Dwayne Dail spent 18 years in a North Carolina prison on false charges of rape. When he got out based on new DNA findings, his ex-girlfriend promptly sued him for child support. (Mandy Locke, “Dail, expecting $360,000, sued by ex-girlfriend”, Raleigh News & Observer, Oct. 24; “Wrongly Convicted Man Sued for Child Support”, WRAL, Oct. 23; “Prosecutor: Wrongful Conviction Is ‘Nightmare'”, WRAL, Aug. 29; “Dwayne Dail responds to lawsuit”, Goldsboro News-Argus, Oct. 28).
Archive for 2007
Guestblogger thanks
Thanks to Jason Barney, from the Seattle area, for filling in while I met a deadline. Remember, if you’re interested in guestblogging, that it’s fine to approach us well in advance; we’ll probably need some help before and during the holidays, for example.
Edwards campaign: take down that student YouTube
Which has merely induced Dan Kennedy (Oct. 27) to reproduce the thing as a public service (Jim Rutenberg, “Student Paper Upsets the Edwards Camp”, New York Times, Oct. 26). The Streisand Effect strikes again…
October 30 roundup
- Law firm of King & King in D.C. lost its chance at a contingency fee when its client elected not to pursue the case, so naturally it sued the client [Robert Loblaw @ eNotes; D.C. Circuit ruling for client, PDF]
- How hot is the sausage gravy at Bob Evans? $5,000 worth of hot, says wrist-burned West Virginian [W.V. Record]
- Kid on bicycle suffers catastrophic head injury, lawsuit blames road’s steepness and “dangerous wooden posts” alongside [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
- Genarlow sprung [Volokh and everyone else; earlier]
- Better hope you make it to Chapel Hill: Fayetteville, N.C. loses 24-hour neurosurgery cover [F’ville Observer via KevinMD; trial lawyers’ response]
- Fans sue Aerosmith over canceled Maui concert [AP/IHT]
- Class action over poor-quality Kia brakes yields $5.6 million jury verdict, but do lawyers really deserve $4.1 million? [Legal Intelligencer] More: whoops, covered already just below;
- We don’t care what your wishes might be, we’re putting you on the ventilator to protect ourselves [RangelMD]
- Tawdry sex angles aside, this really sounds like a cautionary tale of the dangers of liberal amendment of pleadings [Lat]
- Observation on traffic-cams: “I’m sick of living in a world in which legal trouble can be generated by robots.” [Scheie via Reynolds]
- Read all about it: we side with Paul Krugman and Atrios [four years ago on Overlawyered]
Today’s Tidbits
$600 per class member for defective brakes; $4.1M attorney fee claim
See this story via Law.com. No problem with consumers getting a few hundred dollars to offset the cost of a brake job. A healthy $5.6M verdict provides such remedy for over 9,000 class members. The rub? A $4.1M attorney fee claim, which according to my arithmetic is ten lawyer-years in work, at a respectable $200/hr. Oh, and check out the defendant attorney’s brilliant lawyering in his appeals brief, referring to the trial judge as the “Red Queen” from Alice in Wonderland. It wouldn’t be so bad had the appeals court not remanded the attorney fee issue back to that very trial judge.
Mean-spirited protest of funeral for fallen United States Marine prompts suit
The story is here. That anyone would express their protest in this manner is truly shameful. Update: $10.9M verdict!
Law says wife is husband’s property
Slighted spouse sues his wife’s lover for “alienation of affection.” Law says wife is a man’s “property.” Story via ABC.com.
What Elizabeth Wurtzel tells us about the XOXOHTH lawsuit
You may recall that a couple of Yale Law School students sued the administrator of a law-school bulletin board because they blamed silly gossip about them on the board for costing them job offers. (The administrator himself lost his job offer in response to the uproar.) If so, how come their Yale Law classmate Elizabeth Wurtzel—whose topless photos decorate the Internet, who wrote about her own cocaine and Ritalin addictions, and who was fired from a newspaper for plagiarism—was able to get a job offer from WilmerHale? More on Wurtzel: Taylor; Lat; Bonin, all talking about this NY Times piece. Previous skepticism about the lawsuit: Ilya Somin.
Latest Montgomery Blair Sibley follies
In an unusual order, with seven of the nine Justices not taking part, the Court summarily upheld a D.C. Circuit Court ruling that those Justices had immunity to a civil damages claim of $75,000 by a Washington, D.C., attorney who has challenged the Court for an earlier refusal to hear his case. Since those seven members of the Court were directly sued, they were recused; under federal law, when the Court does not have a quorum (six Justices minimum), the effect is to affirm the lower court ruling. The attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, had sued the Justices after they had denied review of a case involving a domestic relations and child custody dispute. In Monday’s order, no Justice made any comment on the Circuit Court ruling being affirmed.
“When punitive damages make no sense”
Stuart Taylor, Jr. on the Exxon Valdez and telecom-surveillance cases (National Journal, Oct. 29 — will rotate off free site, so catch it now). P.S.: Ted has more on the high court’s grant of cert in the Exxon case.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: “Fetal Injury at Work”
In UAW v. Johnson Controls, 499 U.S. 187 (1991), the Supreme Court held that sex discrimination laws prohibited employers from making decisions about fetal safety that took the choice to work in dangerous conditions away from pregnant women. Still, even though the Supreme Court held that “Decisions about the welfare of future children must be left to the parents who conceive, bear, support, and raise them rather than to the employers who hire those parents,” and the Supreme Court rejected the idea that civil liability could be an issue for such employers, state courts are still holding employers liable when women claim their unborn children suffered injury while they were working. Michael Starr and Christine Wilson look at the issue in the October 29 National Law Journal.
Sam Adams (beer) vs. Sam Adams (candidate)
Writes Jack Bogdanich (Oct. 25): “‘Sam Adams’ is a very, very, very common name. People who brand their companies with a very, very, very common name have to live with the consequences. Letting supporters of a real politician named Sam Adams express their support for him with an appropriately named web domain or two is just something that Boston Beer is going to have to live with.” More: Lattman, Oct. 25.