- Update to Maine Board of Tourism intimidate-a-blogger-by-litigation lawsuit: case dismissed, government official fired. [Maine Web Report; AP/Boston Globe]
- Senter blocks State Farm Katrina class settlement. [Point of Law; Rossmiller; Woullard v. State Farm]
- Senator Schumer (D-NY) calls for liability reform to save New York economy; Governor Spitzer shows up at press conference. [Point of Law]
- Canadian $10M settlement for Syrian torture: that’s what we get for trusting Syria. [Frum]
- Remember that case in Snohomish where the celebratory cannon blew up at the football game? And the plaintiffs’ lawyer complained that the injured student was getting threatened by the townspeople over his lawsuit? Turns out the student (allegedly) told a youth minister that he deliberately overloaded the cannon for “a bigger bang,” and now is (allegedly) harassing the minister. And the original threats had nothing to do with football spirit. Everett Herald]
- Regulations drive restaurateurs from New York to friendlier (if armpittier) climes. [New York via Taylor]
- Suit: suicide fault of auto dealership sponsoring “Hands on a Hardbody” contest. [AP/ Austin American-Statesman]
- Nanny statism meets failure to contemplate ex ante vs. ex post thinking in UK: new Manchester police policy is to refuse to chase helmetless bicycle thieves. [Telegraph (h/t F.R.)](earlier)
- Private eyes and lawyers among the transactions costs of rent regulation in New York. [NYT]
- The war on science doesn’t just come from the right. [Adler @ Volokh; Sandefur @ Positive Liberty]
- Mrs. Alito is very cool [WaPo via Bashman]
Posts Tagged ‘Mississippi’
January 21 roundup
- Update: $8M Greyhound verdict (Aug. 18, 2005) affirmed. [Serles v. Greyhound (6th Cir. 2007)] (Update to update: also Nordberg.)
- Hugo Chavez-wannabe Mississippi AG Jim Hood: $2.5M State Farm verdict is “drop in the bucket.” See also POL Jan. 16 and links therein. [Biloxi Sun-Herald]
- I’ve been saying this for a while: Enron litigation a search for deep pocketed-bystanders, rather than actual wrongdoers. [Houston Chronicle]
- Lawless LA: Deputies barred from foot chases now, so criminals know to run away. Lawsuit victim:
“I’m less proactive because I’m worried the next time I do something — who’s going to second-guess that?” [LA Times] - Lawyer tries to sabotage clients’ immigration proceedings over $7000 fee dispute, gets slap on wrist. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
- Forbidden words [Bader @ CEI Open Market]
- How bad US ethanol law hurts poor Mexicans [Cafe Hayek]
- Case for abolishing FCC [Slate (!)]
January 13 roundup
About to fly away for the Martin Luther King Day weekend; Walter will approve comments, but there may be delays. I leave you with:
- Judge Senter channels Hugo Chavez: $2.5M in punitive damages in Mississippi for noting that an uncovered storm surge was responsible for the destruction of a $225k house. [Point of Law; Insurance Coverage Blog; Chicago Trib]
- Public Citizen calls medical malpractice crisis a “hoax.” Are they right? [Point of Law]
- Mass torts and multiple misjoinders. [Point of Law; Drug and Device Law Blog]
- Sasha Baron Cohen isn’t exactly sympathetic to the Borat litigation plaintiffs. [LA Times]
- “High-profile trial looms large for controversial class-action leader” [DC Examiner]
- Still more on warning labels. [Mass Tort Litigation Blog]
- New Jersey Dem wants voting rights for idiots. No, really. [CNN/Reuters]
- I found this tale of a Supreme Court argument poignant [WSJ Law Blog]
- Harris County courthouse “rocket docket”: delay people with lengthy metal-detector lines, then throw them in jail when they’re late for court. [Kirkendall]
- Different kind of rocket PSA: Don’t explode fireworks in your hand. [GruntDoc; Unbounded Medicine (gory)]
December 8 roundup
- Can reformers declare victory? [Point of Law; American Lawyer]
- Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirms: no litigation tourism for asbestos plaintiffs. [AP/Commercial Dispatch (h/t SB); Coleman v. A-Bex; Albert v. Allied Glove]
- More asbestos frauds in the Wall Street Journal. [Point of Law]
- LA judge will decide whether to censor Borat DVD. Earlier: Nov. 9. [Reuters]
