- Could bald employees sue under genetic-bias law? [Delaware Employment Law]
- EPA under pressure in bedbug battle [Atlantic Wire, Time]
- “Child Safety Advocates Push for Changes to Prevent Hot-Car Deaths” [Fair Warning]
- Proof of Living Constitution Theory? iPhone Constitution app is now on version 1.3.8 [Magliocca, Co-Op]
- “North Carolina’s Corrupted Crime Lab” [Radley Balko]
- “The folly of needless alcohol laws” [Conor Friedersdorf, The Daily Dish]
- “Judge Posner opinion on overwarning” [PoL, Drug and Device Law]
- Annals of zero tolerance: No scissors allowed at ribbon-cutting ceremony at Pittsburgh airport [eight years ago on Overlawyered]
Posts Tagged ‘overwarning’
San Francisco cellphone radiation warnings
Study after study finds no health effects to worry about, but the city by the Bay wants warnings anyway. [Bruce Nye, Ted Frank/PoL]
January 16 roundup
- Caution: Warning label overload. Why wacky warnings matter. [Ted Frank @ Sphere]
- Further evidence of efficiency of product liability limits when federal safety regulation is already in place. [Philipson/Sun/Goldman NBER Working Paper No. 15603]
- Army seeks to court-martial soldier in Afghanistan for possessing “child pornography” when his mother sends him family photos that include a four-year-old in a swimsuit. [AP/WaPo via Riehl; WQAD]
- Burger King coffee is hot, too. [Virginian-Pilot]
- The “slush pile” disappears, in part because of fear of plagiarism litigation. [WSJ]
- Schwarzenegger faces fight on his proposed tort reforms. [Legal Newsline (I’m quoted)]
- I’m speaking at NYU Law January 21 at an American Constitution Society panel on class action issues. [NYU Law]
- Off topic, but I believe that this may be the first time I’ve been listed in the index of a book.
“The lethal dangers of sand”
Wear appropriate protective clothing, “do not let this chemical enter the environment”, and if you come in contact with it, “immediately flush skin with plenty of water for at least 15 minutes while removing contaminated clothing and shoes”. It’s ocean sand! MSDSs (Material Safety Data Sheets) are by and for lawyers: “Very few chemists, in my experience, spend much time with these forms at all, preferring to get their information from almost any other source.” [Derek Lowe via Virginia Postrel]
More: Interesting comments, including one on ionized water (if exposed, “flush the contaminated area with water”) and this from reader John: “Good news: if the sand is intended for use by children under 12, as of August 14 the sand itself will have to be permanently labeled with a batch number so it can be easily recalled.”
Warning: “milk bottle contains, er, milk”
The warning on a bottle from Asda, a large U.K. grocery chain, is “indicative of a policy by supermarkets and food manufacturers to liberally stamp warnings on products to avoid legal complications.” [Daily Mail]
Mirapex jackpot justice – literally
Gary Charbonneau had a gambling history, including substantial wins, which devolved into compulsive gambling in 2002. He blames this on his Parkinson’s disease medication, Mirapex, which he started taking in 1997. Mirapex changed its warning label to include reports of a correlation while Charbonneau was taking the drug; Charbonneau’s doctor kept prescribing the drug. Nevertheless, Charbonneau was able to persuade a jury that the failure to warn was what was responsible for his $200,000 gambling losses (much of which came from gambling illegally) and resulting marital troubles. The jury verdict even awarded $8 million in punitive damages, giving a whole new meaning to jackpot justice (though one would expect the trial court to reduce this substantially). The only press coverage of this lawsuit, aside from a handful of blogs (Pharmalot; TortsProf; InjuryBoard), is in an op-ed I wrote for today’s Examiner about the case and about how a Supreme Court case and Congressional legislation could affect it. (Theodore H. Frank, “Jackpot justice gets new meaning,” DC Examiner, Aug. 19).
