The New York Times quotes my testimony to the hearing on H.R. 847.
Unfortunately, the story incorrectly refers to AEI as a “lobbying organization,” which it is definitively not. It is unimaginable how the Times could have made this mistake, given that just three weeks ago, they had to correct an identical mistake; the senior editor has promised me a correction.
And it’s a big one, buried in a state budget package: the lifting of two-decade-old restrictions on what they can charge clients. More: Point of Law.
Last year New York trial judge Herman Cahn ruled in favor of class-action giant Milberg in a high-profile dispute over whether it could share its winnings from past cases with disgraced felon and former name partner Melvyn Weiss, the firm’s former driving force. Judge Cahn stepped down from the New York bench in December, and now it develops has been hired by Milberg as its “distinguished” new attorney. And you — with the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists today — certainly have a suspicious mind. There probably won’t be any shortage of funds with which to pay the former jurist: an American Lawyer headline last month read “Milberg Among Plaintiffs Firms Awarded $120 Million in Xerox Class Action”.
“Tracing the legal principles behind a New York statute on lawyer deceit to a law adopted by the English Parliament in 1275, the New York Court of Appeals has determined that an attorney can be subject to treble damages in New York for an unsuccessful attempt to deceive a court. Responding to certified questions from the 2nd Circuit, the Court of Appeals ruled that the ‘unique statute of ancient origin’ was not a codification of common law fraud, and applied to attempted deceptions as well as successful ones.” [Joel Stashenko, New York Law Journal]
Great for lawyers’ image when that happens: “A New York surrogate court judge has approved a $91,000 payment to an estate executor, despite a provision in the decedent’s will prohibiting commissions to anyone.”
Thus a New York lower-court judge has ruled (NYLJ).
I just got to the September 15 issue near the bottom of my pile of unread mail, and there’s an excellent piece of reporting by Jennifer Kahn on the case of James Zadroga, the police officer who worked at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/11 whose death was attributed to exposure to dust and was a symbol for the thousands of plaintiffs in that litigation–until the New York medical examiner found evidence that prescription drug injections were responsible for the lung scarring. Kahn’s article is tremendously damning on that question. Zadroga’s name was successfully used to get legislation passed in New York state, and similar legislation (on which I testified) is pending in Congress to open the taxpayer fisc to thousands of questionable claims.
One can almost fill an entirely separate blog with variations on the McDonald’s hot coffee case. In Manhattan, 77-year-old Rachel Moltner ordered a hot tea from a Starbucks, but had trouble removing the tightly-secured lid, spilling the beverage all over her. (You will recall other lawsuits complaining that the Starbucks lids are not tight enough.) Moltner not only blames Starbucks for her resulting second- and third-degree burns (and recall that the raison d’être of the Stella Liebeck suit was the false claim that only McDonald’s served beverages that were hot enough to cause third-degree burns), but for the broken bones she suffered when she fell out of bed in Lenox Hill Hospital while being treated for burns. Moltner’s asking for $3 million.
Press coverage in the NY Post (h/t P.G.) is short on legal details (though one is encouraged to see Starbucks publicly defending themselves, an apparent change in policy). But I’ve downloaded and uploaded the complaint, which was filed in state court and removed to federal court. The kitchen-sink allegations include a defective cup, defectively hot tea, and a failure to warn. Right now the parties are haggling over federal removal jurisdiction, as Starbucks waited more than thirty days after receiving the complaint–until a formal demand for money was made–to seek removal. This is an interesting example of sandbagging; if defendants remove cases simply on the possibility that alleged damages will exceed the amount-in-controversy requirement, they may incorrectly remove cases that should remain in state court, but if they wait for the formal confirmation from the plaintiff, they may face the allegation that they’ve missed the 30-day window to remove a case–something to consider when plaintiffs’ attorneys complain that defendants reflexively remove cases to federal court that don’t belong there. Moltner has a good argument that Starbucks waited too long to remove, because alleged damages would have clearly exceeded $75,000 despite the lack of an ad damnum clause in the complaint citing a number, but the consequence of such a ruling will be that defendants will be forced to prematurely remove cases that perhaps should not be removed. (Moltner v. Starbucks Coffee Co., #: 1:08-cv-09257-LAP-AJP (S.D.N.Y.)).
Coyote also points to this page, which magically promises simultaneously to reduce health premiums while requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions and doing lots of other generous stuff. Total discussion of medical liability issues consists of the following bullet point:
Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.
Yes, because suppressing current malpractice insurance rates by adopting artificially rosy premises as to future payouts worked out so well when tried in New York. Update Monday: transition yanks entire “Agenda”, this section and others.