Richmond, Va.: “A high school art teacher has hired the ACLU to challenge his firing after a video of him moonlighting as a ‘butt-printing artist’ was widely circulated among his high school students.” Stephen Murmer was fired from his job at Monacan High School. (Matt Reed, “Backside artist to challenge firing”, AP/ABCNews.com, Jan. 24).
Archive for January, 2007
Tradeable permits for sinful foods?
Policy wonkery meets health nannyhood in a truly daft proposal from the David-Cameron-led Tories in the UK, a commission of which has deemed cakes and ale (at least in excess) to be “social pollutants”. One searches in vain for the “April Fool’s” giveaway tag. (Patrick Hosking, “Tories plan strict quotas for makers of fatty foods”, Times Online, Jan. 19) (via NRO “The Corner”).
Lawyer for families: MySpace “no different” from day-care center
Kiki, the cheerleader
Ted proves himself to be a superior purveyor of Supreme Court gossip (Jan. 23).
Lawyer: guess maybe we burned that fee documentation
Sensational new disclosures in the scandal (Mar. 6, Aug. 25, etc.) over self-dealing by lawyers in divvying up the results of fen-phen litigation in Kentucky:
The three lawyers accused of plundering Kentucky’s $200 million fen-phen settlement “tore up or burned” notes showing how much they paid themselves and their clients, according to one of the lawyers.
Depositions obtained by The Courier-Journal include Lexington attorney Melbourne Mills Jr.’s description of a secret meeting that he said he and lawyers William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr., also of Lexington, held at Gallion’s house in 2001 to divvy up an extra $10 million beyond what they’d already paid themselves from the settlement. …
[Attorney Angela] Ford alleges that Mills’ description is a “dramatic indication of a cover-up.”
She has asked that those lawyers and another attorney, Stan Chesley of Cincinnati, who helped negotiate the settlement, be forced to surrender $62.6 million in funds they allegedly misappropriated — as well as $59.5 million they paid themselves in fees….
Kentucky courts have never required a lawyer to “disgorge” or return a fee for misconduct, but courts in other states have done so, according to Ford’s motion….
Chesley, who was hired by the Lexington lawyers to negotiate the settlement, said he had no reason to question why he was paid $20.5 million — $7 million more than his contract outlined — in part because he could not “believe that these good folks would have sent me more money than I was entitled to.”
In her motion to force the lawyers to give up their fees, Ford said the defendant lawyers, including Chesley, breached their duties in a “spectacular and unparalleled way” by giving only about one-third of the settlement to the clients.
“The facts of this case truly are as egregious as it gets,” she said in court papers. ..
Since the settlement, Gallion and Cunningham have both become permanent residents of Florida, a state that Ford notes allows debtors to keep their homes when they take bankruptcy.
Stanley Chesley was, and remains, one of the most famous plaintiff’s lawyers in the United States and a major powerbroker in national Democratic politics. The article also sheds further light on the close ties between now-disgraced Judge Joseph F. (“Jay”) Bamberger, who approved the Kentucky fen-phen settlement and has since resigned, and the plaintiff’s team in the litigation. (Andrew Wolfson, “Lawyer: Fen-phen notes destroyed”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 21).
More: a companion piece in the same paper profiles the Cincinnati-based Chesley (Andrew Wolfson, “A breach of duty; wealth mounts for ‘prince of torts'”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 21)(via Lattman).
Author: Penguin tagged my book as “black interest”
Many large bookstores carry sections devoted to works of African-American interest, and a number of book clubs and other specialized selling channels do a thriving business by specializing in black themes and authors. In October, however, Florida-based author Nadine Aldred, who writes under the pen name “Millennia Black“, filed a pro se lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against her publisher, Penguin Group, on the grounds that Penguin (she alleges) insisted on steering her work into black-interest channels although she would rather have been marketed as a general-interest author. On the Wrong Side of the Alligator has reprinted excerpts from the complaint (Jan. 6).
The estimation of whether a particular author’s work will sell better if marketed to a niche or to a more general audience is inescapably going to depend on case-by-case judgment (assuming that marketing dollars and available cues of cover design, etc. are limited and cannot be dispatched in both directions at once). It is not immediately apparent why Penguin would not have an interest in taking a path that maximized its author’s sales. Aldred’s suit asks $250 million. See also Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Why book industry sees the world split still by race”, Wall Street Journal/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 6.
