- As one who wrote at length about the silicone-implant litigation at the time — founded as it was on junk science theories hyped to panic potential plaintiffs — I agree that Elizabeth Warren has nothing to apologize for about her bankruptcy work for Dow Corning. Move on to better criticisms, please [Darren McKinney, WSJ] Related: Federalist Society teleforum on mass tort bankruptcies with Steven Todd Brown, Ralph Brubaker, and Dan Prieto;
- “What should be the duty of public retailers whose customers have bizarre or offensive clothing, appearance, demeanor or behavior but do not actually engage in or threaten violence on the retailers’ premises? To avoid risk, should the retailers exclude them from their stores?” [Eugene Volokh quoting federal court opinion in Budreau v. Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc. (D. Maine)]
- New York residents should brace for higher taxes as trial-lawyer-backed bill in Albany exposes public authorities to more road claims [John Whittaker, Jamestown Post-Journal]
- “Kansas Supreme Court Throws Out Personal Injury Damages Cap” [Associated Press]
- Whose proposal for joint trial counts as triggering removal of mass action under the Class Action Fairness Act? The court’s? Choice between federal and state courts implicates fundamental questions of fairness [Eric Alexander, Drug and Device Law on Supreme Court certiorari petition in Pfizer v. Adamyan]
- Glyphosate, talc verdicts suggest juries may be paying more attention to purported smoking-gun documents than to scientific evidence on causation [Daniel D. Fisher, Northern California Record; Corbin Barthold, WLF] “Inconsistent Gatekeeping Undercuts the Continuing Promise of Daubert” [Joe G. Hollingsworth and Mark A. Miller, WLF]
Posts Tagged ‘silicone breast implants’
Silicone breast implants: “sad history of a government approved scare”
25 years ago CBS and the Food and Drug Administration, with trial lawyers and their hired experts busy in the background, kicked off a national panic over silicone breast implants. After waves of needless consumer fear and considerable disruptions to the U.S. economy– and the transfer of a great deal of money to claimants and their lawyers — the panic subsided and the general safety of the devices came to be widely accepted [Jack Fisher, ACSH; our coverage here; my book The Rule of Lawyers, which devoted a chapter to the saga]
New books roundup
- Widely discussed new Charles Murray book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission, includes extensive discussion of failures of law and litigation system [Carlos Lozada WaPo review, Cato’s Letter, podcast and related post, J.D. Tuccille/Reason]
- Rare and welcome book-length work on state attorneys general, Paul Nolette’s Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America, I’ll have more to say about it in due course [Liberty and Law, discussion with author]
- The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom by my Cato colleague David Boaz, a revised and updated edition of his earlier Libertarianism: A Primer, includes chapter on law and the constitution as well as much related discussion; boasts blurbs from John Mackey, Peter Thiel, and Richard Epstein;
- Arnold Kling on Political Realism, new free e-book from Jonathan Rauch; also, Kling reviews a recent talk at Cato by Michael Shermer on his book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom;
- “We will fight for a fair contract!” proclaimed then-N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine to government workers, neat trick if you accept assumption that he was on opposite side of negotiating table from them [Michael Toth on new Daniel DiSalvo book on public sector unionism, Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences]
- In the mail: Akhil Amar, The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic, on how the idiosyncrasies of particular states, regions, and localities have shaped our understanding of the U.S. Constitution;
- And: Jay Cost, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption [related Cato event]
- And: Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Jared Meyer, Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young;
- And: Jack C. Fisher, Silicone on Trial: Breast Implants and the Politics of Risk [Sager Group]
New book on silicone breast implant litigation affair
A new book by Dr. Jack Fisher revisits the silicone breast implant litigation fiasco, a tale often mentioned in this space, including the FDA’s role [Josh Bloom, Science20 via ACSH]
Joseph Nocera on the mass-tort business model
The New York Times columnist responds to critics of his coverage (earlier here, here, etc.) of the BP Gulf spill claims bonanza:
Until that story [on the silicone breast implant episode], I’d always taken the liberal view of plaintiffs’ lawyers as avenging angels, righting wrongs and helping wrest compensation for people who had been harmed by greedy corporations. …
[Since then] I’ve seen mass torts where the actual plaintiffs get coupons while the lawyers reap millions. Mass torts where the connection between the product and the harm is illusory. Mass torts built on fraud (silicosis). Complex litigation settled for billions even when the government implies that consumers are responsible (Toyota sudden acceleration). I’ve also seen cases where some victims hit the jackpot with a giant jury verdict and other victims come up empty. Or where a corporation really has done harm but pays off the lawyers instead of the victims. Over the years, I’ve thought: There’s got to be a better way.
Read the whole thing [via Ted at Point of Law]
New breast-implant-cancer scare
New reports of a study linking an exceedingly rare cancer (anaplastic large cell lymphoma, 3 in 100 million women) to breast implants shouldn’t be seen as somehow vindicating the long-discredited litigation-driven scare campaign against the implants. [David Gorski; Robert Goldberg, DrugWonks; David Oliver]
Update: O’Quinn estate will refund $46.5 million to implant clients
As longtime readers of this site know well, the late mass tort king John O’Quinn nicked the accounts of breast implant plaintiffs with a fortune in unauthorized overcharges. Austin attorney Terry Scarborough, who spent ten years helping get some of the money back, “says he could have built a practice based on people itching to sue O’Quinn, whose generosity toward charitable and Democratic causes was shadowed by a reputation for stiffing fellow attorneys — a mortal sin in the practice of law.” [Austin American-Statesman, Texas Lawyer]
CPSIA chronicles, April 24
- Understatement alert: per the official Congressional Research Service on Capitol Hill, “For the moment…one thing seems certain: implementation of the CPSIA is not going well.” [report in PDF format courtesy ShopFloor]
- In Wisconsin, the Madison Children’s Museum has for the past 21 years based its annual fundraiser (July 18, this year) on a big discount sale of American Girl dolls and accessories. Worse luck for them.
