Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Damned If You Do Department: Campus Suicides

We’ve previously noted that colleges, out of fear from liability over student suicides, have been taking extreme steps to preempt the problem by requiring medical leaves of absence. George Washington University discovered that avoiding suits from Scylla doesn’t mean that Charybdis won’t sue: Jordan Nott has sued the school after being barred from campus after seeking hospitalization for suicidal thoughts. Liability reform is clearly needed: either schools aren’t responsible for student suicides, or they aren’t responsible for the steps they take to prevent such suicides. (In the famous Elizabeth Shin/MIT case, the parties recently settled after a court ruling expanding schools’ liability in suicide cases, including the possible liability of administrators without mental health credentials.)

Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, argues for a middle ground—a program based on one at the University of Illinois intervening in the lives of suicidal students without kicking them off campus. But Schaffer doesn’t recognize that the middle ground doesn’t resolve liability issues, including hindsight-based lawsuits for the cases where the middle ground isn’t successful; even the Illinois program has reduced suicides by only half. Educational reform can’t happen without legal reform.

Filed under: , , , , ,

New Orleans judicial expense account spending questioned

A reader asks me to blog about an expose in this Sunday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune, calling it “appalling.” In 2003-2004, one judge (presumably the highest-spending judge) spent $16,717/year on travel, compared to the average $8,000 spent by other judges.

I don’t know whether this is a good judge or a bad judge, but that shouldn’t matter to my analysis. I’m less appalled. Someone has to be the highest-spending judge, and this one doesn’t appear to have violated any rules. $4,400 in taxpayer money was spent to teach a course in Colorado, but if the judge had been reimbursed by the Louisiana Association of Defense Counsel, different people would be complaining about the supposed conflict of interest. The newspaper successfully nitpicks rental-car and airport transportation costs—but the judge must have travelled coach, because there’s no complaint about his airplane tickets. One can question the political savvy of a judge who doesn’t realize that his expense account reports are going to be scrutinized. One can also complain that the money comes from civil district court filing fees, but, at the end of the day, money is fungible and it doesn’t really matter what pot the money comes from. It would probably be more efficient to end travel reimbursements and just raise salaries—but because of tax implications, maybe not.

Louisiana state judges make less than first-year associates in private law firms, and I’m not about to complain that a judge was a little generous with himself in taking advantage of available and legal perks to the tune of a few thousand dollars. There appears to already exist a check in the system, in that this judge’s request for a week-long educational trip to Italy was rejected.

Or am I so overly jaded by plaintiffs’ bar abuses in the billions that I should be more appalled? Feel free to comment in the comment section, but be polite and on-topic.

Filed under: , ,

Frozen dessert suit melts in NYC

Sad news for the boosters of obesity litigation: a Manhattan judge has dismissed a would-be class action which asked the maker of CremaLita frozen dessert to pay for weight-gain damages because it had wrongly advertised its product as fat-free and as having 60 calories per serving when in fact it had about 10 calories more than that. After a Consumer Affairs investigation had uncovered the misrepresentation, Stephen Brandt sued, claiming “that as a result of CremaLita’s alleged false advertising …he and countless ‘other members of the class’ were put at risk of ‘severe health problems, including but not limited to cardiovascular problems, mobility problems and cancer’ as well as the ‘negative self-esteem issues’ that the ‘social stigma’ of “excess weight gain carries” in today’s culture.'”

However, Justice Emily Jane Goodman ruled that Brandt was not an appropriate representative for a class action, in part because of his difficulty in demonstrating damages. To begin with, Brandt claimed to have consumed only one serving of CremaLita per week, which meant, said the company’s defense lawyer, that his extra calorie consumption would have amounted to only 10 calories a week. Brandt, whose weight ballooned by 41 pounds over a six-year period including the seven months in which he said he’d been a buyer of the dessert, also conceded that he’d enhanced it with crumbled cookie toppings.

In court filings, the defense was rather cruel about it all: “What Brandt fails to mention,” said its lawyer, “is that he regularly eats real ice cream, McDonald’s and Wendy’s cheeseburgers, french fries, pepperoni pizza, beer, corn chips, donuts, cookies, hard cheese, eggs, bagels, peanut butter, Chinese take-out meals and pasta, [and] that he never exercises.” Moreover, “although he provided no useful information regarding his weight gain during the period that he ate CremaLita, his medical records . . . show that he managed to pack on an additional 16 pounds in the nine months after he stopped” eating the confection. (Dareh Gregorian, “Suit melts away”, New York Post, May 25; Gothamist, May 25).

