Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Pennsylvania’

Airport Parking, Antitrust & Eminent Domain

For the past three years, Stan Cramer has been fighting to save his parking garage near the Harrisburg International Airport from eminent domain seizure by the airport’s municipal operating authority. The airport wants to eliminate competition with its own parking lots, and when Cramer refused to sell voluntarily, the authority used its powers under Pennsylvania law to take the property by force. Recently, a Pennsylvania judge allowed Cramer’s lawsuit to stop the seizure to proceed to trial.

In a related case, Pennsylvania AG Tom Corbett filed a federal lawsuit last year to stop the airport authority’s seizure on the grounds that it violates federal antitrust law. It’s a strange setup: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania suing one of its own subdivisions in federal court over the use of power granted by state law. In March, U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner dismissed the AG’s complaint, citing the airport authority’s immunity from federal antitrust lawsuit as a state actor. Conner said the airport’s anti-competitive motives were irrelevant; its actions were clearly authorized by the Pennsylvania legislature.

Corbett appealed the judge’s dismissal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Briefs were filed in October, and a decision on the appeal is expected next year. Meanwhile, new management has taken over at the airport, and they are trying to negotiate a settlement with Cramer.

Read On…

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Annals of Pennsylvania libel law

As we have had occasion to note in the past, the home of Ben Franklin has somehow wound up as a place where newspapers are unusually vulnerable to intimidation by the threat of lawsuit (see Mar. 16, 2004, Nov. 21, 2006, etc.). Paul Carpenter, the excellent columnist with the Allentown Morning Call, sheds a bit of light on a case with which he was personally involved, Bufalino v. Associated Press (692 F.2d 266 (2d Cir.1982)). (“Small newspaper leads the way against bullies”, Nov. 26).

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Crazed samurai killer wins only $1 in police brutality case

Perhaps this Pennsylvania jury considered that it was steering things down the middle with its result:

Five Bethlehem police officers used excessive force to restrain a man high on crack cocaine who killed a drug dealer with a samurai sword and set him on fire, a federal jury ruled Tuesday night.

… [Sonny] Thomas, 50, who testified he suffered bruises and recurring migraine headaches as a result of the violent scuffle, sought $35 million in damages but was awarded $1….

Thomas testified he had smoked 12 rocks of crack cocaine during the four hours before stabbing [19-year-old Carlos] Garcia more than 80 times with a 4-foot-long samurai sword.

Police, who arrived at the grisly scene to find Garcia’s body set ablaze with the sword sticking out of it, said Thomas ignored an order to surrender, while Thomas countered that he put up no resistance but was beaten anyway. While finding five of the police officers at the scene responsible for excessive force, the jury exonerated five others. The federal judge who presided over the trial, John Fullam, called the jury’s verdict “remarkable”. (Matt Birkbeck, “Samurai killer wins police brutality case, $1 award”, Allentown Morning Call, Nov. 29). For more on “one-dollar” verdicts by juries in excessive-force cases filed by criminals, see my 1994 City Journal article on New York’s “mugger millionaire” case.

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When a judge sues for defamation, cont’d

Reacting to the recent case in which a jury awarded Illinois chief justice Robert Thomas $7 million against a suburban newspaper, the Kane County Chronicle (Jun. 22, Jul. 19, Nov. 3, Nov. 7, Nov. 14, Nov. 19). the New York Times recalls a 1983 case in which “a Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania sued The Philadelphia Inquirer for defamation. The case was finally dismissed this summer — a full 23 years after it began. … [Reporter Daniel R.] Biddle, who is now an editor at The Inquirer, said he had learned through lawyers that some of the biggest law firms in Philadelphia declined to represent the paper, in part ‘because they were afraid’ that fighting a Supreme Court justice might jeopardize their other clients.” (Katharine Q. Seelye, “Clash of a Judge and a Small Paper Underlines the Tangled History of Defamation”, New York Times, Nov. 20). More: Mar. 16, 2004. The Times piece also discusses a lawsuit’s silencing of the Alton Telegraph, which once was an outspoken voice in Madison County, Illinois; Ted covered that episode on Point of Law Dec. 28, 2004.

