Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘schools’

T-shirt battle before Seventh Circuit

“Why do people bring lawsuits for such trivialities?” Judge Richard Posner, a notoriously tough jurist, asked Dymkar during a three-judge hearing of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit Thursday. “Have they been harmed, these ‘Gifties’?”

The Chicago Sun-Times covers a four-year class action battle brought by the mother of one of 24 students over their punishment for wearing a shirt perceived as insulting regular students (which the “gifted” students charmingly called “tards.”) The oral argument is indeed entertaining.

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Sexual harassment — by a 4-year-old

A letter from the La Vega Independent School District warned DaMarcus Blackwell that his son was involved in “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” after the boy hugged a teacher’s aide and “rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee”. The boy was four years old at the time. (Emily Ingram, “Hug lands 4-year-old in suspension”, Waco Tribune-Herald, Dec. 10; Volokh, Dec. 12).

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ADA: Colleges bend to accommodation demands

Amid a rapid rise in the number of students with disability diagnoses — diagnoses of learning disability, in particular — colleges and universities “have magnified services to help those students keep pace – from personal note-takers to high-tech computer equipment that reads aloud and types research papers. … The number of college students with disabilities has grown fivefold from three decades ago, when it was estimated at 2.3 percent.” At Regis University in Colorado, the number of students receiving accommodations has jumped more than fifty percent in three years, from 240 to 370. “The number of college students diagnosed with disabilities increased dramatically after the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, [Regis disability services director Joie] Williams said.” About 600 students use the “Access Center” at Denver’s Metropolitan State College: its services, which by law are free to students, include uploading textbooks onto students’ iPods. (Jennifer Brown, “More colleges helping with disabilities”, Denver Post, Nov. 26). For accommodation demands at the high school level, see, e.g., this Mar. 24 post.

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Killer’s mom sues high school

Birmingham, Ala.: “Felicia Reynolds, the mother of former Hoover High School student Ricky Reynolds, has filed a $5 million claim against the city of Hoover, saying her son would not have fatally stabbed classmate Sean Joyner had her pleas for help been heeded. Ricky Reynolds is in a Louisiana prison serving a 20-year manslaughter sentence for the November 2002 incident at the high school.” (Robert K. Gordon, “Killer’s mother sues Hoover”, Birmingham News, Dec. 7).

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Academic freedom update: Loftus suit argued before California Supreme Court

Elizabeth Loftus dared to write an article in the Skeptical Inquirer critically examining questionable claims of recovered memory abuse (Aug. 26, 2004); justices seemed skeptical of the argument Nicole Taus shouldn’t be allowed to sue for Loftus’s alleged misrepresentations to obtain information, which scares media lawyers: “Although journalists generally identify themselves truthfully, ruling for Taus would ‘create a motive’ for news sources unhappy about their portrayals ‘to belatedly contend that the reporter obtained the information by misrepresentation,’ lawyers for the media argued.” Loftus denies lying, but, at the dismissal stage, the Court assumes the allegations of the complaint are true. Whether Veronica Mars would be sued into next week is left as an exercise for the reader. (Maura Dolan, “High court considers privacy issue”, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 6).

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“Next to go: duck-duck-goose”

Some thoughts on the “safety”-driven (in fact, lawsuit-driven) repression of schoolyard play: “I feel very sorry for elementary school teachers if the kids don’t run around the playground chasing one another. All that energy is going to come out one way or the other – better outside than in.” (Dean P. Johnson, “Schools are banning tag. What’s next: musical chairs?”, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 3).

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Cheaters’ delight

“We have found that graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others,” concludes a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada. …

However, what’s holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation.

(Thomas Kostigen, “Survey: M.B.A.s Are The Biggest Cheaters”, MarketWatch/ CareerJournal.com, Oct. 25; Al Lewis, “Wily MBA students lead cheating pack”, Denver Post, Oct. 2).

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