- “Anti-recycling”, maybe? Is there a word for what happens when you yank perfectly safe, useful products off shelves by the ton and send them instead to landfills?
- Blast from the past dept.: if you think Public Citizen has made a mess of the risk and science issues in its advocacy on behalf of CPSIA, you should check out the world-class mess it made when it enlisted in the trial lawyer campaign against silicone breast implants, to name but such one campaign of many.
- Powersports dealers wary of whether new stay of enforcement really protects them [DealerNews, Sioux City (Iowa) Journal]
- The first senior, influential Senate Democrat to acknowledge that CPSIA needs fixing? Montana’s Max Baucus is willing at least to sign on to a legalize-minibikes bill.
- In the comments section on NPR’s phthalates story earlier this month, one of the most-recommended comments was that by Steven Tesney of Houston, who wrote, “As a result of CPSIA and the surrounding political grandstanding, my small home-based company will be going out of business. I design clothing for ‘Alternative’ families with infants, toddlers & kids. My products are organic and use natural dyes but because of new testing requirements that are completely cost prohibitive, I will be forced – along with hundreds of thousands of crafters, artisans and other small business owners – to close my doors. The only companies that will be able to afford the testing will be large corporations (many from China). Mass produced goods win while homemade, handcrafted goods lose. Say goodbye to the charming hand carved wooden toys & crocheted baby caps that you take to baby showers. Say hello to a plethora of licensed products staring back at your children.”
- “CPSIA and the black market” [Wacky Hermit]
Public domain image courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org: Walter Crane, illustrator, The Baby’s Aesop (1887)
“The Use of Litigation Screenings in Mass Torts: A Formula for Fraud?”
Lester Brickman has a new must-read paper on an under-reported problem:
Lawyers obtain the “mass” for some mass tort litigations by conducting screenings to sign-up potential litigants en masse. These “litigation screenings” have no intended medical benefit. Screenings are mostly held in motels, shopping center parking lots, local union offices and lawyers’ offices. There, an occupational history is taken by persons with no medical training, a doctor may do a cursory physical exam, and medical technicians administer tests, including X-rays, pulmonary function tests, echocardiograms and blood tests. The sole purpose of screenings is to generate “medical” evidence of the existence of an injury to be attributed to exposure to or ingestion of defendants’ products. Usually a handful of doctors (“litigation doctors”) provide the vast majority of the thousands and tens of thousands of medical reports prepared for that litigation.
By my count, approximately 1,500,000 potential litigants have been screened in the asbestos, silica, fen-phen (diet drugs), silicone breast implant, and welding fume litigations. Litigation doctors found that approximately 1,000,000 of those screened had the requisite condition that could qualify for compensation, such as asbestosis, silicosis, moderate mitral or mild aortic value regurgitation or a neurological disorder. I further estimate that lawyers have spent at least $500 million and as much as $1 billion to conduct these litigation screenings, paying litigation doctors and screening companies well in excess of $250 million, and obtaining contingency fees well in excess of $13 billion.
On the basis of the evidence I review in this article, I conclude that approximately 900,000 of the 1,000,000 claims generated were based on “diagnoses” of the type that U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, in the silica MDL, found were “manufactured for money.”
Despite the considerable evidence I review that most of the “medical” evidence produced by litigation screenings is at least specious, I find that there is no effective mechanism in the civil justice system for reliably detecting or deterring this claim generation process. Indeed, I demonstrate how the civil justice system erects significant impediments to even exposing the specious claim generation methods used in litigation screenings. Furthermore, I present evidence that bankruptcy courts adjudicating asbestos related bankruptcies have effectively legitimized the use of these litigation screenings. I also present evidence that the criminal justice system has conferred immunity on the litigation doctors and the lawyers that hire them, granting them a special dispensation to advance specious claims.
Finally, I discuss various strategies that need to be adopted to counter this assault on the integrity of the civil justice system.
Unclear on the concept
Bizarro-Overlawyered hasn’t quite gotten the hang of how to put forward their propaganda campaign to deprive consumers of the choice of arbitrating disputes.
A New Orleans woman, Patricia Dicorte, says she got ripped off by her contractor in May 2007, so she took him to an arbitrator, and in July 2007—a fraction of the time it would take in a civil suit of that magnitude—she had an arbitration ruling in her favor for $219 thousand. Unfortunately for her, she then took it to the cesspool of Orleans Parish Courts for enforcement, and Democratic Judge Yada Magee—a colleague of the cousin of the contractor—violated the Federal Arbitration Act and threw out the arbitrator’s ruling. (Dennis Woltering, “Despite arbitrator’s ruling woman still fighting contractor”, WWL-TV, Feb. 25). This will eventually be reinstated on appeal at some unnecessary expense, but somehow Kia Franklin is advertising this fiasco as an example of problems with arbitration (!), rather than as a problem with the judicial hellhole of New Orleans. (If the judge isn’t willing to give a fair ruling for the consumer in something as straightforward and administrative as arbitration judgment enforcement, what makes Franklin think that the consumer would have had a better chance with that judge in a civil trial?)
Judge Magee is best known for railroading negligence findings for 1800 plaintiffs against Dow Chemical in bogus silicone breast implant litigation in 1997, a decision thrown out by a Louisiana appellate court in 2002. Spitzfaden v. Dow Corning Corp., 833 So.2d 512 (La. App. 2002).