The misnamed Center for Science in the Public Interest, fresh from their loss earlier this month against KFC (May 3), has sued Burger King on the same theory that the legal act of selling foods that contain trans-fats is actionable. (Burger King discloses trans-fat content on its website, so any claim of failure to warn is patently false.) CSPI’s Stephen Gardner self-servingly writes about the suit on the Public Citizen blog without once mentioning the earlier slapdown, much less the fact that the reason trans-fats are so prevalent in the American diet today is that CSPI and its ilk worked so hard to persuade people to use trans-fats instead of saturated fats in the 1980s through similar tactics. CSPI should be suing itself. The question is why courts condone the misuse of the legal system to act as a public-relations device.
Posts Tagged ‘Public Citizen’
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)]
“FDA ends ban on silicone breast implants”
“The government on Friday rescinded a 14-year ban on silicone gel implants for cosmetic breast enhancement, a decision praised by some for providing women with a better product but criticized by others who still question their safety. … After rigorous review, the [Food and Drug Administration] can offer a ‘reasonable assurance’ that silicone implants are ‘safe and effective,’ said Donna-Bea Tillman, director of the FDA Office of Device Evaluation.” (Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Daniel Costello, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 18). Silicone breast implants, available to consumers in most other countries, were driven from the market after a campaign of speculation and misinformation by trial lawyers and allied “consumer” groups, particularly Dr. Sidney Wolfe’s Public Citizen Health Research Group. The campaign resulted in billions in legal settlements over nonexistent autoimmune effects from the devices, none of which had to be repaid even after more careful scientific studies dispelled the early alarms. Chapter 4 of my book The Rule of Lawyers, which tells the story of the silicone litigation episode in detail, isn’t online. The New York Sun has an editorial drawing some of the appropriate conclusions (“Now They Tell Us”, Nov. 20)(& welcome Above the Law readers). More: Second Hand Conjecture channels Virginia Postrel (via InstaPundit).
November 3 roundup
- Don’t forget Point of Law’s featured roundtable discussion on the midterm elections. [Point of Law]
- Public Citizen’s consumer law blog is holding a book club, and they’ve invited AEI’s Michael Greve into the hostile territory to discuss his book on consumer-fraud class actions. Both the book and the discussion are must-reading. [CL&P; CL&P; CL&P]
- Lester Brickman and others talk about mass tort screening fraud on your iPod. [Federalist Society]
- November 8 in DC: the Kaiser Family Foundation is hosting a big panel on health courts. [Common Good]
- Roundup of links on the outrageous Illinois Chief Justice Robert Thomas libel suit. This really deserves a longer post by itself. [Bashman]
- Melvin Dummar is back in court with his implausible Howard Hughes lawsuit. [AP/MSNBC via ATL]
- Barney Frank also doesn’t like the internet gambling ban. [Frank via Evanier]
- Today’s outrageous Ninth Circuit decision: a 2-1 invalidation of a meth-addict’s guilty plea for murder. Judge Bybee’s dissent tears it apart. [Smith v. Baldwin; The Recorder; Above the Law]
- Clint Bolick of Institute for Justice, on the other hand, defends judicial activism in an interview with Russell Roberts. [Cafe Hayek]
- Have we mentioned the new website with all of Judge Richard Posner’s opinions in one place? [Project Posner]
October 16 round-up
- “‘I’ve never felt so ill,’ says one reporter about the NY Times’s coverage of the Duke lacrosse-team case.” [New York Magazine]
- Double-standards for judicial seminars. [Point of Law; Volokh]
- 14-year-old British student arrested for not wanting to do class project with non-English speakers? [Volokh]
- Our October 13 entry on the pros and cons of complusory licensing in copyright provoked one of our longest comment threads ever.
- Will regulators shut down an aversive-stimuli special-education school? Should they? [Village Voice via Cowen]
- Cheap crime deterrent: wearing pink. [Prettier than Napoleon] Meanwhile, professors debate shaming in general. [Markel on PrawfsBlawg and SSRN; Berman; Markel reply; Kerr on Volokh; Markel reply]
- Trent Lott about to implement bad public policy out of spite. [RiskProf]
- Greg Beck has good analysis of the Emerson v. NBC garbage disposal suit. Always glad to see Public Citizen support liability reform. [CL&P]
- Is “erroneous removal” a problem? [Point of Law; TortsProf Blog]
Salonquest scare letter: photos of our products violate our copyright
Public Citizen Litigation Group’s Greg Beck blogs a refutation though, alas, he doesn’t single out the attorney who makes the absurd claim. Beck notes the problem:
Even if a claim like Aquage’s is without legal merit, however, many small online sellers who receive a threat like this would rather cut their losses and back down than risk a lawsuit. It’s usually not worth hiring a lawyer when you are only hoping to make a few bucks off the sale in the first place.