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October 24 roundup

  • I’m speaking at the National Press Club today on the Philip Morris v. Williams case. [Point of Law; Medill summary; Bashman analysis]
  • How much skin color discrimination is there? [Somin @ Volokh]
  • Latest in the Ninth Circuit follies. [Above the Law]
  • Difficulty of making causal link between lung disease and 9/11 dust. [NY Times; TortsProf]
  • Kirkendall on the Skilling sentence. [Kirkendall]
  • Quelle surprise: ATLA dishonestly attacks me. [Point of Law]
  • Ford seems to have settled, instead of fighting, the ludicrous Texas Garcia decision where they got blamed for a drunk-driving accident with unbelted passengers. [Point of Law; CFIF]
  • Scalia: “The more your courts become policy-makers, the less sense it makes to have them entirely independent.” [AP]
  • Richard Epstein on legislators v. Wal-Mart [EconTalk Podcast]
  • Environmentalists v. private property rights. [CEI blog]
  • Litigious Pennsylvania judge Joan Orie Melvin sues for a pay-cut. [Bashman]
  • Why law firm associates work so hard. [Marginal Revolution]

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Overtime-suit spam

Unsolicited email arrived a few hours ago from a return address of EmploymentRights@media-uplink.com with the message: “Do You Know Your Rights As An Employee? Are Your Work Rights Being Neglected? Are You being paid for: Overtime? Putting your uniform on or off? Time spent preparing for your shift? Attending safety meetings? Travel time and expenses?” The link, when clicked, led to this page at a domain entitled legalleadshost.com. Overtime and employee-classification suits have emerged as a highly lucrative field of practice for the plaintiff’s bar in recent years. “In December, a California jury awarded $172.3 million to Wal-Mart workers for missed meal breaks.” (Sophia Pearson and Margaret Cronin Fisk, “Wal-Mart Loses Pennsylvania Suit Over Missed Breaks”, Bloomberg, Oct. 12).

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Police sued after man in 15-hour standoff kills self

Pennsylvania: “The widow of an upper Bucks County man [John Heckenswiler] who killed himself after a 15-hour standoff has filed a federal lawsuit against authorities, claiming they threatened and harassed her unstable husband so severely that he chose suicide over surrender. Deborah Heckenswiler retained an attorney with a record of success in suing police — John P. Karoly Jr. of South Whitehall, who has won multimillion-dollar settlements in brutality and misconduct suits against the Bethlehem and Easton police departments in recent years. … Police violated Heckenswiler’s ‘federally guaranteed right to be free from discrimination on the basis of disability’ because of policies and practices that encouraged negligence and excessive force in dealing with the mentally ill, the suit claims.” (Daniel Patrick Sheehan, “Widow sues police; Karoly takes case”, Allentown Morning Call, Oct. 14). More: complaint here in PDF format courtesy SuicideMalpractice.Net, a website critical of lawsuits seeking to blame third parties for acts of suicide.

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Ivied halls, defended by lawyer phalanxes

“Large universities now employ the equivalents of small law firms on staff, and it’s worth pondering what this Perry Masonification of our schools says about how they operate. …As Ed Stoner, a retired Pittsburgh lawyer who, over a 30-year career, represented numerous schools in Western Pennsylvania, told me: ‘People [today] are much less inclined to think, “I wouldn’t sue the university, it’d be like suing my mother.” People tend to look at the university as one more institution that might have a lot of money.'” (Mark Oppenheimer, “College Goes to Court”, OpinionJournal, Jul. 14).

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Collection agency class settlement

A class action settlement resulting from litigation against the firm of H.A. Berkheimer of Bangor, Pennsylvania, was sufficiently tilted in favor of legal fees as opposed to class relief that Bucks County Judge Robert Mellon gave it thumbs down. Allentown Morning Call columnist Paul Carpenter, who’s had an outstanding series of columns on the litigation business lately, has the story (“Lawyers can get sweet deals only in some states”, Jun. 20).

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Employers win two in court

Each year Gerald Skoning, a prominent employment lawyer at Chicago’s Seyfarth Shaw, assembles his pick of the ten most bizarre employment cases of the previous year, and each year the National Law Journal publishes the roundup but omits to put it online. So I’ll just quote my two personal favorites from the latest list (“Last year’s bizarre cases”, Mar. 20):

…A federal district court in Oklahoma has dismissed a 70-year-old office worker’s claim that her employer discriminated against her because she was not fired. Mary Wyatt, who had worked for Occidental Petroleum for more than 24 years, argued that she should have been fired and awarded a severance package. The court disagreed, reasoning that, “Plaintiff has not suffered an adverse employment action by the continuation of her employment.” I commend the court for its eminently sensible recognition that the continued opportunity to earn a living isn’t discrimination.

…A federal court in Pennsylvania has ruled that a weight loss center did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by refusing to hire a salesman who weighed 350 pounds because it was concerned his appearance was inconsistent with the sale of its products. The court dismissed Bob Goodman’s claim, stating: “The mere fact that Defendant was aware of Plaintiff’s weight and rejected [him] for fear that his appearance did not accord with the company image was not improper.” I salute this weighty contribution to commonsense jurisprudence.

For another you-should-have-fired-me case, see May 11, 2004. For coverage of previous Skoning roundups, see May 12, 2005 and links from there.

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