Filed under: ,

Poland Spring fracas, cont’d

Boston Business Journal has a feature article catching up on the torrid fight between attorney Jan Schlichtmann (A Civil Action) and a squad of class-actioneers led by Thomas Sobol of Hagens Berman, over whether lawyers in pursuit of settlement fees sold out the interests of clients following lawsuits against Nestle’s bottled-water operation (Sheri Qualters, “‘Civil Action’ lawyer tangles with litigators”, May 19). Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly also has a big article which will however rotate off their online “Feature” page soon. Earlier coverage: Mar. 25, Mar. 20, etc.

Filed under: , , ,

This Man Should Quit Politics and Become an Entrepreneur

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) believes that government must force automakers to increase the fuel-efficiency of the vehicles they sell. Here’s part of a letter that he has in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, explaining:

Your editorial opposing fuel economy standards (“Not So Grande CAFE,” May 8) that the standards amount “to the government dictating the kind of cars Americans will be able drive, even if those cars aren’t safe on the road.” This is wrong.

First, the goal of fuel economy standards is to enable Americans to drive the cars they want — but that the automakers aren’t producing. And what Americans want is the full range of vehicles available now, including SUVs, but with greater gas mileage. The technology exists to create those vehicles affordably, car buyers want them, and the nation needs them. The fact that they are not on sale is a classic market failure.

…..

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.)
Chairman
House Committee on Science
Washington

…………………………………………………..

Rep. Boehlert whips the term “market failure” about too cavalierly. The believable existence of genuine market failure requires an institutional setting in which a significant number of individual decision-makers each bears too few of the consequences of his or her choices — such as when, for example, an owner of a factory upstream pollutes a river in ways that harm downstream owners of riverside land because downstream owners have no effective way to enforce their property rights to an unpolluted river.

But the situation decried by Rep. Boehlert has none of the institutional prerequisites for “classic market failure.” If a sufficient number of consumers truly are willing to pay for more-fuel-efficient cars (as Rep. Boehlert asserts), surely at least one of the 20-plus automakers now supplying new cars to the U.S. market would discern this fact — and, out of pure self-interest, act to satisfy this consumer demand. After all, if increasing a car’s fuel-efficiency would cost an automaker $X and if consumers are willing to pay $X+Y for such a car, then profits are to be had satisfying this consumer demand.

Rep. Boehlert doesn’t divulge in this letter his source of information about this alleged consumer demand, but surely now that he’s unearthed this valuable information, automakers will act on it voluntarily — assuming, of course, that the information’s source is credible.

Alas, I suspect that Rep. Boehlert’s source of information on this point is not credible — for, again, if Rep. Boehlert’s claim were credible, automakers wouldn’t have to be forced by government to satisfy their customers’ demands.

The arrogance and conceits of Rep. Boehlert and his ilk make me want to vomit.

Filed under:

UK: What, no specific performance?

Too bizarre to let pass: in Kent, England, 53-year-old Christine Ryder filed a breach of contract complaint against Kevin Reeves, 40, for accepting £20,000 from her in exchange for his promise to engage a hitman to murder her, or do it himself. Instead Reeves skipped out without doing the deed, and a judge ordered him to pay Ryder £2,000 in compensation. (Alan Hamilton, “A contract is still a contract – even if it is a contract to kill”, The Times (U.K.), Jan. 17; Longhorn Law, Jan. 17).

Filed under: ,

Caffeine as “drug”

It’s one of the premises of the anti-fizzy-drinks campaign (and presumably, after that, the anti-coffee and tea campaigns): when your kids drink Coke or Pepsi, they’re ingesting (shudder) a drug. Is it being taken seriously? Well, caffeine is now turning up as a prohibited substance in school zero-tolerance policies. (van Bakel, May 26). Can suspensions for possession of Dr. Pepper be far behind?

Filed under: , ,

Breathalyzers for everyone?

At least if New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz gets his way. Although it doesn’t consider the technology ready yet, “Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) gives a qualified endorsement to the idea” of making the devices mandatory in all new cars, teetotalers’ included. After all, they only run about $1,000 apiece, the cost in freedom and dignity aside (Jayne O’Donnell, “Will all autos some day have breathalyzers?”, USA Today, Apr. 28)(via Brian Doherty, Hit and Run).

Filed under: , , ,