- Guacamole dip fallout: “Is the goal here to get guac with more avocados or to create more work for the abogados?” Earlier: Dec. 6. [LA Times via Bashman]
- Quelle surprise: the tobacco settlement money is being treated by Missouri like general revenue, i.e., a tax. [Mass Tort Litigation Blog]
- Quelle surprise: Stephanie Mencimer caught exaggerating case for plaintiffs’ lawyers. [Point of Law]
- Epstein: What’s good for pharma is good for America. [Boston Globe]
- Heather Mac Donald: No, the cops didn’t murder Sean Bell. [City Journal]
- Well, suing several major Ontario Jewish organizations and releasing a press release that they’re all part of the Israel lobby is one way to convince people that you’re not a bigot, right? [Bernstein @ Volokh]
- The case against (and for) Jeff Skilling helps explain why CEOs are paid so much. [Point of Law; Kirkendall]
- Lame-duck Republican Congress wasting final hours with committee hearing on contract dispute, but one of the parties is famous, so it’s okay, right? [Kirkendall]
- Environmental group on the web speaks out against Dihydrogen Monoxide. [DHMO.org]
- The problem of Institutional Review Boards. [Carpenter @ Volokh; Point of Law]
- Will Danny DeVito play Gretchen Morgenson in the movie? NY Times and Sen. Grassley get snookered by unsuccessful trial lawyer. [Ideoblog; WSJ]
- New York Times web commenters are unimpressed with the fact that Nintendo needs to warn Wii users not to throw their remote. [The Lede]
- “The conventional wisdom is that we would be better off if politically powerful leaders were less mediocre. Instead, my view is that we would be better off if mediocre political leaders were less powerful.” [Kling @ TCS Daily via Kirkendall]
- “If Democrats allow lower prices here, they may even have to tolerate Wal-Mart.” [WSJ letter @ Cafe Hayek]
- Lindsay Lohan wants to enlist Al Gore in a lawsuit against her former assistant. [Defamer; Access Hollywood]
- Hey, we’ve slightly tweaked our right-hand sidebar. What do you think?
What liberal media? Part 758
One would think that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s steering of $14 million in taxpayer money to a friend instead of using government attorneys at a fraction of the cost would be a major scandal, but The Sun Herald allows the story to be derailed into a trial-lawyer attack on lawsuit reform— and this is the “one hand/other hand” focus the reporter took:
“Some say the GOP pushes it because trial lawyers are the Democrats’ last major source of campaign funding. Others say Republicans push such changes to protect their major source of funding, big business.”
That reform demonstrated itself to be good public policy (especially in Mississippi, where its legal system was a notorious and shameful “judicial hellhole”) doesn’t seem to enter the equation. (Geoff Pender, “Battle over lawyer fees”, Oct. 25).
Round-up
Some quick links:
- Michael Krauss reviews a Mississippi Court of Appeals decision on a bogus fender-bender claim. [Point of Law; Gilbert v. Ireland]
- Yet another example of overbroad laws on sex offenders (see also Jul. 3, 2005). [Above the Law]
- “As far as the law is concerned, those individuals whose pacemakers fail are the lucky ones.” [TortsProf Blog]
- Emerson Electric sues NBC in St. Louis over a scene in an hourly drama where a cheerleader mangles her hand in a branded garbage disposal. [Hollywood Reporter, Esq.; Lattman; Defamer and Defamer update; St. Louis Post Dispatch]
- A case that’s really not about the money: Man stiffs restaurant over $46 check, defends himself against misdemeanor charge with $500/lawyer. [St. Petersburg Times; Obscure Store]
- Bill Childs catches yet another Justinian Lane misrepresentation. See also Sep. 26 and Sep. 17 (cf. related posts on Lane’s co-blogger Oct. 3 and Sep. 25), and we might just have to retire the category, since we can only hope to scratch the surface. Point of Law has the Gary Schwartz law review article discussed by Childs. [TortsProf Blog and ] Lane’s post also deliberately confuses non-economic damages caps with total damages caps: nothing stops someone with more than $250,000 in economic damages from recovering more than $250,000, even in a world with non-economic damages caps.
