Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Steve Chapman on pro football litigation

As I’ve been saying for a while, if the logic of other mass tort litigation is to carry over to suits over traumatic brain damage from pro football, it’s by no means clear how the organized sport can make it through the coming wave of litigation other than by turning itself into a very different game. Chicago Tribune-based syndicated columnist Steve Chapman gives me a chance to outline some of the reasons why, including the high likely damages, pressure to draw in peripheral parties and defendants such as doctors and equipment makers, and difficulties in relying on an assumption of risk defense [Washington Examiner] Background on risks for school-age players: WSJ.

P.S. Some more stirrings on the prevention and diagnosis front. A contrasting view from Max Kennerly. And discussion by Andrew Sullivan and readers, “Is Big Football the Next Big Tobacco?”

Filed under:

Recess appointments, shmecess appointments, we’ve got the power

Although the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled its composition invalid, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) “declares that it will keep doing business as if nothing happened.” [WSJ via Fed Soc Blog]

This is by no means the first face-off between the D.C. Circuit and an agency resistant to its will: for another, see this 1981 Regulation account (PDF, scroll to page 11, “Reversing the D.C. Circuit at the FCC”) of a series of showdowns between the appeals court and the Federal Communications Commission. That one ended happily for the independent agency, but then the FCC may have been on firmer ground going to bat for its right to exercise policy discretion as an expert agency than it would have for its right to be constituted improperly through unconstitutional appointments.

Filed under: , ,

Indiana: “Couple Faces Jail Time For Nursing Deer Back To Health”

“The Indianapolis Star reports that the Indiana Department of Natural Resources wants to prosecute Jeff and Jennifer Counceller for taking care of an injured deer that showed up on their doorstep.” [CBS Cleveland via Amy Alkon, Dan Mitchell] A while back I wrote about the case in which a Virginia family got in trouble with the feds after their 11-year-old rescued a baby woodpecker in their back yard and cared for it for a day or two before releasing it.

Filed under: ,

Medical roundup

  • “On Average, Physicians Spend Nearly 11 Percent Of Their 40-Year Careers With An Open, Unresolved Malpractice Claim” [Health Affairs via Pauline Chen, NY Times]
  • SCOTUS lets stand Feds’ “accept Medicare or lose your Social Security” edict [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
  • Robot surgery: from the Google ads, you might think lawyers are circling [Climateer via Tyler Cowen]
  • New York mandates more aggressive anti-sepsis measures in hospitals, and White Coat thinks it won’t end well [EP Monthly]
  • Shortages of generic FDA-regulated sterile injectables begin to take deadly toll [AP/Worcester Telegram, earlier]
  • Continuing the discussion of electronic medical records from a few days back: as medico-legal documents, EMRs are under pressure to be something other than candid and spontaneous [Kaus] While other patients wait for critical care, ER docs and nurses enter mandatory data fields for whether the infant is a smoker or the flu victim is a fall risk [White Coat]
  • Obamacare part-time-work fiasco “only starting to become news when it hits university professors” [Coyote, David Henderson, earlier]

Filed under: , , , , ,

AP/WaPo on Chevron maneuvering

Via an AP dispatch, the Washington Post covers another round, from Argentina, in the long squabbling over whether American-led lawyers can get foreign courts to enforce a $19 billion environmental judgment from the Ecuadorian courts. You’d think this would have made a good occasion for AP or the Post to mention, at least, the sensational developments of three days ago, in which Chevron filed with a court a sworn affidavit in which a former Ecuadorian judge said that he and a second judge had allowed plaintiff’s lawyers to ghostwrite their judgment in exchange for a promised bribe of $500,000. Those allegations were dramatic enough to generate prompt, substantial coverage in places like Fortune, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Forbes, yet the Post still hasn’t mentioned them, unless you count a vague reference in the AP item to longstanding charges of fraud on both sides.

Filed under:

Paul Krugman on expanding disability rolls

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman believes you’re living in a right-wing “intellectual bubble” if you think rising disability claims in the Social Security program reflect anything other than “the real health problems of an aging work force.” Thing is, no less a personage than former Obama budget director Peter Orszag wrote in the New York Times that the “spike in disability insurance applications (and awards) does not reflect a less healthy population,” and Orszag’s view on this matter is commonplace among many other analysts whose views are hardly conservative. [Ira Stoll, who has just relaunched his wonderful SmarterTimes.com, one of the best media-criticism sites since they invented the Internet; everyone should start reading it]

Filed under: ,

Jeffrey Toobin on recess appointments

Don’t the New Yorker’s readers deserve a better law analyst than Jeffrey Toobin? In his rant against the Canning decision, notes Ed Whelan, “Toobin asserts that there has never before been a ‘legal challenge’ to the scope of a president’s authority to make recess appointments. Somehow he missed the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling in 2004 — highlighted prominently in the D.C. Circuit opinion — in which liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and others challenged one of President Bush’s recess appointments.” [“Bench Memos“]

P.S. Mike Rappaport on another datum omitted by Toobin amid his fevered charges of judicial partisanship: “Prior to Judge Sentelle’s decision, the only judicial opinion to adopt the same position was written by liberal 11th Circuit Judge Rosemary Barkett, following a brief filed for Ted Kennedy by liberal Marty Lederman.”

Filed under:

Banking and finance roundup

Filed under: , , ,