P.S. Disclosure, for whatever it’s worth: Penguin was my publisher on my first book (The Litigation Explosion).
More: Charles E. Petit of Scrivener’s Error writes to say:
The real problem in this instance is not with Penguin. The real problem is an antitrust nightmare: the book distribution system, which is probably the paradigmatic example of “one man’s antitrust is another man’s economy of scale”–at least until you look into the financing and terms of doing business, which makes me ask “What economies of scale?” The _distributors_ are the ones who demand “pigeonholing” of books, and Penguin’s best defense will be to point out that books that are released _without_ a category tend to stay in distributors’ warehouses unshipped. In other words, “We had to put _some_ category on it as a business necessity, and this is the one that in our commercial judgment was the best fit.”
January 24 roundup
- “[P]rotect good doctors from junk lawsuits by passing medical liability reform.” This sounds much like what we heard four years ago in Overlawyered. [Bush SOTU]
- Update: Autopsies in Comair crash (Sep. 19) have lawyers salivating over noneconomic damages possibilities. Refreshing honesty: “It’s all about money.” [AP/Insurance Journal]
- Driver falls asleep at wheel, blames Ford for resulting accident; Indiana jury disagrees. [Bloomberg/NorthJersey.com] Florida juries have been more generous (Nov. 17, 2005; Nov. 21, 2005).
- Being a minor defendant in a mass tort [Mass Tort Lit Blog]
- Gary Condit’s lawyer asks to withdraw from his “frivolous” libel suit (and roundup of Condit’s legal actions). [Levine @ Patterico]
- More on Abigail Alliance v. FDA [Marginal Revolution]
- More on the new prohibition (Oct. 19 and links therein). [Kirkendall]
- A review of the OJ Simpson book. [Wolcott @ Vanity Fair]
- “This is Ronald Reagan’s party. Why is it proposing Jimmy Carter’s energy policy?” [Frum]
- Congressional Black Caucus: no whites allowed, even for a representative of a majority-minority district. [The Politico]
- Three years ago in Overlawyered: John Edwards’s bundle of secrets
- Seven years ago in Overlawyered: Mormon student actress sues over profanity in theater productions, settles in 2004 for over $250,000.
- I’m speaking at WLF tomorrow morning with Victor Schwartz and Sherman Joyce. [Point of Law]
Litigation double standards
Class action attorney allowed to tell Iowa jury that the named plaintiffs are “just regular people who bought software” who volunteered to step forward to sue Microsoft; Microsoft is not allowed to question plaintiffs (who stand to recover a few dollars) about whether they were actually recruited by their attorney friends who stand to make millions if the case succeeds. (David Pitt, AP/Houston Chronicle, Jan. 22). How the class even got certified under these circumstances is also questionable.
Litigious Unabomber
He’s got plenty of time, alone there in his prison cell, to work on making sure his legal rights get asserted far and wide. (Serge F. Kovaleski, “Unabomber Wages Legal Battle to Halt the Sale of Papers”, New York Times, Jan. 22).
Cop who snatched body part wins reinstatement
Annals of public employee tenure, this time from Norwalk, Ct.: “The city will not appeal a state Labor Department ruling to reinstate police Officer Liam Callahan, a nine-year veteran fired last fall for taking a skull fragment from the scene of a May 2005 accident. ‘The laws in the state are such that it’s extremely difficult to overturn a ruling,’ Deputy Corporation Counsel Jeffry Spahr said yesterday after discussing the matter in executive session with the Norwalk Police Commission.” According to numerous press reports, co-workers of Callahan’s said he planned to use the skull fragment as an ashtray. An investigation concluded that Callahan’s statement after being confronted that he had intended to return the fragment was not credible. (Created Things (Jeff Hall), Jan. 16; Brian Lockhart, “City officer in skull-fragment case reinstated”, Stamford Advocate, Oct. 24). And on the sued-if-you-do, sued-if-you-don’t front, note well: “Callahan and the city still face a civil lawsuit from [victim Alfred] Caviola’s family.” Unless Callahan personally turns out to provide a deep pocket, it appears the longsuffering taxpayers of Norwalk may find themselves on the hook for who knows what sort of payout — juries in other cases have expressed outrage at mishandling of decedents’ remains — even as the city is unable to sever the actual perpetrator of the act from its payroll.