Court throws out verdict because defense mentioned Liebeck case

“A defense lawyer’s fleeting reference to the ‘uniquely iconic’ McDonald’s coffee case was enough for the Utah Supreme Court to order a new trial in a pedestrian accident lawsuit and allow the plaintiff to seek a larger damages award.” [Matthew Heller/OnPoint News; Jodie Hill/Downtown Lawyer] And Abnormal Use is out with a new interview of Ted Frank, who has written frequently on the hot-coffee case for this site, and who says:

The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.

I, too, gave a lot of thought to writing up the long controversy over the Liebeck case in my latest book, precisely because academic sources, and not just trial-lawyer publicists, persistently spread distortions and misconceptions about the case. Eventually it seemed like too wide a digression from the book’s main themes — but someone still needs to write up that story.

April 25 roundup

A tale of California labor law

“Bookworm,” the Bay Area-based blogger, tells the story of what happened in a case on which she worked, which arose after an employer encountered the interaction of two California laws, one requiring that final wages be paid within three days, another tilting attorneys’ fee awards toward employees in disputes with employers. A highlight: when the California Supreme Court attempted to correct some of the most extreme unfairness arising from the fee rules, it got overridden by the state legislature. [Bookworm Room]

Gulf spill: “I never signed up with anybody”

Campbell Robertson and John Schwartz of the New York Times find that many Vietnamese-Americans who are listed as law firm clients in the BP Transocean spill proceedings would rather not be law firm clients. “Like [Tim] Nguyen, some maintain that they never signed up with lawyers, but found that claims had been filed on their behalf (about 50 people have made formal complaints to the claims facility along these lines).” Nguyen found himself a client of lawyer Mikal Watts, “and to his further surprise, as a Louisiana shrimper rather than a Mississippi shipyard worker.” Watts, a big-league Texas tort lawyer, has reported having 43,000 spill clients, many mass-recruited from minority and poorer communities; he says he has a “signed contingency-fee contract with every client,” and that he has released clients who changed their mind about representation. “People familiar with the claims process [of one 26,000-claimant subgroup] said nearly every submission was listed as a deckhand with identical earnings.” Watts says the claims fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, has kept changing the documentation it asks for.

Mark Steyn on Kinder Egg ban

We’ve previously discussed the FDA’s ban on importation of European “Kinder Surprise” kids’ treats (a toy wrapped in a chocolate egg) and last night conservative writer Mark Steyn ran into the law, as his kids saw two of the confections confiscated at the Canada-U.S. border. The Border Patrol agents would not allow the kids to separate the chocolate from the surprise, eat the chocolate on the spot, and then take home the toys. “The real choking hazard,” he observes, “is the vise-like grip of government.”

Plus: “Woman campaigns to legalize chocolate Kinder eggs” [Northwest Florida Daily News]

Texas considers strong measures against lawsuits intimidating speech

The First Amendment notwithstanding, wealthy and powerful litigants in this country often exercise the tactical power “to bully those who publicly criticize them into silence by filing frivolous lawsuits that the critics can’t afford to litigate,” with defamation lawsuits being a particularly favored means of such bullying. The majority of states have moved to enact “anti-SLAPP” laws aimed at curtailing this tactical exercise through the application of sanctions or otherwise, but such laws are often quite weak, sometimes applying only, for example, to speech aimed at petitioning the government on public matters. Now Texas lawmakers are considering what would be one of the nation’s strongest laws, protecting “communication made in connection with a matter of public concern” and including statements made in non-public forums, such as emails. The website SLAPPED in Texas has compiled a list of speech-chilling lawsuits in the Lone Star State, including the oft-criticized suit by a real estate developer against author and eminent domain critic Carla Main. [Arthur Bright/Citizen Media Law, Paul Alan Levy/CL&P]

Court: Canadian charter mandates bargaining with teacher’s union over class size

Canadian courts in recent years have ruled that the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms creates an enforceable right to collective bargaining, that is, compels employers to bargain with unions rather than with individual workers over terms of employment. Now the Supreme Court of British Columbia has ruled that the Charter prohibits the provincial government from reserving class size and teacher-student ratios, among other topics, as matters of government policy ruled out of bounds as subjects of bargaining with the teacher’s union. [British Columbia Teachers’ Federation v. British Columbia, 2011 BCSC 469 via Bales, Workplace Prof; related 2009 (Alberta court constitutionalizes mandatory dues checkoff)]

Claim: NY Yankee top hat logo copies her uncle’s 1936 design

A spokeswoman for the baseball team said there was “no proof” of the woman’s claim. “This is a wonderful country,” said [Alice] McGillion, “where anybody can sue for anything, even when the allegations are over 70 years old.” [NY Post] More: Unbeige (on possible evidence for claim).

Also on sports logo law: “Can I legally get myself tattooed with a pro sports team’s logo?” [Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope]