Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for December, 2015

U.S. Chamber’s “Most Ridiculous Lawsuits of 2015”

Here. Their winner is the monkey-selfie case, and it, like five of the others, has been covered here before: aunt sues nephew for careless hug, cop spills free coffee on lap and sues, thrown roll at Missouri restaurant, California woman allegedly used fake medical records and pictures “from the Internet” to bolster McDonald’s coffee-spill case, and Washington bank robber injured while fleeing scene.

The four others:

4. Pennsylvania Nursing Student Fails a Course Twice and Sues the School for Not Helping With Anxiety
5. Two New York Women File $40 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Like, Five or Six Scratches’ They Received From a Gas Explosion Blocks Away
6. Colorado Inmate is Suing the NFL for $88 Billion Over the 2015 Cowboys’ Playoff Loss
7. Florida Woman is Suing FedEx for Tripping Over a Package Left at Her Doorstep

Our coverage last year of their 2014 list is here.

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December 30 roundup

  • Federal Circuit court of appeals says government can’t deny trademark as “disparaging” just because it frowns on its expressive content, implications are favorable for Washington Redskins in their legal case [Eugene Volokh, Paul Alan Levy, In Re Simon Shiao Tam opinion, case won by past Overlawyered guestblogger Ron Coleman]
  • Mentally ill man walks into San Diego county recorder’s office, submits properly filled-out deed transferring major sports stadium to his name, chaos ensues [San Diego Union Tribune]
  • Lawsuit against prolific California class action firm includes details on how it allegedly recruits plaintiffs, shapes testimony [Daniel Fisher]
  • New Jersey: “Man Sues Because Alimony Checks Were Mean To Him” [Elie Mystal/Above the Law, ABA Journal]
  • Blustery Texan Joe Jamail, “greatest lawyer who ever lived” or not, was no stranger to Overlawyered coverage [Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly (“We only overpaid by a factor of five, and that felt like a win”), Daniel Fisher (city should have cut down beloved oak tree in road median because “it isn’t open season on drunks”)] Jamail’s best-known case gave me chance to write what still might be my all-time favorite headline, for a Richard Epstein article in what is now Cato’s (and was then AEI’s) Regulation magazine: “The Pirates of Pennzoil.”
  • Hotel security camera footage may help decide whether Eloise tainted-sandwich tale will end up shelved as fiction [New York Post]
  • Your War on Drugs: shopping at garden store, throwing loose tea in trash after brewing combine with police goofs to generate probable cause for SWAT raid on Kansas family’s home [Radley Balko] More: Orin Kerr.

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Environment roundup

  • Cato podcast with William Fischel on his new book Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation;
  • If traveling with your pet skunk, avoid Tennessee [Mental Floss, “15 Surprising Animal Laws That Are Still on the Books”]
  • “How Land-Use Regulation Undermines Affordable Housing” [Sanford Ikeda and Emily Washington, Mercatus via Market Urbanism] Head of Obama administration Council of Economic Advisers gives speech pinning high housing costs on land use regulation, but don’t get hopes up about policy changes quite yet [Randal O’Toole, Cato]
  • Panel on role of Congress in environmental law at Federalist Society National Lawyers’ Convention with David Schoenbrod, Eric Claeys, Matt Leggett, and Nicholas Robinson, moderated by the Hon. Steven Colloton [YouTube]
  • “Market urbanist” position criticized (Steve Randy Waldman) and defended (Jeff Fong);
  • Mysteries of Los Angeles: drive to limit large residential developments is being led in part by… AIDS Healthcare Foundation? [L.A. Times]
  • “On the misuse of environmental history to defend the EPA’s WOTUS rule” [Jonathan Adler, earlier on Waters of the United States rule]

