Ronnie Joe Neal, who got to Texas’s Death Row by committing a particularly heinous sex murder, says Bexar County jailers didn’t act speedily enough to save him after he attempted suicide by downing 50 prescription tablets. So he wants $35 million in his civil rights lawsuit, in which he’s represented by attorney James Myart. (Ken Rodriguez, “Alamo Heights teacher’s killer wants $35 million worth of ‘justice'”, San Antonio Express-News, Apr. 21). Similar: Apr. 17.
Archive for April, 2006
Chicago bans foie gras
The dozen or so restaurants in town that serve the expensive French delicacy will be subject to $250 to $500 fines if they continue to do so. California has banned the production, but not the serving, of the fattened goose liver. (Fran Spielman, “City council approves foie gras ban”, Chicago Sun-Times, Apr. 26 (via Bainbridge)).
Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006
A likely winner of the Stendhal lottery — the one in which the prize is to write a book that will still be read a hundred years after it saw day — the urbanist is remembered by the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock at City Journal and by Tyler Cowen, Jesse Walker, Sissy Willis, Witold Rybczynski at Slate, Alan Ehrenhalt, New Haven Independent and Ann Althouse, to list just a small sampling. I put in my own laudatory two cents in a 1998 Reason symposium. More: 2Blowhards.
More on Joe Jamail
A belated viewing of the now infamous deposition video (see Apr. 8) stirs memories for Prof. Bainbridge of a few highlights from the suave and distinguished career of zillionaire Houston litigator Joe “You could gag a maggot off a meat wagon” Jamail (Apr. 20). In comments, “Thief” of “Thief’s Den” points out that famously civility-challenged lawprof Brian Leiter holds the “Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law” at the University of Texas, Austin.
Seeks $1.2 million for spanking
I can’t say that Alarm One’s workplace motivational technique of spanking (both male and female) employees who are late for meetings while other employees hoot is one I approve of, but Janet Orlando’s claim of emotional injury and unmoored damages is more than a little out of whack. (Pablo Lopez, “Workplace spanking leads to lawsuit”, Fresno Bee, Apr. 25 (hat-tip J.T.).
Forbes: “My Kingdom for a Casino”
As regular readers of this space know (Apr. 14, etc.), I’ve long taken an interest in the injustices that have been visited on innocent landowners in New York, Connecticut and many other states by lawsuits seeking to revive long-defunct Indian land claims. I’ve got a guest column in the latest Forbes (“On My Mind”, May 8, reg) briefly summing up a few of the things wrong with this litigation. A sample:
Until lately Anglo-American law sought a careful balance between the goal of restoring wrongfully taken property to its rightful owners, on the one hand, and the equally valid goal of securing everyone’s property against the danger that a claimant will show up some day to assert a speculative defect in title. Hence doctrines aimed at preventing old disputes from staying alive indefinitely: statutes of limitation, adverse possession, “acquiescence” in unchallenged political boundaries.
In a series of rulings over the past 30 years, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that Indians are wholly different from other land claimants. Law professors have cheered: What cause is more romantic than that of dispossessed Indians? (Somehow owners of small farms in upstate New York never seem to merit the underdog label.) The rulings also constitute a stunning victory for a scrappy cadre of Legal Services lawyers; a few of these antiestablishment types have found themselves, over the arc of a career, gradually transmuted through their tribal connections into highly paid casino promoters, in a transformation worthy of a Balzac or Stendhal novel.
(cross-posted at Point of Law)
Safety mask litigation
Today’s W$J has an editorial about the ill consequences of the trend in recent years for lawyers prosecuting asbestos and silicosis cases to add makers of commonly used industrial masks and respirators as defendants in their suits:
The Coalition for Breathing Safety, an industry group, reports that between 2000 and 2004 plaintiffs attorneys filed more than 326,000 claims against its five members. Some of these are asbestos-related, although the recent deluge has been all silicosis. One manufacturer (which prefers not to be named lest it become a bigger target) says that prior to 2002 it faced about 200 silicosis claims a year. In 2003-4, it got hit with 29,000….The industry coalition estimates its members have spent the equivalent of 90% of their 2004 net income fighting suits in recent years.
The suits have fared poorly — none of the respirator makers have lost a case in court — but the making of industrial respirators and masks is a low-margin line of business, and companies that invest heavily in the business may simply be buying themselves legal risk. And now comes the scare over avian flu:
Respirator manufacturers are still going strong overseas, but the U.S. could find itself unable to purchase these products in a crisis. Worried about a possible flu pandemic, many governments are snapping up masks; France is acquiring 685 million. In previous disease scares (say, China and SARS), countries have blocked mask exports. Local U.S. governments and hospitals are already having a hard time finding supplies.
It might be added that the plight of respirator makers is attributable in large part to the economics of what has been called the shotgun approach to defendant-naming. It is very unlikely that lawyers would have filed 300,000 claims against mask makers, or anything approaching that number, if each suit had to be filed as a freestanding matter. However, it costs very little to add 3M or another respirator defendant when a case is already been judged to be worth filing against other, more vulnerable defendants. For more on the mask litigation, see Sept. 15, 2004 and Jan. 22, 2005. More: Point of Law, May 9.
“Abstinence education”: bait and switch?
The Bush Administration recently issued regulations that tighten the definition of what must be preached in federally funded “abstinence education” school programs. At Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter relays some thoughts I had about the process by which “abstinence” has turned out to mean “Biblical sex only”. Others picking up the story include Glenn Reynolds, Mark Kleiman, and Kevin Drum, while Three Years of Hell thinks the assumptions I find objectionable have been implicit in the program since it began (with the assent of Bill Clinton, of all people) in 1996. Planned Parenthood and ThinkProgress have more on the regulation changes.
P.S. Most important, of course, is Prof. Carpenter’s description of me as someone “who runs a terrific website about litigation abuse“.
“Rival bands clash over little-person KISS tribute”
One tribute band consisting of, er, miniature performers of KISS songs and routines has sent a cease-and-desist letter to another such tribute band. (Robert W. Welkos, “Rival bands clash over little-person KISS tribute”, LA Times, Apr. 11).
One reason your gas prices are so high
…is that Congress decided not to take action to protect MTBE producers from junk-science lawsuits. So “MTBE makers are leaving the market in a rush,” and now the East Coast is facing shortages. Alas, the Republicans, rather than point out this economic reality, and take steps to solve the problem, have decided to jump on the bogus “price-gouging” populist bandwagon. (Wall Street Journal op-ed, Apr. 25). We noted the problem of plaintiffs’ lawyers suing oil companies for complying with a Congressional environmental mandate back in 2003.