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Posts Tagged ‘about the site’
In case you wondered
I am decidedly male (as ascertained by this test applied to a couple of my recent columns). See Dale Carpenter @ Volokh, Apr. 27, who finds that some other well-known writers aren’t the genders you might expect them to be.
Welcome Dallas Morning News readers
The newspaper reprinted my warning labels column yesterday (Walter Olson, “Product labels have come unglued from reality”, Mar. 25). Reader Gary Neyens of Round Rock, Tex. wrote in to say he enjoyed the piece and added one of his own favorite stories:
I recently replaced the serpentine (fan) belt on my Ford pickup. The Ford Motorcraft packaging warned “Shut off engine before checking or replacing belt”. I know the reason for this warning – – Somebody, somewhere…
While on the subject of publicity, Legal NewsLine did a whole article (with file photo!) based on my recent column about not counting the trial lawyers out (Rob Luke, Anti-business suits still surging, warns tort-reform expert”, Mar. 21). Last month New York Post reporter Janon Fisher quoted me in an article on the “firefighter’s rule” which historically has barred injured public rescue personnel from suing the people they were rescuing, or others whose negligence allegedly led to disaster (“Firemen file arson lawsuits”, Feb. 2). And a couple of publicity clips from last year that I didn’t round up at the time: at the North County Times’ The Californian, Bridgit Jordan quotes me on Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-tobacco philanthropy (“Donation may go up in smoke”, Aug. 22); and Joseph Goldstein of the New York Sun quotes me in an illuminating article about the “creeping oversight” of New York City government operations obtained by the feds through consent decrees and the like (“Bush Administration, in Series of Federal Lawsuits Against New York Agencies, Gains Creeping Oversight of Local Government”, Aug. 15).
Cathy Seipp
The end is very near for Cathy Seipp, and I’m frustrated with my inarticulateness in conveying my sorrow and anger over the injustice and absurdity of her untimely death. I was an early fan of hers, noticing that her idiosyncratic tastes in books and television corresponded nicely with mine. I first started corresponding with the feisty reporter when, in the course of self-Googling, she discovered a link to her Mediaweek columns on my old homepage in 2000; she generously quoted me when a tidbit I told her about the old Burns & Allen show ended up as an anecdote in one of her columns. We were on opposite coasts by 2001, but managed to say hello regularly on the occasions when one of us made the journey in one direction or the other. Every time I saw her, she was surrounded by lively and intelligent and bright friends drawn by her sharp wit and no-nonsense style, and I was always sorry that I wasn’t able to spend more time around that latterday Algonquin Round Table. I admire how resolute she was in the face of death; I regret that we missed each other last time she was in DC, and that the last time we broke bread together wasn’t in a better restaurant than the Sheraton breakfast buffet as we had agreed.
To perhaps inappropriately steer the conversation to the subject of this site, as noneconomic losses go, it’s hard to think of a larger one than the premature loss of Cathy Seipp; her family and friends will miss her love, her laughter, and her pointed observations; we’ll all miss her writing. Despite that, there would be no justice if one were to randomly select a deep pocket and demand it pay us all millions to compensate us for that loss. Losses are suffered without compensation all of the time; people are untimely struck down by aneurysms, mental illness, skiing accidents—and cancer.
The fact that, in some cases, there is the possibility of constructing a plausible scenario to blame a deep pocket and force it to compensate those who have suffered a loss does not ineluctably mean that that wealth-transfer must occur for justice to be done. Often it’s quite the opposite. That we at Overlawyered often argue against such compensation as contrary to the long-term interests of the public good does not mean that we do not value life or understand the hurt or unquantifiable costs of a life taken too soon. The case of Cathy Seipp, who will die of a cancer that just happened to happen to her without anyone to blame or sue, and the sorrow we feel for her loss, is refutation enough of that strawman.
I’m proud to have been able to call Cathy Seipp a friend, and ashamed that I cannot do justice to her memory through my own words. Let’s use hers: Cathy encountering a liability-fearing school bureaucracy over an asthma inhaler, on the miracle of public-school teacher tenure, and on the Guardian‘s counterproductive 2004 election letter-writing campaign. Go to her web page and leave good wishes.
Welcome Chicago Tribune readers
Today’s Trib reprints my Times (U.K.) piece urging caution about journalists’ claims that business has “trounced the trial lawyers”. (Walter Olson, “Trial lawyers not trounced yet”, Mar. 20).
Will David be shamed?
His friend Ronald Coleman wants to know (Feb. 28).
