NY Times on litigation finance

Yes, it’s an informative piece, and yes, it does explore some of the drawbacks and abuses, particularly for clients whose lawsuits are being financed by banks, hedge funds or other investors. But the Times (with its reporting partner, the Center for Public Integrity) also buys in to what David Oliver correctly identifies as a big, central fallacy when it claims that the influx of money into plaintiff’s cases “is helping to ensure that cases are decided by merit rather than resources.” So when an outside investor makes it possible for, say, a patent troll to launch mass royalty demands on behalf of marginal patents, or a mass tort firm to roll out scientifically dubious toxic-injury claims, or an Indian tribe to assert 200-year-old land claims against nearby farmers for casino-seeking leverage, it means that cases are now suddenly being resolved on a basis that more closely tracks the merits? Check your premises, please. More: Dan Fisher/Forbes and Ted Frank/PoL, and earlier on Counsel Financial.

P.S. Good round table at New York Times “Room for Debate”, check out in particular the Paul Rubin and Richard Epstein contributions; Kenneth Anderson/Volokh (“insurable interest”).

November 15 roundup

  • Simon Singh on need to reform UK libel law [BoingBoing]
  • Complaint: Scalia’s too darned principled on religious liberty [rebutted by Ponnuru at NRO]
  • Air Force sued after teenage rave in abandoned bunker turns bad [PoL]
  • Scathing Kleinfeld dissent in Ninth Circuit Alien Tort case [Volokh, Fisher, Recorder]
  • “Law Firm Accused of Requiring Heels, Then Discriminating When Injury Occurred” [ABA Journal]
  • Parent’s angry letter to Kansas City school board complaining that teacher laid hands on son; best part are the demands [Something Awful forums]
  • Australia: “Iconic Merry-Go-Round Is Deemed an Insurance Liability” [Free-Range Kids]
  • “Meatpacker to pay $3m for using strength test” [five years ago on Overlawyered]

“Mount Washington Hotel to businesses: Stop using mountain’s name”

“A state lawmaker tells WMWV-FM that the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort has told other businesses with ‘Mount Washington’ in their name to stop using it or face a legal challenge.” The hotel says it has challenged only three lodging businesses and does not intend to go after other local businesses named after the mountain. [AP, WMUR, Boston Globe]

P.S. Commenter Mannie: “It gets better. The IOC routinely harasses businesses on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for using the name ‘Olympic.'”

“The other oil cleanup”

Must reading in last week’s New York Times Magazine: Douglas McCollam explores the scramble over compensation after the BP TransOcean gulf oil spill, profiling Texas trial lawyer Tony Buzbee, who’s among those leading resistance to the Ken Feinberg administered-compensation-fund way of handling claims. It offers a much broader and better-informed perspective on wider litigation trends than is usual in such stories.

Guardian advances litigation urban legends

The venerable British newspaper — at least someone there in charge of selecting pictures and captions — seems to have fallen for an old bit of fiction about an insurance customer who supposedly tried to collect on the loss of his cigars via fire, as an example of “odd American lawsuits.” One wonders why papers fall back on hoary email legends when they could have readily found hundreds upon hundreds of genuine examples of odd American lawsuits right here.

Incidentally, the reader who makes it through the underlying opinion piece (by Neil Rose) does eventually learn that the cigar fable is one of a class of stories “most of [which] are apocryphal or didn’t get anywhere, such as the case against the dry cleaners.” This is not really up to snuff as a way of warning readers off the cigar tale, and it’s grossly misleading as a description of the Roy Pearson dry-cleaners pants suit, which Pearson kept going for years at a very real and serious cost to his targets, the Chung family. Much of the point of the Neil Rose article seems to be to assure British readers that the American way of litigation may be safely emulated, since its costs are not really so bad. If that’s the argument, shouldn’t the piece convey a fairer picture of those costs?