Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Lawyers target milk

Jonathan Turley is fond of claiming (without any real basis) that litigation reform advocates make up stories to promote tort reform. The reality is that the plaintiffs’ bar provides us with stories far more entertaining than any fictional Winnebago lawsuit.

Remember the day of June 21, 2005, because that’s the day that a sufficient number of the world’s problems were solved that a “public-interest group” has nothing better to do than to troll for plaintiffs to sue the dairy industry for not putting warning labels on milk about lactose intolerance. This is yet another publicity stunt of Dan Kinburn and the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, over 95% of whom are not physicians; last time they asked for publicity, we gave it to them. The American Medical Association has called PCRM a “fringe organization” that uses “unethical tactics” and is “interested in perverting medical science.” (via Taylor, who is waiting for vegetarians to sue over beef commercials)

Filed under: , ,

Housekeeping note

Mostly of interest to other webmasters: the continued assault of trackback spam (hundreds a day now) is making it increasingly hard to maintain our trackback function, especially given the tendency of this site to comment on matters involving casinos, obesity, pharmaceuticals, and other chronic spam-magnet topics. Rather than disabling trackback entirely, I’m going to experiment with turning it off for older posts that are heavily affected. If you happen to link to an older post on which trackback has been turned off, consider sending me an email to alert me (can’t guarantee a response, though, I’m afraid).

Filed under:

Blawg Review #11

…is now up, hosted by Al Nye the Lawyer Guy. Our post on the hapless Virginia couple who served liquor to their son’s friends comes in for a link, and the host has some very kind things to say about this site and about my book The Rule of Lawyers (which — have I mentioned? — makes a great gift for graduates, or belated Father’s Day offering).

Other highlights of the review: George Lenard discusses a Seventh Circuit ruling that the MMPI, a standard personality test, counts as a “medical examination” which when administered by an employer to applicants before a job offer is made triggers the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and Carolyn Elefant offers advice on how to benefit from blogs without spending a whole lot of time on them.

Filed under:

“Affordable housing” lawsuits

In Connecticut as well as some other states, land developers have teamed up with low-income housing advocates to promote laws which impose on towns a duty to boost their level of so-called affordable housing and give homebuilders willing to include such housing in their developments a cause of action to go to court to overturn local building restrictions. Norm Pattis of Crime and Federalism (May 9) isn’t buying the idea that the resulting litigation, with its tendency to replace the formerly diverse land-use practices of different towns with homogeneous sprawl, really should count as progressive.

Filed under: , ,

“How the government blew $135 million in six years”

Here’s a Business Week writer who shares our general view of the federal tobacco suit: “The real affront is that this ill-conceived legal campaign was not halted years ago. … The Justice Dept. took a mountain of evidence, much of it uncovered by other investigators, applied speculative legal theories, and then proceeded to seek ridiculously overinflated damages. Now most of its original case has been thrown out by the courts, and the agency is scrambling to devise a remedy that will justify all the effort. …If they indeed are trying to get rid of a Clinton-era case they have never embraced ideologically, as Waxman suggests, the weakness of the case itself only made that all too easy to do.” (Nanette Byrnes, “The Tobacco Suit That’s Going Up In Smoke”, Jun. 27). “I don’t know that what the Bush administration has done is any more politically based than what Clinton did in bringing the case in the first place,” Paul Honigberg, a member of the Justice Department’s legal team on the case until September 2001, told the New York Times. (Eric Lichtblau, “Political Leanings Were Always Factor in Tobacco Suit”, Jun. 19)(via Orin Kerr). Before the Clinton White House intervened in the late 1990s, the Justice Department had taken the position that the federal government had no cause of action against the tobacco companies of the sort later asserted. For more, see Sept. 29 and Sept. 23, 1999 (filing of suit), Sept. 21, 2004 (start of trial), and more recently Feb. 5, Jun. 13, etc.

