I didn’t see any mention of lawsuits in the Lileks column the Key Monk cites immediately below, but for the polite rejoinder to the underlying point, see Virginia Postrel.
Archive for 2004
Thank you and goodnight
Overlawyered.com readers, thanks for reading my posts and allowing me to invade your cyberspace. Thank you Mr. Olson for letting me sap your bandwidth on this site. Two things to leave you with, as The Monk’s one-week term as guest blogger ends:
1) This amusing entry from James Lileks regarding the social aspects of the various lawsuits urging that church-state separation means no “Christ” in Christmas.
2) Merry Christmas, Joy of the Season, All the Best and Happy New Year.
Thanks to KeyMonk
…for a highly productive week as guestblogger (five posts yesterday alone). His regular blog (“Politics, Sports, Law, and occasionally Religion — whatever you want to argue about”) can be found here.
If it’s Tuesday, it’s time to sue Wal-Mart
From the “Must do more, somehow” column comes this tragedy-spawned lawsuit by a grieving mother following the suicide of her daughter. The daughter was a manic depressive schizophrenic who killed herself with a shotgun she bought from Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart branch seven miles away had on file her prescription for anti-psychotic medication. The mother wants $25,000,000 from Wal-Mart for failing to prevent the tragedy by reviewing her daughter’s pharmacy records or its own store records (the daughter had assaulted another person at the store where her prescription was on file).
Problem 1 = Federal law prohibits revealing pharmacy records in running firearm background checks.
Problem 2 = Texas law prohibits the publication of mental health records without the patient’s approval.
Problem 3 = How does an attack on a third party result in any evidence that someone is suicidal?
Details are here.
Mandatory lunch
Are you an hourly employee in California who wants to work through lunch so you can leave early to beat traffic? Under California law, your employer can’t let you do that without paying you for an extra hour’s salary: they risk suit, and there have been dozens of such suits in California this year. The Schwarzenegger administration is proposing administrative rule-changes to make meal breaks a voluntary option of employees, and unions are attacking him for “chipping away at workers’ rights” for trying to give the California rule the same flexibility as the federal rule. (Rachel Osterman, “Clash over new rules for lunch breaks”, Sacramento Bee, Dec. 15). More: NLJ, Jan. 31.
America’s worst export?
One of the reasons that The Monk supported the revolutionary and quite extensive tort reform that the Texas Legislature passed last year (commonly still known as “House Bill 4”) is that trial lawyers have a tremendous capacity to find ways to, er, protect their clients’ interests no matter how many pathways to victory, loopholes in previous laws or damage caps are put in place.
And this ingenuity is being exported from US courts to international tribunals. As James Pinkerton’s column notes, “the trial lawyers, entrepreneurial as always, have found new courts – world courts – to play in. And they have found allies among activists and fortune-hunters who dismiss traditional democracy and diplomacy in pursuit of their goals.”
Yipes.
UPDATE: for more on the Inuit lawsuit noted in Pinkerton’s column, check out Point of Law’s item noted by this site’s editor here. For those of you just tuning in, Point of Law is Overlawyered’s companion site that (as its own description states) “is a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute that brings together information and opinion on the U.S. litigation system.”
Free Speech losing in the UK?
In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a group of Sikh “protesters” forced the cancellation of a controversial play described as a “black comedy” that centered around rape and murder at a Sikh temple. The details are in this article (registration is gratis) and some outrage is in this short lead editorial.
Here is what is most worrisome — the notion that free speech must give way to the (violent) protests of the community (and the concurrent lack of protection by peace officers). The attitude is nicely encapsulated by these two reactions:
Update: Joshua Flax/Chrysler verdict
More press coverage on the $105 million collapsing seat verdict (Nov. 24). The Fulton County Daily Report spells out the plaintiff’s case, without much attempt at balance. A press release from the plaintiffs’ lawyers claims that Chrysler experts admitted that a “stronger” seat would not have collapsed and that other Chryslers have “stronger” seats–but leaves it ambiguous whether the first “stronger” is referring to something different than the second “stronger.” The artful phrasing in the release (instead of a straightforward statement about whether Chrysler’s experts admitted Joshua Flax would not have been hurt if he had been in a Mercedes), combined with the improbability that Chrysler would go to trial with such a fact pattern, suggests that this is sophistic equivocation. (R. Robin McDonald, “Partner Wins $105 Million Verdict Against Chrysler”, Fulton County Daily Report, Dec. 1; Butler Wooten press release, Nov. 23). The Detroit News has extensive followup coverage, featuring a photo of the totaled minivan from which five people walked away, and an interview with a NHTSA spokesman who notes that “If you merely increase seatback strength, you may be trading one set of injuries for another. These seats did exactly what they were designed to do.” (Jeff Plungis, “Trial puts spotlight on safety of car seats”, Dec. 19).
In the Detroit News article, Clarence Ditlow complains that there’s an increase in collapsing front seats hitting children in the rear seats–but that’s surely a result of fewer children being seated in the front, where they were in danger of passenger-side airbag injuries. (Airbag-child fatalities have declined from 60 in 1995 to 10 in 1999.) Indeed, as the Washington Post notes, notwithstanding their headline, child deaths per mile traveled is down, as is the long-run trend of total child deaths. The Post article also suggests areas where we will see future auto litigation as new safety features transition from optional to standard. I’ve worked defending an auto company in shift-interlock litigation, for example. (Greg Schneider, “Kids, at Risk and Neglected”, Washington Post, Dec. 5).
Terror funding prevention
The Ninth Circuit reinstated indictments against seven defendants accused of financing a terrorist group. The ruling also reversed a district court ruling that invalidated the 1996 terrorism-financing law under which the US government had issued the indictments. The bush Administration has used the law as a tool to prosecute people who have allegedly bankrolled terrorist organizations by contributions to “charity” organizations. This ruling matches the outcome of a similar case before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Details are here.
The ruling is especially notable because the Ninth Circuit is generally considered the most liberal (and volatile) of the 12 regional circuit courts — it sits primarily in San Francisco and presides over appeals from US district courts in the far west and some mountain states; the Fourth Circuit is considered one of the two most conservative federal appeals courts and presides over appeals from district courts in the Carolinas, the Virginias and Maryland.
Real vote fraud
I wrote about the frivolous legal challenge to the Ohio presidential vote earlier today. But real vote fraud and voting shenanigans seem to be taking place in Washington state.
John Fund writes about a real threat to voting rights in Washington state — efforts to “find” votes for the gubernatorial candidates in what had been a close election, which became closer every time King County looked at its in-box.
UPDATE: And for more fun with voter intent and attempts to obtain executive office through fraud, check out the coverage of San Diego’s controversial mayoral election here.