- Sen.-elect Cory Booker (and Mayor Bloomberg too) on liability reform and fixing health care [NJLRA] How plaintiff’s lawyers get around caps [Alex Stein, Bill of Health] Missouri protects health volunteer workers [John Ross]
- Like an Ayn Rand novel: Massachusetts ballot initiative pushes confiscation of private hospital profits [Ira Stoll, NY Sun]
- Advice: plan now to lower your 2014 income to get valuable ObamaCare subsidies [San Francisco Chronicle]
- Medicare comes off poorly: “Quality Of Care Within Same Hospital Varies By Insurance Type” [Tyler Cowen]
- Revisiting a panic over alleged mass drug injury: “Avandia’s posthumous pardon” [David Oliver, earlier here and at Point of Law]
- Louisiana lawmakers use malpractice statute to discourage abortion [Alex Stein, Bill of Health]
- Georgia committee looks at plan to replace med-mal suits with administered compensation [Georgia Report via TortsProf, Daily Report Online (constitutionality), Insurance Journal]
- Uwe Reinhardt on professional licensure and doctors’ monopoly [David Henderson]
Great moments in personal responsibility, Euro edition
“A Romanian man who has admitted to stealing masterpieces by Gauguin, Monet and Picasso on Tuesday threatened to sue the Dutch museum he took them from for making his robbery too easy.” [AFP/ArtDaily]
“The little Louisiana pension fund litigation monster”
Fortune reporter Erika Fry profiles the lawyer-allied Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System, pronounced “Lampers,” which has been called a “serial plaintiff,” a “frequent filer,” and in one legal brief “the most prolific filer of shareholder litigation in U.S. history.”
Welcome WOR John Gambling listeners
I was a guest this morning on John Gambling’s popular NYC morning show to discuss Free Speech Week, which Tim Lynch is covering all this week at the Cato blog (more). Items tagged “free speech” at Overlawyered are here. More: And now the podcast is up (6:18).
“UC Davis pepper-spray officer awarded $38,000”
“A former UC Davis police officer whose pepper-spraying of protesters gained worldwide notice thanks to a viral video has been awarded more than $38,000 in workers’ compensation from the university for suffering he experienced after the incident.” [Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle]
More from Lowering the Bar:
Here are some additional facts that are remarkable.
- Pike was on paid leave during the university’s investigation, which for some reason took eight months.
- The investigation found not only that Pike didn’t need to use the spray, but that he used a spray not sanctioned by the department and he used it from an unsafe distance. Seems serious and willful to me.
- Pike was being paid — please be seated — at least $119,000 per year (another report says $121,680) plus benefits, to be a campus policeman in Davis, California.
- Though Pike was fired, he will still get his pension.
- The students he sprayed sued UC Davis for civil-rights violations. The university settled with them for $1 million (plus an apology). Under the settlement, the plaintiffs will each receive, at most, $30,000.
Yes, the man who assaulted the plaintiffs will be getting $8,000 more than any plaintiff will get, as a result of his claim that he was acting within the course of his employment by assaulting them and became emotionally disabled as a result of being accused of assaulting them; he is also allowed to keep a pension that is likely based to some degree on the $119,000 per year the state was paying him to be the kind of officer who pepper-sprays non-violent protesters in the face.
Liability and torts roundup
- Struggling with a new-design gas can? There’s a reason for that [Scott Reeder, earlier on Blitz bankruptcy]
- NYT video retrospective on Stella Liebeck-McDonald’s (hot coffee spill) case is getting a lot of attention;
- Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has made itself the biggest name in asbestos defense, and some trial lawyers hope to make hay with that [Scripps/WPTV]
- California trial lawyers chief: yes, we’re going to partner up more with elected officials as in lead paint case [Chamber-backed Legal NewsLine]
- It’s differences in procedure, more than in substantive law, that mostly explain why the U.S. has hundreds of times as many product liability suits as Japan [J. Mark Ramseyer via Point of Law]
- “Injured by big government? Call: 717-671-1901 [promotion for Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania free-market-oriented outfit]
- How litigation finance might remake the lawsuit landscape [Nora Freeman Engstrom via TortsProf]
Great moments in school safety
Sending fake gunmen into schools as an exercise? Have authorities lost their mind? [Jennifer Abel, Anorak via Brian Doherty]
Update: liability for publishing articles that undermine lawsuits
“A federal appeals court has shot down a Massachusetts consumer protection case against two doctors, a medical journal and its publisher over an allegedly flawed article cited by defendants in birth-injury medical malpractice cases. That means plaintiffs’ attorneys will have to challenge the article’s validity in each case in which the defense wishes to cite it.” The First Circuit did not reach the issue of constitutional free speech, but upheld a lower court’s ruling that the plaintiff had not shown adequately that expert testimony reliance on the allegedly faulty article had resulted in the loss of the litigation in question. [Sheri Qualters, NLJ] Earlier on A.G. v. Elsevier here.
Caribbean reparations, payable by the U.K.?
An “international legal fantasy,” as one observer puts it. [New York Times; earlier on Haiti and France; more on reparations]
Ethics roundup
- Eliciting false testimony among sins: “Ninth Circuit finds ‘textbook prosecutorial misconduct'” [Legal Ethics Forum]
- Syracuse: jurors say insurance company lawyer observing trial got uncomfortably close [Above the Law]
- South Carolina: “Prosecuting attorney is accused of dismissing charges in exchange for sexual favors” [ABA Journal]
- Judge, handing down six-year sentence, calls defense lawyer’s briefing of witness a “playbook on how to lie without getting caught” [Providence Journal]
- Kentucky high court reinstates $42 M verdict against lawyers for fleecing fen-phen clients [Point of Law] Accused of bilking clients, prominent S.C. lawyer surrenders license, pleads to mail fraud [ABA Journal]
- Former Kansas attorney general accused of multiple professional violations: “Phill Kline is indefinitely suspended from practicing law” [Kansas City Star]
- “Nonrefundable ‘Minimum Fee’ Is Unethical When Fired Lawyer Will Not Refund Any of It” [BNA]