Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Katrina’

Retailers Settle Katrina Gas-Price Suits

Over at Coyote Blog today, I observe that while most of us have shifted our attention away from Katrina, gas price “gouging” lawsuits against gasoline retailers still continue. Sunoco became the latest retailer to settle, paying New Jersey over $300,000 to be left alone. Many other states have also gotten into the act, including Aspiring Governor Eliot Spitzer, who would never miss an opportunity to score some populist points.

So, having spent months trying to explain markets and supply & demand and refute the silliness of the “price-gouging” concept, what are gasoline retailers doing today? Why, they are hauling credit card companies in front of Congress to accuse them of … price gouging (Coyote Blog, Feb 17). Also see Sept 2, Sept 1.

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What’s new at Point of Law?

If you like this site, you’ll love our sister site, Point of Law, which explores similar issues, often in greater detail than we have room for here. Recently, at Point of Law:

And I’ve also been writing elsewhere: AEI has released my working paper on the Vioxx litigation in two parts: Part I and Part II.

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A good cause: SCOTUSblog Rehnquist Bobblehead auction

SCOTUSblog is sponsoring an auction of a Justice Rehnquist bobblehead for charity, the winner to donate proceeds to charity. I’m currently the lead bidder, and my donation will be split between two good causes I invite you to support also: the Benjamin Franklin High School Katrina Reconstruction Fund and the Institute for Justice. IJ’s merry band of litigators needs no introduction because of their work on Kelo, so let me talk about Franklin.

I graduated Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans in 1987. Franklin is not only one of the leading academic public schools in the country, averaging 23 National Merit Semi-Finalists a year and sending 99.5% of its graduates to college, but it is one of the few racially integrated schools in the city of New Orleans, maintaining its academic standards in the face of pressure ranging from a legislature that outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1980s to modern-day school-board racial politics seeking to abolish magnet schools. The school was one of the few pieces of New Orleans that worked.

Unfortunately, Franklin was located on the New Orleans Lakefront, one of the lowest-lying areas of the city, and suffered $3 million in physical damage from the storm and flooding. Dedicated parents, faculty, and alumni are undertaking heroic efforts to re-open the school as a federal charter school with many of its pre-hurricane teaching staff on January 17, 2006—the tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin’s birth. Federal and state funds are expected eventually, but there is an immediate need for money to pay for faculty salaries, startup costs, and instructional materials.

The Benjamin Franklin Alumni Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, has set up three funds: the Katrina Recovery Fund provides money to twenty needy families of Franklin students; the Franklin Reconstruction Fund goes to reopen the school; or one can sponsor a specific distressed family.

100% of your tax-deductible donations go directly to help families or the school, with no administrative fees. (Paypal may be charging a transfer fee, but one can mail a check directly.)

I know that I make many of my charitable donations at this time of year, and hope you consider the Franklin Alumni Association’s efforts among your other choices. Click here to donate and let them know I sent you.

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Hurricane-chasing, cont’d

New Orleans criminal defense attorney Joseph Larre’s 300 clients were evacuated and now sit in lockups across the South, some as far away as Jacksonville, Fla. Many of his case records were destroyed by floodwater, and the city’s criminal courts have not reopened. So Larre, 47, drove around the city last week in his champagne-colored Ford Explorer and nailed signs to telephone poles announcing, in big red letters, “KATRINA CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT.”

By Friday, he had received 300 phone calls. At least two other lawyers, he said, have put up similar signs.

Larre said he hasn’t decided whom to sue for what. But he says he has heard from homeowners who fear that insurance companies will scrimp on settlements, as well as irate residents looking to haul New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even the Red Cross into court.

As he considered potential defendants, Larre said, “I definitely like the oil companies and their insurance companies.”…

“You really hit the jackpot if you nail the Army Corps of Engineers,” he mused, standing in a mud-caked intersection in his shorts, T-shirt and running shoes.

(Douglas Birch, “Lawyers drawn to storm cases”, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 10).

