Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘online speech’

ConcurOp “cyberspeech as tort” symposium, cont’d

That lawprof chatfest promoting the idea of wider rights to sue over online speech has provoked a bit of a furor; see addenda to our earlier post as well as continuing coverage at Scott Greenfield’s site. Good! Better to have a controversy now than wait until after some academic consensus has already hardened around a MacKinnonite “of course we need to let people sue more widely over speech, or else women’s voices will be silenced” position. Update March 2010: David Kopel covers at Volokh.

The episode has also helped spin off a second, tangential controversy taking the form of a new round in the ongoing dispute between some “practical” law bloggers and their counterparts in legal academia, on which see Greenfield and Marc John Randazza.

Filed under: , , , ,

Online-speech symposium at Concurring Opinions

As Scott Greenfield notices, the lawprof chatfest (organized by Danielle Citron, Frank Pasquale, David Hoffman, and Deven Desai) is tilted toward participants who want to restrict online speech in the name of feminism and civil rights.

P.S. One of the symposium participants most inclined toward the free-speech position, Michael Froomkin, draws some particularly lively comments. And Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg offers some pointed criticisms.

Filed under: , ,

Telemarketing consumer site menaced by foreign suits

Julia Forte of North Carolina

operates a pair of web sites — 800notes.com and whocallsme.com — that provide an interesting consumer service. These web sites include message boards that permit consumers who receive calls from telemarketers to comment on their experiences; other consumers who receive a call from a given telemarketer can take a look and make a decision about whether they want to take a particular call.

U.S. law protects her in this mission, but telemarketers who don’t like the critiques made available on her sites have begun suing, or threatening to sue her, in other countries where protections for online speech are less robust. [Paul Alan Levy, CL&P Blog]

Filed under: , ,

Legal blogs: keeping lawyers more honest?

Venkat Balasubramani of the blog Spam Notes has a highly interesting guest column at AvvoBlog arguing that blog coverage has emerged as a new check on lawyers’ tendency to pursue their cases in an overzealous or hardball fashion. In the BlockShopper, Nordstrom/Beckons, and Kentucky domain-name seizure affairs, as well as numerous gripe-site and reputational-claim actions where the Streisand effect came into play, blogs have helped call national attention to the weakness of a litigant’s position, the danger that a disputant without major resources will be bulldozed by the cost of litigation, or both.

Balasubramani is kind enough to single out three bloggers in particular and to include me among their number:

…Walter Olson: who blogs at Overlawyered is another blogger who frequently flags unreasonable positions taken by lawyers. While he monitors litigation excess generally, absurd tort lawsuits are his specialty, and many a plaintiff’s lawyer has graced the pages of his blog in shame.

And he concludes:

Increased scrutiny of legal decisions and lawsuits by blogs and internet commentators will have undoubtedly have an overall beneficial effect. … Lawyers these days live in fear that one of their lawsuits will be highlighted on the pages of sites such as Overlawyered, the Legal Satyricon, or the Volokh Conspiracy. I know I sometimes do.

Whole thing here.

Filed under: , ,

March 22 roundup

  • No back-alley bikini lines: New Jersey consumer affairs director rejects proposed ban on Brazilian waxing [Asbury Park Press, JammieWearingFool, Jaira Lima and protest site, Popehat, News12 video] Florida, however, won’t let you get a fish-nibble pedicure [WWSB]
  • Kids doing well in homeschool but divorcing dad disapproves, judge says they must be sent to public [WRAL, Volokh]
  • Al Franken comes out for loser-pays in litigation (well, in this case at least) [MSNBC “First Read”]
  • U.K.: “A man who tried to kill himself has won £90,000 in damages from the hospital which saved his life but hurt his arm in the process” [Telegraph]
  • Life in places without the First Amendment: “Australia’s Vast, Scattershot Censorship Blacklist Revealed” [Slashdot, Volokh, Popehat]; British Telecom passes all internet traffic through “‘Cleanfeed” filters to identify (inter alia) racist content [Glasgow Herald]
  • More on that suit by expelled student against Miss Porter’s School; “Oprichniki” said to be not identical to Keepers of Tradition [NYTimes; our December coverage]
  • “Why We Need Cop Cameras” [Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune] Shopkeepers terrorized in Philadelphia: “The thugs had badges.” [Ken at Popehat]
  • Counting former lobbyists in Obama Administration? Don’t forget Kathleen Sebelius [Jeff Emanuel, RedState]
  • Wisconsin: “$50,000 claim filed over girl’s time-out in school” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 20 roundup

  • Elena Kagan’s changing views of Senate confirmation process: “Lobster in Pot Re-Evaluates Pro-Boiling Stance” [Spruiell, NR “Corner”]
  • “Federal Courts React to Tide of Pro Se Litigants” [NLJ]
  • We get permalinks in nice places including a prominent Dutch business paper [NRC Handelsblad]
  • Someone who needs research done should snap up Kathleen Seidel, model practitioner of citizen journalism on autism-vaccine fray [Neurodiversity] When she got a call from a charity telemarketer recently, she began checking them out online. Results? Devastating. [Neurodiversity, Popehat]
  • How far does Britain’s new animal welfare law go? Does it really cover little Nicholas’s pet cricket? [Never Yet Melted]
  • Constitutionalizing judicial ethics: Caperton v. Massey case before Supreme Court is a bit more complicated than you’d think from the NYT editorial [Point of Law]
  • If you’re not in favor of government cracking down on what is said in online forums, are you “trivializing women’s harms”? [Danielle Citron/ConcurOp, Scott Greenfield] On the other hand, it doesn’t take a commitment to feminism to note that there are online bullies and they’re a nasty, overwhelmingly male lot [Popehat, language]
  • Attorney walks away from a whole bunch of cases after accusation he bribed a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line employee, and his troubles may not be over yet [Florida Daily Business Review]

Filed under: , , , ,

February 19 roundup

  • Surprising origins of federal corruption probe that tripped up Luzerne County, Pa. judges who were getting kickbacks on juvenile detention referrals: insurers had noted local pattern of high car-crash arbitration sums and sniffed collusion between judges and plaintiff’s counsel [Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Legal Intelligencer] Court administrator pleads to theft [Times Leader] Judge Ciavarella had secret probation parole program [PAHomepage]
  • We get accolades: “Overlawyered.com has a new look. Great new format, same good stuff,” writes ex-securities lawyer Christopher Fountain, whose real estate blog I’m always recommending to people even if they live nowhere near his turf of Greenwich, Ct. [For What It’s Worth]
  • “Fla. Jury Awards $8M to Family of Dead Smoker in Philip Morris Case” [ABA Journal; for more on the complicated background of the Engle case, which renders Florida a unique environment for tobacco litigation, start here]
  • Scott Greenfield vs. Ann Bartow vs. Marc Randazza on the AutoAdmit online-bathroom-scrawl litigation, all in turn playing off a David Margolick piece in Portfolio;
  • Eric Turkewitz continues his investigations of online solicitation by lawyers following the Buffalo crash of Continental Flight #3407 [NY Personal Injury Law Blog, Mon. and Tues. posts; earlier]
  • One vital element of trial management: keep track of how many jurors there are [Anne Reed, Deliberations]
  • Public Citizen vs. public health: Sidney Wolfe may succeed in getting the FDA to ban Darvon, and the bone marrow transplant nurse isn’t happy about that [Dr. Wes, KevinMD, more on Wolfe here]
  • “Baseball Star’s [uninfected] Ex Seeks $15M for Fear of AIDS” [OnPoint News, WaPo, New York Mets star Roberto Alomar]

Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,