June 18 roundup

  • “When the country went cold turkey”: Tyler Cowen reviews Last Call, Daniel Okrent’s history of Prohibition [Business Week]
  • Phrases never to put in email, e.g., “We Probably Shouldn’t Put This in Email” [Balasubramani, SpamNotes]
  • “My biggest wish was that I would get a cease and desist from the company that publishes Marmaduke” [Walker, Reason “Hit and Run”]
  • California proposal to jail parents for kids’ truancy [Valerie Strauss/WaPo via Alkon] Parents arrested on charges of forging doctor sick note to excuse third grader [Glenn Reynolds, Dan Riehl]
  • UK judge: NHS need not fund transsexual’s breast enlargement [Mail]
  • “Charitable Foundation Leader Alarmed by Government Intrusions into Philanthropy” [WLF Legal Pulse]
  • Missed earlier: “Stalking Victims’ Duty to Warn Employees, Lovers, Visitors, and Others?” [Volokh]
  • “Overturning Iqbal and Twombly Would Encourage Frivolous Litigation” [Darpana Sheth, Insider Online]

Malpractice systems in other countries

They do things very differently elsewhere, reports the AMA’s American Medical News (via White Coat):

“Nobody is as hospitable to potential liability as we are in this country,” said Richard A. Epstein, director of the law and economics program at the University of Chicago Law School. “The unmistakable drift is we do much more liability than anybody else, and the evidence on improved care is vanishingly thin.”

In other news, the Obama administration is now rolling out its test project grants on med-mal; for reasons already aired in this space, Carter Wood isn’t expecting much.

Drugmaker to halt production of sedative

Following a Nevada jury’s highly controversial $500 million verdict over allegedly inadequate warnings against multiple patient use, as well as bad publicity over possible abuse by music legend Michael Jackson, “Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries recently announced it will stop production of its sedative propofol, which many worry will intensify an already existing shortage of one of the most widely used anesthetics in the United States.” [Abnormal Use, earlier]

June 16 roundup

  • Shameless: House leadership exempts NRA lest it sink bill to regulate political speech [John Samples, Cato]
  • Employment law: “Arbitration Showdown Looms Between Congress, Supreme Court” [Coyle, NLJ]
  • “Wake Up, Fellow Law Professors, to the Casualties of Our Enterprise” [Tamanaha, Balkinization]
  • Move to allow international war crimes trials over “aggression,” a notoriously slippery term [Anderson, Brett Schaefer/NRO “Corner” via Ku]
  • Litigation slush funds: “Cy pres bill in Ohio House” [Ted Frank, CCAF]
  • “Recent Michigan Prosecutions for ‘Seducing an Unmarried Woman’” [Volokh]
  • Scalia: “…least analytically rigorous and hence most subjective of law-school subjects, legal ethics” [LEF]
  • Silicosis settlement scandal update: “As 2 Insurance Execs Admit Bribes, PI Lawyer Says He Can’t Be Retried” [Houston Chronicle via ABA Journal, earlier]

Judge: no “emotional distress” for Empire State-jumper

“Preventing an individual from jumping off of the 86th floor of the Empire State Building is neither extreme nor outrageous,” wrote Judge Jane Solomon in disallowing the emotional-distress claim of Jeb Corliss, a daredevil jumper who had been prevented from jumping off the skyscraper in 2006. Solomon also found that the owners of the building had not defamed Corliss in legal papers when they called his stunt attempt “illegal.” (He was in fact convicted on misdemeanor charges.) The owners are suing Corliss for damages over the incident, which forced an hourlong shutdown of the observation deck. [AP]

Oil cleanup and the Jones Act

Critics say the U.S. government has turned down offers of state-of-the-art Gulf cleanup help from the Netherlands and other countries because it would require a waiver of the Jones Act, a union-backed law from 1920 that restricts coastwise marine trade to U.S. ships and crews. [Houston Chronicle, Mark Perry, Mike Riggs/Daily Caller] More: Keith Hennessey, via PoL, on the Bush Administration experience with Jones Act waivers after Katrina and Rita. Yet more: according to the Obama administration, waivers wouldn’t make a difference. More: Bainbridge.