Oz reforms: no tears for laid-off lawyers

“Lawyers losing their jobs because of the NSW government’s clampdown on public liability claims have received little sympathy from Premier Bob Carr. The government’s tort law reforms have reportedly forced the closure of a whole floor of lawyers at one Sydney firm. And NSW Bar Association president Ian Harrison has warned that up to a third of barristers could lose their jobs.

“But the premier gave the lawyers short shrift, saying he would rather see money going to workers than lining legal eagles’ pockets. ‘Australia would have been put out of work if we hadn’t reformed the tort laws and reined in this culture of litigation in NSW,’ he said.” (“Lawyers get no sympathy”, AAP/Melbourne Age, Dec. 5).

“The Civil Liability (Personal Responsibility) Act and its amendments introduced caps and thresholds on compensation and shifted the balance towards greater personal responsibility to avoid long and expensive court cases. The result has been a sharp drop in casework for solicitors and barristers specialising in personal injury cases.” (Alex Mitchell, “Get over it, Carr tells jobless lawyers”, Sun Herald/Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 7).

Newsweek and Weekly Standard cover stories

Newsweek has a new cover story (“Civil Wars”, Dec. 15) on “Lawsuit Hell”, with sidebars on what litigation is doing to schools, medicine, and municipal governance (Chicago), with balance from Sen. John Edwards. The good news to report is that it’s a superior package, no surprise since one of the lead writers is Stuart Taylor Jr. (writing with Evan Thomas). The less good news is that although many of the colorful cases cited will seem, um, familiar to our readers (see Nov. 26), this website wound up not getting mentioned in the final draft. (Maybe someone will recommend us in a letter to the editor). NBC/MSNBC is doing related broadcast features all week, and the authors will be taking part in a live Web discussion on Thursday 12/11 at 11 a.m. EST.

And it’s a busy week on the newsstands, since our friend Bill Tucker has a cover story in the new (Dec. 15) Weekly Standard entitled “In Defense (sort of) of Trial Lawyers”. We disagree with quite a bit of it, as you can imagine, but it does give us a couple of nice mentions, which counts for a lot, no?

S. 17200 horror stories

Tim Sandefur collects them, too: “[I]n another currently pending case, a trial court hearing a class action lawsuit with class members from across the nation — but suing in California — held that it could simply ignore the choice of law clauses of the contracts from 48 other states, because ?17200 is more broadly written than any other ‘consumer protection’ law, and therefore it violated public policy to require litigants from other states to litigate there even though the contracts they signed required them to do so.” (Dec. 3). See also Oct. 26; Nov. 24; Steven Greenhut, “How California’s Consumer Laws Legalize Extortion”, Foundation for Economic Education, May.

More on California antispam law

Reason Online (Dec. 8) has now published a longer version of my piece on California’s very bad new anti-spam law, which will spell courtroom trouble for legitimate marketers nationwide unless the federal CAN-SPAM bill, which would override it, is enacted instead. The new version goes into detail about some of the precedents that make the California law scary, including the litigation that has arisen under Utah’s one-year-old law giving individual recipients a right to sue over spam, and the record of junk-fax class actions filed pursuant to a federal 1991 law; these discussions had to be left out of last week’s Wall Street Journal version of the piece (see Dec. 3) for space reasons.

Main Street’s financial spies

Among its other provisions, the USA Patriot Act enacted into law sweeping authorization for the federal government to require “financial institutions” — which, it turns out, can include auto dealers, jewelry stores and other retailers — to file confidential law enforcement reports when customers display buying patterns that might suggest them to be in possession of illicit funds. (The businesses are also forbidden from telling their customers that they have informed on them to the feds.) “Know your customer” rules, rationalized as part of the ever-widening fight against money-laundering, had previously been highly controversial — see our Mar. 1999 piece in Reason — but after Sept. 11 were dusted off and enacted with an antiterrorism rationale. Recently (Dec. 1) Michael Isikoff reported in Newsweek that in two-thirds of federal law enforcement searches using the confidential reports, there has been no evident connection with terrorism at all. John Berlau has the details, in Reason Online (“Dangerous Deputies”, Dec. 5; “Show Us Your Money”, Nov.).

New letters to the editor

We’ve posted another batch of letters to the editor, including one from David Giacalone commenting on the recent case in which a Washington state jury hit the state with $8.8 million in damages for not preventing an assault by youths in foster care; a note from an Ontario barrister pointing out that both Canada and Great Britain maintain specialized commercial courts, a trend that is spreading in this country as well; letters on Fox v. Franken and on malpractice insurers’ investments; and, last but certainly not least, a humdinger of a letter from someone who is really, really upset that anyone would have the temerity to write the sorts of things we publish in this space (“Are you even a lawyer?”, he demands to know).