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Banking and finance roundup

  • Trying to buy gift cards in bulk as an employee bonus, Coyote discovers anew that the government hates cash;
  • Initial public offerings are drooping again, regulation one reason [Thaya Knight, Cato]
  • A dissent from the lamentations, here and elsewhere, on the decline of small community banks [Ira Stoll] “Fed’s Tarullo says looking into smaller banks’ concerns” [Business Insider]
  • Berned out? Financial transactions tax “one of the more overrated ideas in American Progressive political discourse” [Tyler Cowen, Wikipedia on Sweden’s experience via @aClassicLiberal on Twitter] And Sen. Sanders continues to express incredulity on Twitter about college loans’ carrying higher interest than home mortgages do, despite attempts to enlighten him on the whole topic of secured lending and collateral [@tedfrank]
  • Video of Federalist Society convention panel on constitutionality of administrative law judges at SEC and elsewhere with John S. Baker, Jr., Stephen Crimmins, Todd Pettys, Tuan Samahon, moderated by F. Scott Kieff;
  • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ban on contractual arbitration will help class action lawyers, few others [Todd Zywicki, Mercatus]
  • “How US policies to stop terrorist financing end up hurting innocent families abroad” [Dylan Matthews, Vox] Money laundering regs, “de-risking” result in many bank closures in U.S.-Mexico border areas, hassles result for local residents and businesses [Kevin Funnell]

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First Amendment Defense Act, draft two

Both sides in the culture war are gearing up for a fight in Congress on the proposed First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), which would establish various rights for persons and institutions who object to same-sex marriage. The bill’s text, however, has proved a moving target (earlier here and here). Scott Shackford at Reason gets farther into the details than the mainstream media has done.

Relatedly, Rod Dreher writes at the American Conservative that as a social conservative who resisted gay marriage, but now considers that cause lost, he believes fellow thinkers concerned with religious liberty should look to ally with libertarians. He recommends Shackford’s recent piece in Reason (which quotes me on adoption issues) noting the organized gay movement’s ever wider split from libertarians on issues of central government power, individual liberty and free association.

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EPA’s lobbying on “Waters of the United States”: no big deal?

My local paper, the Frederick News-Post, ran an editorial on Monday that 1) saw nothing especially wrong in the Environmental Protection Agency’s illegally expending tax money to stir up pressure on Congress to support a wider interpretation of EPA power; 2) claimed that the fuss over tax-paid lobbying was for lack of any substantive critique of EPA’s “WOTUS” (Waters of the United States) rule, although a majority of states have challenged that rule, the farm and rural landowner communities have been up in arms against it all year, and a federal appeals court has agreed to stay it.

So I wrote this letter in response, which ran today. There wasn’t space for me to dispute the FNP’s peculiar notion that to oppose the water rule as exceeding the EPA’s statutory authority is to encourage the “anti-science, climate change denial crowd,” which tends to reinforce my sense that “anti-science” and “climate denial” are turning into all-purpose epithets increasingly unhooked from any particular relationship to science or climate. (cross-posted at Free State Notes)

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Roanoke man pardoned on arson conviction

ornamentsVirginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted an unusual absolute pardon to Davey Reedy, released six years ago after many years of imprisonment on an arson murder conviction after a house fire that killed his two small children. The case is one of dozens in which forensic methods formerly used for evaluating arson have been re-examined as poorly based and unreliable. “According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 38 people have been exonerated before Reedy for arson-related crimes since 1991.” [Washington Post; earlier]

From the Post’s Christmas Day story:

After his release in 2009, he has settled back in the Roanoke area with his family. The day McAuliffe called to tell him of his exoneration, Roberta Bondurant said, he was coordinating a volunteer project.

“He’s at a place and time in his life where he’s at peace with himself,” she said. “It doesn’t help him at all in the time he has left on this planet to hold bitterness for anyone who made a mistake along the way.”

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Neil Steinberg: “Sued by a Lunatic”

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg reprints a column from 2000 about a lawsuit that ensued after he exchanged words with a young man waiting in line at the drugstore. The process dragged on through the Christmas season until just before the holiday itself: “It is days in a windowless, airless room, somehow both too big and claustrophobic, waiting for your case to be called, staring dully at tiles on the ceiling, hearing the headachy murmur of legalisms just out of earshot, noting the starched exhaustion of lawyers, the unease of regular folk. There are motions and counter-motions. Many times I recalled that Hamlet, listing reasons to kill himself in his famous ‘To Be or Not to Be’ soliloquy, puts ‘the law’s delay’ up high, right after the pangs of despriz’d love.”

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