Might it be time to abolish the National Transportation Safety Board? It’s supposed to serve as an authoritative source on the causes of accidents, but last week its chief, calling for a nationwide ban on cellphone use by drivers, was not just non-authoritative but actively misleading. I explain in a new post at Cato at Liberty (& Instapundit, Balko, Stoll, Adler).
More on misleading government public health advisories here.
“When someone dies you’re only supposed to say something good. Kim Jong-Il just died. Good.” (with apologies to Bette Davis; this seems on the way to becoming one of my most popular Twitter posts ever, even getting a mention in the Hollywood Reporter)
“Last Friday an Oklahoma federal jury awarded a pitcher $871,000 in actual damages (and gave his parents $80,095.85 in actual damages) for an aluminum bat that allegedly was defectively designed and contained insufficient warnings. The case is styled Yeaman v. Hillerich & Bradsby Co., Case No. CIV-10-1097-F (W.D. Okla.).” [Russell Jackson] Earlier here, here, here, etc.
The holiday Hollywood chestnut gets a medico-legal analysis from Steven Buckingham at Abnormal Use.
It took three years of litigation, but Texas developer H. Walker Royall has finally ended his defamation suit against author Carla Main and publisher Encounter Books (which is also my publisher on Schools for Misrule). Main’s book Bulldozed had been critical of the use of eminent domain in land takeovers, and in particular of its use in a deal in Freeport, Texas. The case helped prompt the Texas legislature to enact stronger protections for defendants against so-called SLAPP suits, a development long overdue in some other states as well. [Roger Kimball, Houston Chronicle; Jacob Sullum; earlier]
Don’t (if you’re a lawyer seeking favorable rulings in your case) attract national attention by assailing the judge and other court officials as, among other epithets, “Popess,” “mindless numbnut,” “dastardly Jesuit,” and “bigoted Catholic beasts.” [Lowering the Bar, Minnesota]
David Boaz recalls the great essayist’s remarks at a Cato Institute event. Other tributes: David Frum, D.G. Myers, Chris Buckley.
More: Hitchens’ wonderful 2004 Vanity Fair piece in which he sets out to break a series of pettifogging New York City laws and regulations.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is asking the UN high commissioner on human rights to rule various American states in violation of international law because of the states’ insistence on various restrictions on the franchise, including ID requirements for voters, denial of the vote to convicted felons, and measures that “have reduced the ease of early voting, a convenience that is disproportionately heavily used by African-Americans.” [Guardian; Caroline May, Daily Caller]
The Art Newspaper takes up a trend we’ve noted before in this space:
In New York, the art lawyer Ronald Spencer, of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, agrees with Sanig. “This is a very serious problem. Specialists are often academics earning $100,000 [or less] a year and they can’t afford litigation they are fearful of being a defendant in a lawsuit, even if they should win.” He admits that there are more of these cases in the US: “It’s a cliché, but we are more litigious here.” He says that the US system, whereby the plaintiff does not have to pay the legal fees of the successful defendant, encourages this.