Filed under:

ADA and cruise ships

Do you run a cruise ship that may stop at an American port of call, in addition to those of a dozen other countries? Then you may have to retrofit your vessel in various ways to comply with the consumer-accommodation requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Or such is the apparent implication of a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down Jun. 6. Three Justices dissented. (Spector et al. v. Norwegian Cruise Line Ltd., opinion courtesy FindLaw; Brian Doherty, “Sea of Litigation”, Reason, June; Pat Cleary, NAM Blog, Jun. 6; Georgetown Law webcast). See Mar. 2.

Filed under:

RFK Jr. vs. thimerosal

One of America’s least credible public figures, celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wades into the mercury in vaccines/autism controversy (Dec. 29, 2003, earlier posts) with a “special investigation” for Salon and Rolling Stone rehearsing the contentions of anti-thimerosal activists (“Deadly Immunity”, Jun. 16). Orac at Respectful Insolence, who’s covered the controversy extensively, hits back hard here, here and here. Reactions from Salon’s readers are here, and the online magazine has already been obliged to post several corrections of Kennedy’s errors, including the following remarkably embarrassing one:

The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms — an amount 40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury.

More: Skeptico (Jun. 20) challenges RFK Jr.’s account of a supposedly hush-hush meeting of vaccine scientists held outside Atlanta (via Adler, the Corner).

Filed under: , , ,

Strippers, privacy and class actions (again)

Once again the application of class action procedure to the world of exotic dancing is raising privacy issues not encountered in your ordinary everyday class action. In recent Texas litigation (see May 3), the concern is the sending of notices in the mail to past lap-dance customers informing them of their rights to recovery over alleged fee overcharges (which notices will in some cases be opened by their outraged spouses and significant others). And now in a San Francisco wage-and-hour class action, former managers of one club are arguing that many of the exotic dancers themselves don’t want their real names known and face potentially harmful intrusions into their privacy under any notification plan likely to be effective (“Dear Former Exotic Dancer…”). A lawyer pressing the class action, which concerns alleged misclassification of the dancers as independent contractors, dismisses the management argument as merely tactical. (Pam Smith, “Privacy Worries Don’t Shake Up Stripper Class Action”, The Recorder, Jun. 14).

Filed under: , ,

Update: staking the Shinnecocks

On the day the Shinnecock Indian tribe filed the first of an expected series of lawsuits laying claim to wide swaths of the Hamptons (see Jun. 13), the tribe disclosed that its courtroom offensive was being underwritten by wealthy Detroit casino investors Marian Ilitch, who with her husband Michael founded Little Caesars Pizza and since then has gone on to purchase baseball’s Detroit Tigers as well as the city’s Red Wings hockey team, and real estate developer Michael Malik. “Gateway Funding Associates, a company backed by [Ilitch and Malik], signed an agreement with the tribe more than a year ago to pay for the lawsuit and other ‘economic development’ initiatives in exchange for a part of any future proceeds, said Tom Shields, a spokesman for Gateway.” Champerty has been defined as the practice of aiding in a lawsuit in return for a share in the benefits being sued over; it was illegal at common law but “the prohibitions have been greatly relaxed in modern times” and in some cases abolished. (Katie Thomas, “Shinnecocks launch legal claim to Hamptons land”, Newsday, Jun. 16; “Lawsuit backers invest in casinos” (sidebar), Jun. 16; James Langton, “Native American tribe lays claim to the Hamptons”, Sunday Telegraph (U.K.), Jun. 19).

Filed under: , , , , ,

U.K.: fruit trees get council axe

“A council is cutting down dozens of healthy trees because it fears that it will be sued if people slip on fallen fruit. Mature crab apple and pear trees are the prime targets of the cull by Havering council, east London, which said it had never been sued by anyone over rotten, slippery fruit on the pavement but the potential existed for such action.” Homeowners have protested, to no avail so far. (David Sapsted, “Trees cut down amid fears of fruit case”, Daily Telegraph, Jun. 18).

Filed under: , ,