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Update: Bill Childs in the comments-section to Lane:
“Of course, all of this gets pretty far afield from what I originally wrote and that you’ve conceded, which is that you (unintentionally but sloppily) misrepresented the facts of the Pinto memo, failed to research its background beyond what was apparently represented to you, and still haven’t (last time I checked, at 9:10 p.m.) updated your site to reflect your error. Nor have you approved the trackback I sent to the site. You’ve posted comments to that very entry and another entry has gone up on the site, but readers still see the plainly inaccurate statement that the memo excerpt you show was Ford evaluating tort liability for rearendings, when in fact it was Ford evaluating a regulatory proposal for rollovers using numbers from NHTSA.
Justinian Lane: reform supporter?
Until now, we’ve ignored a small left-wing think-tank’s admitted attempt to create a Bizarro-world version of Overlawyered. The writers are a recent college graduate and a recent law-school graduate who don’t appear to have actually read anything reformers write in support of reform. (For example, one post links to Overlawyered when defending the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, but fails to address any of Overlawyered’s arguments for why the McDonald’s coffee case is meritless, and simply repeats ATLA propaganda that Overlawyered refuted.) The blog has consisted mostly of thoughtless regurgitation of trial-lawyer talking points; when original analysis is attempted, it rises to the level of self-parody, such as an analysis of Leonard v. Nationwide (see POL Sep. 7 and links therein) that ignores the language of the insurance policy, the relevant Mississippi precedent, the existing discussion in the blogosphere, and any semblance of public policy rationalization in lieu of a Wikipedia definition to argue that the decision (and the defendant) are racist because some African-American plaintiffs might lose as a result.
Another such post is Justinian Lane’s “The Myth of the Frivolous Lawsuit.” The standard trial-lawyer talking point on such issues is to redefine “frivolous lawsuit” to consist of an exceedingly narrow subset of what it is laypeople are talking about when using the term “frivolous lawsuits,” note that the legal system has some mechanisms to address this narrow subset of cases, and then conclude that there’s no problem and thus no need for reform. (Or, as per John Edwards, announce Potemkin legislation to tackle this artificially constrained set of “frivolous lawsuits” that does nothing to actually address the problems of the tort system.) But Lane, perhaps because of his unfamiliarity with the legal system, bites off more than he can chew and inadvertently proves the reformers’ point.
New Times column — Katrina verdict
My new column at the Times (U.K.) Online is on last week’s Mississippi Katrina insurance verdict. (Walter Olson, “Insurers can breathe easier over Katrina lawsuits”, Aug. 30). Concluding paragraph:
Major coverage issues remain to be resolved (and appealed), but at least we can take note at this point that America is not Zimbabwe or Bolivia. As Dickie Scruggs said before the Leonard ruling, “If you win it, it’s a huge win. If you lose it, you spin it the best way you can.”
Also, I was a guest last evening (6:30 p.m. Eastern) on Marc Bernier’s high-rated radio show, “The Talk of Florida” to discuss the article.
Defense verdict in Mississippi lead paint case
Five Mississippi plaintiff families wanted to claim their children’s learning disabilities were the fault of a lead paint manufacturer. Unfortunately for them, the parents also had learning disabilities (and some were even considered retarded by social workers), and the defense (led by Kirkland & Ellis’s Michael Jones) was able to successfully argue that genetics was at least a likely cause as environment. (Sheila Byrd, AP, Aug. 4; Townhall.com, Jul. 13). Undeterred, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Michael Casano, plans to bring further lawsuits on behalf of other residents of the decades-old apartment buildings.
Congressman sued for breaking “Contract with America”
U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, a Republican who represents Mississippi’s First District, is being sued by Democratic opponent Ken Hurt on the grounds that he breached a promise made in connection with the “Contract with America” not to run for a seventh term. The Contract, which Republicans put forth as part of their successful campaign for control of Congress in 1994, proposed 12-year term limits for House members, and Hurt says Wicker promised to serve no more than that span. The term limit idea was never enacted into law. Wicker’s campaign manager, Kirk Sims, called the new suit “frivolous and, quite frankly, a little nutty”. (Joshua Cogswell, “Challenger sues Wicker for breaking ‘Contract with America’”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Jul. 28).