Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Want to cut the line at the Disney park? Call my disabled friend

It got started with the handicapped parking placards that in California and elsewhere made their way into the possession of not-so-disabled drivers. Then there were the reports of abuse of airport wheelchair attendant service, which can get you past security fast and which (to avoid litigation, embarrassment, or both) airlines often dispense on request without inquiring into need. Now comes the rentable disabled person to help your kids cut lines at Disney World. Disney allows parties of up to seven to enter attractions separately when one of the party is disabled. According to the New York Post, some affluent Manhattan mothers are happy to pay for the convenience: “The ‘black-market Disney guides’ run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.” [Tara Palmeri, “Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World,” New York Post]

P.S. Too good to check? Commenter Marco and Christopher Robbins at Gothamist both have their doubts on whether the hazily sourced accounts might be embellished or worse.

P.P.S. And quite a lot more skepticism about the story from Lesley at XOJane. But (update) an NBC News investigation finds there does seem to be something to the story.

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“Alarm fatigue”

Trying to order medications for a heart attack victim using electronic medical records, White Coat is frustrated to run into screen after screen preventing him from completing the order without addressing unlikely allergy issues (and thus protecting the hospital from liability):

For those of you who don’t know what alarm fatigue is, think of a car alarm. The first time you hear it going off, you run to your window to see who’s breaking into a car. Maybe you run to the window the second time and the third time, too. By the tenth time the alarm goes off, you’re thinking that the alarm is broken and someone needs to get that fixed. After about thirty false alarms, you’re feeling like going out there and busting up the car yourself – especially if the car alarm wakes you when you’re asleep.

It’s a concept with many applications beyond the emergency room setting, too, product warnings being just the start.

P.S. Dr. Westby Fisher has some related thoughts about the limits of trying to engineer physician responsibility through electronic records design.

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“Keep Calm and Carry On” copyright controversy

You’d think if anyone owned the phrase, it would be Her Majesty’s Government or, failing that, the bookselling couple in the North of England who brought the W.W. II-vintage poster back from obscurity. But one former TV producer has different ideas, and would like to own the rights. [CBS News (autoplays; I’ve removed the previously embedded video because I couldn’t disable autoplay); earlier]

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Feds unveil new, drastically restrictive, campus speech regime

FIRE, Hans Bader, Eugene Volokh and other free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about remarkable and extreme guidelines on university discipline emanating from the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and Education Department Office of Civil Rights. I’ve got more details at Cato at Liberty. Earlier here, here, etc.

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May 14 roundup

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“Derek Boogaard’s Family Is Suing The NHL For Wrongful Death”

The family, now represented by Chicago’s Corboy & Demetrio, is refiling a suit dismissed earlier [Deadspin]:

According to The New York Times, the complaint alleges that the N.H.L., through the actions/inactions of the teams and team physicians charged with caring for Boogaard, breached a duty to Boogaard in failing to monitor his prescription drug use. The suit also alleges that the league’s substance abuse program violated its own rules when it failed to suspend or reprimand him for his several lapses, even in the face of multiple failed drug tests and his admissions that he occasionally purchased the drugs illegally.

P.S. In other sports-lawsuit news, “Vijay Singh sued the PGA Tour on Wednesday for exposing him to ‘public humiliation and ridicule’ during a 12-week investigation into his use of deer-antler spray that ended last week when the tour dropped its case against him.” [ESPN, auto-plays video]

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Government is simply the name for the things we do together…

…such as harass our political enemies [Michael Cannon, Cato, more; Washington Post on revelations that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra tax scrutiny to groups that “criticize how the country is being run”.]

Update: that “just a rogue field office in Cincinnati” story didn’t last long. AP is reporting that the agency’s acting head knew nearly a year ago that tea party groups were being targeted, a fact that might have been of interest to lawmakers pursuing constituent reports of overly onerous document demands from the IRS (see our earlier coverage of that here and here). Meanwhile, ProPublica, the generally liberal-leaning journalistic outfit, has disclosed that the IRS shared with it confidential data from nine conservative-leaning nonprofits.

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Texas and industrial accidents

Ira Stoll catches the New York Times being tendentious again [SmarterTimes]:

…one reason that Texas is at or near the top of the nation in terms of workplace fatalities is that it is at or near the top of the nation in terms of the number of workers and how many hours they work. If you adjust for that, and take the rate of workplace fatalities — that is, the number of fatalities from workplace injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, Texas isn’t worst in the nation, but somewhere in the middle…

Related: Josh Barro, Steven Greenhut (California as comparison).

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Class action roundup

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