Along with its formal report, the commission probing the financial crisis of 2008 has done an online archival dump of internal company documents that some hope, and others fear, will be of great help to litigators — even perhaps a “Wikileaks for the class action bar,” which with its allies was well represented on the commission and staff. [BLT; earlier]
More: David Frum has been doing a series of blog posts on the report’s substance.
The Ohio lawmaker gives his side of the story. Earlier here.
The restaurant chain responds with full-page newspaper ads to a headline-grabbing Beasley Allen lawsuit charging that its beef filling flunks federal standards for meat content. [ad via AP, Atlantic Wire, ABC, Atlanta Journal-Constitution] More: NPR (company has produced superhero cartoon spoof defending its product).
A Colorado cop gets reinstated with back pay after what his police chief considered an “egregious” incident of excessive force. And once again — I argue in my new post at Cato — we are given reason to rethink the strange phenomenon of public employee tenure.
P.S. Scott Greenfield has more on job security for errant police officers.
During the successful campaign for Proposition 64 in California, reformers cited as an example of the sort of the “shakedown lawsuit” they hoped to eliminate a suit in which Bill Lerach’s class action firm demanded money from lock maker Kwikset because its product was marked “Made in U.S.A.” but included screws made in Taiwan. Nonetheless, the California Supreme Court has now ruled 5-2 that the proposition does not ban such suits after all, because consumers can claim to be injured by the arguable mislabeling, even though nothing was defective about the lock. Dissenting Justice Ming Chin, joined by Carol Corrigan, pointed out that to get around the Proposition 64 limit all that consumers “now have to allege is that they would not have bought the mislabeled product,” and that this “cannot be what the electorate intended” in voting for the measure. [L.A. Times, CJAC, earlier here, here, etc.]
Relatedly or otherwise: Glenn Reynolds interviews University of Tennessee law professor Ben Barton about his new book The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System (“Virtually all American judges are former lawyers. This book argues that these lawyer-judges instinctively favor the legal profession in their decisions and that this bias has far-reaching and deleterious effects on American law.”)
One judge found it “unrealistic to expect that such disclosures [of personal and private information on Facebook] would be considered confidential.” But does a litigant’s use of smiley faces in online communication really contradict her claims to have suffered loss of enjoyment of life? [Reuters/MSNBC]
CBS News takes a look at some instances in which in-store cameras captured footage of, e.g., victims carefully positioning the spills on which they intended to slip. More: Legal Blog Watch.
Connecticut state representative Patricia Dillon, seeking to protect the job market for U.S. lawyers’ services, has introduced a bill that would ban as “unauthorized practice of law” various types of outsourced legal work (such as document review, which some law firms now farm out to workers in India). Some don’t think the idea will fly: Westport-based law firm consultant Peter Giuliani “said the doc review-type tasks being done overseas is more like paralegal work. ‘You don’t need a license anywhere in the U.S. to do what they’re doing,’ he said.” [Connecticut Law Tribune via ABA Journal]
I’m beginning to set up the speaking tour on my forthcoming book (background) and from the invitations already on hand it looks as if over the next few months I’ll be visiting New York, Texas, the Midwest, northern California and the Rocky Mountain states, often speaking to Federalist Society chapters. Why not invite me to your area, or check about adding your venue to an already planned swing? Diane Morris at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. is taking the lead in handling arrangements; you can reach her at 789-5226, area code 202, or at dmorris – at – cato – dot – org.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit just contributed this great blurb for Schools for Misrule:
Every year I hire as law clerks some of the best and
brightest law students in the country, and spend a year
wringing out of them all the wrong-headed ideas their law
professors taught them. Now I know why.
To see what newsman John Stossel, author Philip K. Howard and Georgetown lawprof Randy Barnett said about the book, check out the jacket (PDF).