“Please Disregard That ‘We’re Not Blaming the Park’ Thing”
(Post bumped with 12:20 AM update adding coverage of state Labor Department’s suggestion for new warnings.)
Roller-coaster enthusiast and torts professor Bill Childs is stealing our thunder in his coverage of the recent Georgia Batman roller coaster decapitation of Asia LeeShawn Ferguson IV, so there’s no point in rewriting his excellent post instead of quoting it:
June 29 roundup
- New FASB regulation may provide fodder for trial lawyers: publicly disclose your internal analysis of liability (thus giving away crucial settlement information and attracting more lawsuits), and/or face lawsuits when your disclosure turns out to be incorrect. [CFO.com; CFO.com; NLJ/law.com ($); FASB RFC]
- NBC settles a “You-made-me-commit-suicide-by-exposing-my-pedophilia” lawsuit. [LA Times; WSJ Law Blog; Conradt v. NBC Universal]
- A victim of overwarning? 17-year-old loses hat on Six Flags Batman roller-coaster ride, ignores multiple warning signs to jump multiple fences into unauthorized area, retrieves hat, loses head. [FoxNews/AP; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; TortsProf]
- Lots of Ninth Circuit reversals this term, as per usual. [The Recorder/law.com]
- A no-Twinkie defense doesn’t fly in a maid-beating case. [CNN/AP via ATL]
- The Chinese government demonstrates that it can enforce laws against IP piracy when it wants to [Marginal Revolution]
- “Justice Scalia said he thought that the United States was ‘over-lawed,’ leading to too many lawyers in the country. ‘I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex. If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.'” [Telegraph]
- Above the Law commenters decidedly unimpressed by my looks. Looking forward to feminists rushing to my defense against “silencing insults.” [Above the Law]
June 7 roundup
- Monday’s polar bear panel at AEI is a panel about the law of polar bears and the effect of the FWS decision to list them as threatened, rather than a panel featuring polar bears. So no fish will be served. Volokh’s Jonathan Adler will be there, though. [Volokh; AEI]
- Limiting lawsuit abuses lowers costs from litigation, creates jobs in long run. [Engler & McQuillan @ Detroit News]
- HBO to small businesses: prepositions are okay, but conjunctions will lead to injunctions. [Baltimore Sun]
- A one-sided love letter to Cozen O’Connor in the Philadelphia Inquirer over its September 11 litigation is a bit too revealing about its deep-pocket searches: “Cozen lawyers also had to be sure that such a defendant made financial sense, for the firm and its clients.” Culpability, of course, isn’t in the equation; and the newspaper story fails to account for the public-policy implications of having trial lawyers stepping on foreign policy. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
- Life imitates “The Office”: law firm offers “love contracts” for dating workers. [ABA Journal]
- More evidence of FDA overwarning, even when the science and law does not justify it. [Kyle Sampson @ Product Liability Law 360]
- Business tries to bully small website with litigation; small website successfully fights back. [CL&P Blog]
- “[Ron] Paul accomplished the one thing he’s always been good at: using political appeals to get people to send money. I don’t feel freer.” [Henley via Kirkendall]
- “It’s infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline.” [Postrel]
- Story on Vioxx settlement and Merck winning reversals heavily quotes me. [Product Liability Law 360 ($)]
Economists’ amicus brief in Wyeth v. Levine
I’m proud to be part of the amicus brief in Wyeth v. Levine filed by leading economists John E. Calfee, Ernst R. Berndt, Robert Hahn, Tomas Philipson, Paul H. Rubin, and W. Kip Viscusi. It provides an excellent explanation why FDA preemption is good for consumer safety and health policy, and why failure-to-warn litigation by trial lawyers hurts consumer safety. (You may notice that none of the public-policy arguments against preemption you see in the blogosphere fairly address these economic arguments.)
For everything you could possibly want to know about the Wyeth v. Levine case, do see Beck & Herrmann’s roundup of their excellent posts on the subject, and keep an eye out for their discussion of the top-side briefs undoubtedly coming soon.