Annals of rape allegations

“A Louisville police detective testified Monday that she was surprised to see television reporters outside the police station when Karen Sypher arrived to file a rape report last year against University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino.” [USA Today, more] A year ago Sypher’s lawyer wrote Pitino a letter demanding $10 million on threat of suit. Sypher is now on trial for alleged extortion and her then lawyer has given testimony for the prosecution. [ABA Journal]

ADA at a South Carolina courthouse

Fixing the restrooms and other design problems is going to cost Oconee County $2 million, of which it will have recovered about half by suing a now-defunct architect. One big problem, per Spartanburg’s WSPA, is that “ADA requires toilets to measure 18 inches from the center of the bowl to the wall” and some of the courthouse toilets were mistakenly built at 19 inches instead.

“If they were mounted in the floor like the one at your house, you could just put in an offset flange and slide it over one inch to be in compliance,” says [county facilities director] Julian. “But since it’s mounted into the wall, all of the plumbing runs up through the wall.”

Which means the entire wall will have to be torn out and all of the plumbing shifted over — one inch.

More on courthouses and accessibility here.

August 2 roundup

  • “Why Do Employers Use FICO Scores?” Maybe one reason is that government places off limits so many of the other ways they might evaluate job applicants [McArdle, Coyote]
  • Michael Fumento on $671 million verdict against nursing home in California [Forbes]
  • Ted Frank is looking for a pro bono economics expert [CCAF]
  • Lester Brickman, “Anatomy of an Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph of Temptation Over Ethics” [Phillips Petroleum explosion; SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Ice cream trucks return to Niskayuna, N.Y. 34 years after a panic-occasioned ban [Free-Range Kids, Mangu-Ward]
  • Galloping trend toward “whistleblower” enactments: this time lawmakers are rushing one on oil workers [Smith/ShopFloor, more, earlier]
  • Class action lawsuit filed against Trident Xtra Care gum, marketed as good for one’s teeth [Hoffman/ConcurOp; compare Russell Jackson on Wrigley’s settlement of a class action over Eclipse chewing gum]
  • EEOC officials urge employers to ban foul language and swearing in workplace [seven years ago at Overlawyered]

Left assails Fifth Circuit judges based on clients they repped decades ago

Hello? Guantanamo? It’s not as if you’d expect any sort of consistent policy on these matters from the imaginatively named Alliance for Justice. But it’s still strange that they’d open the door to future attacks on their own favored judicial nominees based on clients they represented long before reaching the bench. [Joel Cohen and Katherine Helm/Law.com, NLJ] More: John Steele at Legal Ethics Forum takes a different view, and I comment.

Charge: NHTSA sitting on pro-Toyota investigation results

A new report in the WSJ quotes a retiring NHTSA official as saying higher-ups are refusing to release the results of the agency’s staff investigation into charges of Toyota sudden acceleration, because those findings are not unfavorable enough toward the automaker. I’ve got more detail in a new post at Cato at Liberty, and Ted covers the story at PoL.

Meanwhile, proponents of a sweeping expansion of federal auto safety law, one that would thrust Washington much more deeply into the operations of the automotive industry, are really in a hurry — a quick, urgent, must-do-now hurry — to pass it, even though many of its provisions have not had much airing in public debate. An editorial today in the New York Times — a newspaper that almost comically underplayed the revelations earlier this month about the NHTSA probe’s pro-Toyota results — flatly asserts that the Japanese automaker’s vehicles suffer “persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration,” and demands that the sweeping new legislation “be passed into law without delay.” It’s almost as if they are afraid of what might happen if lawmakers pause to take a closer look.

Among the many other things the new legislation would do is greatly enhance the legal leverage of automaker or dealership employees who adopt the mantle of “whistleblowers”. But if the new revelations from a responsible career employee of NHTSA are ignored, we will have another confirmation that some types of whistleblowing are more welcome in America’s governing class than others. (& welcome Coyote, Gabriel Malor, Death by 1000 Papercuts, Mark Hemingway/D.C. Examiner (“the indispensable Overlawyered blog”), Allen McDuffee/Think Tanked readers).

Shirley Sherrod and a Pigford puzzle

“If there are only 39,697 African-American farmers grand total in the entire country, then how can over 86,000 of them claim discrimination at the hands of the USDA? Where did the other 46,303 come from?” [Zombie, Pajamas Media; earlier here and here] More: Dave Zincavage has been checking Wikipedia (“virtually automatic” $50,000 payouts); and lawyers for Native American farmers and ranchers want in too.