Paging Lenore Skenazy! “Courts are rewarding ‘intensive parenting’ and making it a legal standard, particularly in custody disputes, two law professors say in a paper that will be published in the U.C. Davis Law Review.” Gaia Bernstein (Seton Hall) and Zvi Triger (College of Management School of Law, Israel) say custody law rewards parents for greater involvement in their kids’ lives even if it amounts to over-involvement. “In tort cases, courts are narrowing or eliminating the parental immunity doctrine and creating the potential for judgments against parents for inadequate parental supervision.” [ABA Journal, “Over-Parenting” on SSRN; Prawfsblawg]
Posts Tagged ‘child protection’
June 1 roundup
- Some California attorneys hoping to restart lucrative construction-defect litigation [Frith, Cal Civil Justice]
- Jury awards Seattle bus passenger $1.3 million for stair mishap [KOMO, Seattle Times]
- “Louisiana Bill Would Outlaw Insulting an Under-17-Year-Old By E-Mail” [Volokh, earlier] Update: bill watered down before passage, but still bad news for speech;
- “Attorney Fee Fight Gets Ugly in World Trade Center Litigation” [Turkewitz and more]
- Preventive detention law shows why we need to confine Congress [Sullum, Greenfield]
- Mass Fifth Circuit recusals in Comer v. Murphy Oil global warming case [Wood/PoL, Jackson] More: Shapiro, Cato, Wood/ShopFloor (a strategy to provoke recusals?)
- “By some estimates, circa 40 percent of cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions” [Graeme Wood, The Atlantic]
- Lawyers who sued Facebook over “Beacon” to get $2.3 million in fees, class $0.00 [Balasubramani, SpamNotes]
Cut grapes into pea-sized portions?
It seems the American Academy of Pediatrics wants just about every non-pureed food you can think of — carrots, apples, hot dogs — to carry a warning label about the risk of choking to children. “Some say other risky foods, including hard candies, popcorn, peanuts and marshmallows, shouldn’t be given to young children at all.” [AP; Free-Range Kids] More from Patrick at Popehat: “What Are Your Child’s Odds Of Choking To Death On A Hot Dog?”
And: For better child safety, think like an economist, says Steven Horwitz: don’t let worst-case scenarios rule your thinking and recognize that every good comes with tradeoffs [Free-Range Kids]
December 15 roundup
- “Truck drivers with positive drug tests should not file lawsuits … period.” [Jon Hyman, Ohio Employer’s Law]
- Tiger Woods hires a Hollywood law firm famous for its nastygrams to the press [Bronstad, NLJ; earlier on Lavely & Singer]
- “Mom Who Let Kids Play Outside Threatened by Cops” [Aliso Viejo, Calif.; Free-Range Kids]
- When you’re embarking on the business of not raising pigs, best to start small and ramp up from there [Coyote, U.K.]
- Harvey Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day, guestblogging at Volokh Conspiracy on, inter alia, “honest services fraud“;
- If you’re uneasy about the FTC’s claims to regulate blogger freebies and other entanglements of commerce with online speech, wait till the agency gets the beefed-up enforcement powers it’s seeking [WSJ editorial]
- Replaying a discussion familiar in this country, Israel wonders whether it’s got too many lawyers [Jerusalem Post]
- “Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against O’Quinn Estate Over Fatal Car Crash” [Texas Lawyer]
Canada: bogus forensics took woman’s son, sent her to jail
Testimony by now-disgraced forensic pathologist Charles Smith sent Sherry Sherret-Robinson to jail for a year on charges of infanticide, and resulted in the permanent loss of her other child. Ontario’s highest court has cleared her, but it is rather late. [Jonathan Turley via Radley Balko; Wikipedia on Charles Randal Smith, CBC and more]
December 4 roundup
- Insurance mandate or no, New Jersey specialists tending to duck out of high-legal-risk procedures like mammography [Amy Handlin, Gloucester County Times via NJLRA]
- Audi redux, or something different this time? L.A. Times endorses charges of sudden acceleration against Toyota [Holman Jenkins/WSJ, FindLaw “Injured“]
- Ghastly idea of the year: Rep. Waxman wants federal government to be “responsible” for fixing journalism [Coyote, Bainbridge]
- “Arkansas Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against Dixie Chicks Over ‘West Memphis Three’ Letter” [Citizen Media Law, Longstreth/American Lawyer]
- Judge Weinstein: falsification by arresting officers seems “widespread” in NYPD [Balko, Greenfield]
- U.K.: Carbon ration cards? [Krauthammer]
- Nova Scotia, Canada: “A Couple in their 70s Wave at A Kid…And In Swoop the Cops” [Free-Range Kids]
- Barbra Streisand loses suit over aerial photo of her Malibu home taken by environmental group; by suing, she ensures that many thousands more people will see the photograph, in what is dubbed “Streisand effect” [six years ago on Overlawyered]
U.K.: “Health and safety snoops to enter family homes”
Reads like a parody: “Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.” [Times Online]
November 23 roundup
- “Ten Ways Lawyers Rip Off Clients” [Lawrence Delevingne and Gus Lubin, Business Insider]
- White House visitor logs contain more entries for trial lawyer lobbyist Linda Lipsen (5x) than for Hillary Clinton (3x) (h/t ShopFloor)
- Time magazine has a cover story on child overprotectiveness [Free-Range Kids]
- “Why so many talented people give up on moving to the US”: one immigrant’s 7 year journey through the legal paperwork [Pete Warden]
- Speaking for the whole New York profession? “New York Bar Association president decries tort reform proposals” [Rizo, Legal NewsLine]
- Chamber of Commerce “needs to develop thicker skin” in response to Yes Men parody [LA Times]
- New York: “Judges collect pension and regular pay, and it’s perfectly legal” [Jonathan Bandler, Journal News]
- Cook County “out $14K for toilet paper injury” [Chicago Sun-Times]
November 4 roundup
- Four California lawyers accused in what prosecutors say is giant insurance fraud ring employing staged or “paper” car wrecks, Mark Geragos is defending [Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Glendale News-Press via ABA Journal]
- “Civil Gideon law could overwhelm civil courts”, Ted is interviewed again [Legal NewsLine, earlier]
- “Is that a popularly-elected state judge in your pocket?” [What About Clients?, earlier]
- Audit Integrity, sued by Hertz over financial risk assessment, takes case to SEC [Felix Salmon, earlier]
- OSHA nominee David Michaels, SKAPP and the right to bear arms, continued [David Kopel/America’s First Freedom, earlier and more]
- NJ case raises knotty questions of press liability for reporting allegations in lawsuits [WSJ Law Blog]
- Washtenaw Jail Diary, which made splash on Twitter earlier this year, now reprinting at Ann Arbor Chronicle (earlier);
- “Not every country bubblewraps its kids” [Free-Range Kids on Germany] Background checks for senior-center pen pals and more school overprotectiveness [same]
Three-year-old wanders from Connecticut home
And now police have charged mom with a felony. [AP/Hartford Courant]