Indeed.
Lying with statistics: Public Citizen edition
Businesses “More Likely to Sue Frivolously” trumpets Bizarro-Overlawyered and Greedy Trial Lawyer, quoting a Public Citizen report. Except not even the Public Citizen report supports this claim, and no mathematically-literate person reading the report could think so.
Outsourcing enforcement in Mass
Massachusetts consumer protection law includes “item pricing” regulations.” A shopper who picks up an item marked $3.19, but is charged $3.59 at the checkout, has been the victim of a violation of these rules. If a state wishes to address such incidents, a practical question arises: how to enforce legal rules when they involve such trifling amounts of money per incident? Enter class action lawyers, naturally. According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly has farmed out the enforcement of these rules to a group of private attorneys — who are doing quite well for themselves. Cases against Home Depot and Wal-Mart have been settled; a settlement with Walgreen is pending. If the Walgreen settlement is finalized, the outcome of all this acitivity will be the payment of $3.2 million to the private attorneys, $3.9 million to “an eclectic group of charitable, consumer, and nonprofit groups,” and $425,000 to the AG’s Office. The list of favored groups includes, among others, the Roscoe Pound Institute and Public Citizen. The Globe points out that “it would be impossible to identify consumers hurt by item-pricing failures”; one of the private attorneys claims in the story that the payments to the favored groups will benefit Massachusetts residents, with most being used to “spur greater awareness of consumer rights.” Cases against other retailers (in addition to Walgreen) are pending. (Bruce Mohl, “Reilly turns to private enforcement of item pricing,” Boston Globe, June 27)
West Virginia M.D.s
…won the enactment of far-reaching liability reform in their state last year. How they did it (“The story of tort reform in West Virginia”, David A. Kappel, M.D., Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, May (PDF)). See also “Malpractice Liability in West Virginia” (survey), U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, Nov. 19, 2002 (PDF); American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Ob-Gyns Praise West Virginia’s New Law On Medical Liability Reform” (press release), Mar. 19, 2003. For the other side’s views, see Public Citizen, Jul. 9, 2003, and Stephanie Mencimer, “Malpractice Makes Perfect”, Washington Monthly, Oct. 2003 (& see Howard Kurtz, “Fox’s Middle Man”, Washington Post, Apr. 5 on publishing history of last-named piece, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award although the New Republic had “rejected it as flawed after a couple of rounds of rewriting”).
USA Today on magnet jurisdictions
USA Today has a front-page story on magnet jurisdictions. (Martin Kasindorf, “Robin Hood is alive in court”, Mar. 8). It leaves unrebutted the false claim by Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook that “federal courts are judicial hellholes” because “the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago recently denied class-action status to people who allegedly were harmed when Firestone tires blew out on their Ford Explorer SUVs”; the class that the Seventh Circuit rejected was a nationwide class of all Explorer owners, including those who had suffered no harm. Consumers who were injured by Firestone tires have many lawsuits pending unaffected by the Seventh Circuit’s decision; indeed, as the Seventh Circuit pointed out, anyone who had a significant injury would likely have been advised to opt out of a class action rather than risk having their claim subsumed by the class action. (In re Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. Tires Products Liability Litigation opinion; see also Jul. 8).
It is telling that Ms. Claybrook is suggesting that a court that refuses to countenance a class action on behalf of people who have suffered no harm is “anti-consumer”–it demonstrates that to her, “pro-consumer” means a pure wealth transfer from shareholders to lawyers.
USA Today also understates the problem of Madison County (see Sept. 26, Jan. 5, etc.): it’s not just that class actions have gone to 107 in 2003 from 60 in 2001; in 1998, there were only three class actions filed in Madison County. “There’s some merit to the accusations of bias in Madison County, says retired circuit judge John DeLaurenti, who heard cases there for 27 years until 2000. ‘I don’t know if it’s a judicial hellhole, but just figure it out,’ he says. ‘When people come from hither and thither to file these cases, there’s gotta be an inducement, doesn’t there? They’re not coming to see beautiful Madison County.'”
Disclosure: My law firm represented Ford in the Firestone class action litigation before the Seventh Circuit; my colleague, John Beisner, is quoted by USA Today.