A question of hubris: what’s our traffic?
We ask because we saw a couple of blogs speculating about our traffic, and making a mathematically incorrect calculation underestimating it by mistakingly assuming that our 2006 readership had not grown from 2001.
So how much do traffic do we have? The answer: we don’t know for sure. If one were to count raw page views, we served 1,176,741 pages in January 2007.
A naive, boastful or deceitful newcomer to the web might try to claim that number as readership. However, a significant share, for us as for any site, consists of spiders from search engines and other mechanical “visitors”, 404 pages not found, reloads and various other categories that inflate a proper readership, including periodic “storms” of a hundred thousand or even a million page requests that are unrelated to reader interests and appear to be either DoS attacks or some other form of static interference. (January did not include any major attacks of this sort; November had a big one, which brought its figure to 2.8 million.)
We do know that our PageRank is 7, the same as major blogs like Instapundit and Gawker or sites like Law.com. By comparison, the top law blog, Volokh, has a PageRank of 8; and my own personal unpublicized little-read rarely-posted-or-linked-to vanity blog with under 100 readers/day has a PageRank of 6.
Of course, we don’t suggest that people read our blog just because others are doing so or because it’s trendy or even because of all the awards and praise we’ve won (and those pages need about five years of updates); we hope you do so because you appreciate the unique analysis we provide here.
February 20 roundup
- Trucker-friendly Arizona legislature declines to ban naked lady mudflaps [NBC4.com; Houstonist]
- Crumb of approbation dept.: I’m “[not] as unreasonable as most of the tort-reform crowd” [Petit]
- Sponsors of large banquets in D.C. must pay to have a paramedic on hand even when the banquet crowd consists of doctors [ShopFloor]
- Homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover homewrecking: umbrella policy doesn’t create duty to defend lawsuit claiming the insured broke up someone’s marriage (Pins v. State Farm (PDF), S. Dak., Mayerson via Elefant)
- New York mag on RFK Jr.: Is there some law saying all press profiles of America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure® must be weirdly softball in nature and glide over his embarrassing book and rants, his Osama-pig farm lunacy, his anti-vaccine humbug, his trial-lawyer entanglements and even the wind farm flap?
- Australia court rules Muslim prison inmate suffered discrimination and deserves money for being served canned halal meat rather than fresh [The Australian]
- High medical costs and their causes: am I listening? [Coyote]
- Economists may puzzle their heads over the ultimate incidence of business taxes, but in Wisconsin it’s whatever Gov. Jim Doyle says it is [Krumm via Taranto]
- Feds may punish Red Sox pitcher Matsuzaka for doing a beer ad in Japan, where it’s perfectly legal for athletes to appear in such [To The People]
- Guns in company parking lots: still one of the rare issues where the ABA manages to be righter than the NRA [AP/CBSNews.com; see Apr. 6, 2006]
- Thanks, NYC taxpayers: Brooklyn jury awards $16 million against city in case where drugged-up motorist jumped sidewalk and ran over pedestrians, later blaming the accident on a city sanitation truck [seven years ago on Overlawyered]
Willkommen Neue Zürcher Zeitung readers
If, after reading this February 13 article, you are looking for information on Der Fall des heissen Kaffees, you can find a summary and roundup of other posts in our 2005 roundup post on Stella Liebeck and the McDonald’s coffee case.
A reminder
For readers who haven’t figured this out on their own:
* When we post on Overlawyered about a real or potential lawsuit, it doesn’t necessarily mean we think the case is without merit. We regularly discuss meritorious cases.
* Not infrequently lawsuits we discuss are well founded on existing law, but that existing law is ill-conceived and deserves to be reconsidered. Or both law and lawsuit may make perfect sense, but the level of damages demanded may be excessive or implausible. Or the combatants on one side or both may pursue dubious tactics and theories. Or the media coverage of the case may have been credulous or one-sided. You get the idea.
* Sometimes it’s not clear what if anything either side did wrong in pursuing a dispute, but the case still stands as a monument to the high cost of resolving things through legal process. A recurring example: the family feud over a legacy that ends by consuming the estate in litigation costs.
* We also discuss a certain number of cases that are just plain interesting: they raise novel or non-obvious legal issues, or they shed light on human nature as it manifests itself in legal disputes. And, yes, it does happen on occasion that I take note of a case without being sure what I myself think of it.
* Finally, Ted and I are two different people and don’t always agree with each other.
Sorry if this introduces complexity where people were expecting to find simplicity.