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Free Market Project & Katrina insurance lawsuits

The Free Market Project covers anti-business media bias, and has been issuing weekly exposes of media coverage of the various lawsuits over insurance companies’ flood exclusions: Oct. 5, Sep. 28, Sep. 14. Our coverage: Sep. 15, Sep. 12; POL Sep. 28, Sep. 26, Sep. 25, Sep. 23, Sep. 22, Sep. 9. I spoke about the issue at an AEI panel I moderated on October 3 that was broadcast on C-SPAN2. Transcripts will be posted in the next couple of weeks on the AEI site.

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Hiatus and rehosting update

Readers were not shy about recommending hosting services (thanks for all your emails!) and I’ve now decided to go with Hosting Matters, which has many articulate fans and seems to make a specialty of Movable Type-based blogs. It’ll probably be a few days more before the site is back up and running.

In the mean time, you can follow both my and Ted’s postings at the Manhattan Institute site Point of Law, which has been extra-busy lately (see, for example, its reprint of Ramesh Ponnuru’s fascinating National Review article on trial lawyers and social conservatives). I’ve been juggling a number of other deadlines and published a “Rule of Law” op-ed column on Hurricane Katrina and flood insurance last Saturday in the Wall Street Journal (sub) (more on that). (Bumped 9/30).

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Katrina: “hospitals likely to face litigation”

“As floodwaters consumed their hospitals, nurses and doctors throughout New Orleans took heroic measures to save hundreds of patients. But could the facilities’ owners still be liable for the effects of the disaster? Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. may be among several companies soon facing litigation over deaths inside their hospitals in the hurricane-stricken region.” (Sudeep Reddy, Dallas Morning News, Sept. 15 (reg); Rene Goux (Memorial Medical Center CEO), “At the bottom of the ‘bowl'”, Sept. 12; “In flood, hospital becomes a hell”, Sept. 4)(via Donna Rovito).

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“Doctor says FEMA ordered him to stop treating hurricane victims”

By reader acclaim:

In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn’t registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “I begged him to let me continue,” said Perlmutter, who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. “People were dying, and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers. Two patients died in front of me.

“I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and finally gave up. I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die so the government wouldn’t be sued, but he would not back down. I had to leave.”

In a formal response to Perlmutter’s story, FEMA said it does not accept the services of volunteer physicians:

“We have a cadre of physicians of our own,” FEMA spokesman Kim Pease said Thursday. “They are the National Disaster Medical Team. … The voluntary doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law enforcement rules in a disaster area.”

However, Perlmutter says once back in Baton Rouge his group

went to state health officials who finally got them certified — a simple process that took only a few seconds.

“I found numerous other doctors in Baton Rouge waiting to be assigned and others who were sent away, and there was no shortage of need,” he said.

(Laurie Smith Anderson, The Advocate (Baton Rouge), Sept. 16; Toby Harnden, “‘I could have saved her life but was denied permission'”, Daily Telegraph (UK), Sept. 18).

Read On…

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“Lawsuit blames oil companies for hurricane damage”

The AP reports that a “lawsuit seeks what attorneys say could be billions of dollars from a long list of oil companies for damages to wetlands that allegedly would have softened Hurricane Katrina’s blow.” Attorneys from the New Orleans firm of St. Martin & Williams are seeking class-action status on behalf of all persons and entities in Louisiana that suffered injury from Katrina’s wind and storm surge. They’re naming as defendants 11 oil and gas companies including Shell Oil, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP Corp. whose activities they say depleted marshlands, including by building and neglecting pipeline canals. (AP/Shreveport Times, Sept. 17; “Class-action suit filed against oil companies”, BizNewOrleans.com, Sept. 15).

Meanwhile, environmental litigation over the years aimed at slowing levee and flood-control projects could come under Senate scrutiny, despite peals of protest from the Sierra Club, Sen. Chuck Schumer and others (Dan Eggen, “Senate Panel Investigating Challenges to Levees”, Washington Post, Sept. 17; Jerry Mitchell, “Senate panel investigates levee lawsuits”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17). See Sept. 9, Sept. 14 (& Baseball Crank).

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