…hosted this week by Blawg Wisdom, is inevitably dominated this week by discussions of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on lawyers and the legal system (including a link to C.G. Moore’s account on this site) and the Court vacancies.
Posts Tagged ‘Katrina’
Liability fears delayed evacuation order
Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died in New Orleans because Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory evacuation order until Sunday morning, well after the Saturday mid-afternoon order issued by neighboring parishes. The blogosphere has been wondering what took Nagin and the city so long; Glenn Reynolds has found the answer:
President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, authorizing federal emergency management officials to release federal aid and coordinate disaster relief efforts.
By mid-afternoon, officials in Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, Lafourche, Terrebonne and Jefferson parishes had called for voluntary or mandatory evacuations.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin followed at 5 p.m., issuing a voluntary evacuation.
Nagin said late Saturday that he’s having his legal staff look into whether he can order a mandatory evacuation of the city, a step he’s been hesitant to do because of potential liability on the part of the city for closing hotels and other businesses. [emphasis added]
(Bruce Nolan, “Katrina Takes Aim”, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sunday, Aug. 28). Once again, the lawyers got in the way of the public-safety decision-making, an issue I discussed Aug. 26.
Katrina botch: heads must roll
Katrina refugees
Employ them. (George Lenard, Sept. 2).
Letter from Louisiana: triage and EMTALA
Longtime reader C.G. Moore, a 3L at Tulane Law who lives in St. Tammany Parish outside New Orleans, writes in to say:
My wife, 4 mo. old son, and I survived [Hurricane Katrina] (we live in St. Tammany parish, about 10 miles from lake Pontchartrain). I noticed you had a link to WWL television’s plea for medical personnel to assist the victims. I was in a unique position during the storm and afterward: my wife is an ER doctor, and we sheltered at the hospital where she works.
The doctors and nurses were incredible. They worked non-stop, under incredibly stressful conditions. Many didn’t know where their loved ones were, or whether they had survived, and there was no way to contact the outside world. Many lost everything to the flood waters, tornadoes, and fallen trees. And still, they worked 12-hour shifts (sometimes longer).
But one of the first hurdles they had to contend with was the effects of EMTALA in a disaster situation. [EMTALA is a federal law under which hospitals can be sued if they turn away patients needing emergency medical treatment. — ed.] Under EMTALA, ER physicians are cautious to the point of absurdity. But as the hospital quickly filled to capacity with seriously ill and injured patients, the ER was able to attend to life-or-death situations only. Strict triage procedures were needed to separate the “worried well” from the dying. Medical care really was a limited commodity. Although the magnitude of the catastrophe was clear to all, some patients and their families couldn’t understand that minor boo-boos didn’t merit immediate care (much less admission to the hospital, where it was air-conditioned and they could get a hot meal).
So, my concern is this: once the rubble is cleared and the power restored, the plaintiffs’ lawyers will ooze back into the scene — that this was a disaster situation won’t matter one iota — and they’ll use EMTALA to file lawsuit after lawsuit.
I really hope I’m wrong. But only time will tell.
Gasoline prices spike
You’d think one advantage of electing a Texas oil guy as president would be that, when prices at the pump react to a genuinely massive supply disruption as supply and demand predict they will, he’d know better than to direct public anger toward the ill-defined offense of “price gouging”. Apparently you’d be wrong, though:
“I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this -– whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud,” Bush said. “And I’ve made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.”
(Adam Nossiter, “More National Guardsmen are sent in”, AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, Sept. 1). More: Mark Kleiman got there first (Sept. 1)(via Julian Sanchez). See also Dan Mitchell of Heritage at C-Log (Aug. 31). And Don Boudreaux, after thanking Hawaiian pols, wonders (Aug. 29):
Would it make sense to haul before Congress a group of real-estate agents, or a few homeowners, or some home-builders to accuse them publicly of causing the recent surge in real-estate prices?
Yet more, this time from Jane Galt (Sept. 1): “Prices of everything rise after a disaster, and a good thing too, since that encourages people and material to flood into the damaged area, where they’re needed most.”
Opportunistic legal marketing
Katrina relief efforts
Glenn Reynolds is updating a list of relief charities. There’s a Hurricane Katrina Help Wiki modeled on the one created after the Asian tsunami. Michelle Malkin rounds up other useful things that can be done. And Terry Teachout has compiled this comprehensive list of Katrina blogs.
“Law and lawyers post-Katrina”
Among its other horrific effects, the hurricane is going to pose a perhaps unprecedented challenge to the resilience of a state legal system, by inundating or otherwise destroying the records of many of Louisiana’s busiest courts, law firms and other participants in the legal process. Prof. Bainbridge has details (Aug. 31). More: Texas Lawyer reports that the administrators of the Fifth Circuit courthouse in New Orleans prudently had staffers bring some files up to the second floor as the storm approached.