Felix Salmon wonders whether these services, including their “we’ll fire off nastygrams to bloggers for you” subsector, are really worth the money clients spend on them (Jul. 9; Kate Murphy, “Web of Lies”, Portfolio, Jul. 9).
Archive for July, 2008
Naming your restaurant “Drugstore”
Even if your purpose is just to memorialize the business for which your family is best known locally, you can still get into a lot of trouble in Missouri. (Dan Margolies, “Literal interpretation of obscure state law threatens Smithville restaurant”, Kansas City Star, Jun. 28)(via Eric Berlin).
“Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come”
This particular dispute, over noisy kids’ recreation in an otherwise quiet neighborhood of famously expensive Greenwich, Connecticut, might have led to legal ramifications in almost any day and age. Opponents of the wiffle ball, though, get a lot of mileage from everyone’s awareness of the case a few years ago in which the town was ordered to pay $6.3 million to a doctor who broke his leg while sledding on town land with his 4-year-old son. (Peter Applebome, New York Times, Jul. 10; Patrick Healy, “Town’s Downhill Pastime May Face an Uphill Fight”, New York Times, Apr. 26, 2004). More: Giacalone.
“The Era of Big Punitive Damage Awards Is Not Over”
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a short version of my take on the Exxon Shipping v. Baker decision. Cf. also my Federalist Society podcast.
Investigative journalism and libel chill
Investigative journalism by the TV networks has been in decline, per Broadcasting & Cable, and the networks’ general enfeeblement is only one reason: targets of hostile journalism are now more apt to sic their lawyers on news operations. What gets chilled is not just the shoddy litigation-sourced reportage typified by the NBC “Dateline”-GM trucks scandal, but also more aboveboard and defensible coverage of business failings:
In 2003, “A Dangerous Business,” a [PBS “Frontline”] report examining the water and sewer pipe industry in Texas, kicked off a four-year legal battle. Reported by Bergman and accompanied by a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series, the report detailed egregious workplace safety violations that caused systemic maiming and, in several cases, gruesome deaths of workers.
“That was a great drain and if it wasn’t for The Times, I fear that we might have been in a position where our insurance company would have said, why don’t we just settle this?” says Frontline executive producer David Fanning.
A Texas judge dismissed the suit last year. But Fanning and Bergman are now working to establish a pro-bono team of lawyers to help insulate Frontline from legal threats.
“It’s not that we’re not careful,” Fanning adds. “It’s a question of what it does to you the next time round. Do you find yourself pulling back? Do you find yourself looking over your shoulder?”
(Marisa Guthrie, “Investigative Journalism Under Fire”, Jun. 22).
Gay man sues Bible publishers
Bradley LaShawn Fowler wants $60 million from Zondervan and $10 million from Thomas Nelson over hurt feelings from the editorial handling of the scriptural passages in question. Yes, the suits are pro se, and the judge won’t be appointing a lawyer at public expense to handle them, which still leaves the question of whether employing coercive legal process in such a manner should be free of a price tag in the form of Rule 11 sanctions. (“Man sues Zondervan to change anti-gay reference in Bible”, Grand Rapids Press, Jul. 9)(updated link should be working again).
More: Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Success has a copy of the hand-written complaint (PDF), as well as other commentary and links. James Taranto also comments. And Bill Poser, Language Log (via our comments), on the translation issues raised by the complaint.
Update July 2015: A federal judge soon tossed the hand-scrawled complaint out of court. But the case was destined to take on an urban-legend life of its own, with mostly conservative social media outlets re-reporting it in mid-2015 as if the case were a new and significant legal development, typically omitting its date, circumstances, and disposition. One site alone at last report had reaped more than 90,000 Facebook shares from its July 2015 version.
July 9 roundup
- Significant if true: Ninth Circuit may have finally decided that judges should stop micromanaging Forest Service timber sales [Lands Council v. McNair, Adler @ Volokh]
- GMU lawprof/former Specter aide whose law review output grabbed big chunks of others’ work without attribution doesn’t belong on the federal bench, though he may have a future at Harvard Law [Liptak, NYT; WSJ law blog]
- Update on gift card class actions (earlier) filed by Madison County, Ill.’s mother-daughter team of Armettia Peach and Ashley Peach [MC Record; more background here and here]
- If you regard demand letters from attorneys as menacing and aggressive, maybe you’re one of those “lawyer-haters” with cockamamie notions of loser-pays [Greenfield, and again]
- Just wait till Public Citizen goes after those “charities” that spend more on telemarketing than they raise by it — oh, wait a minute [LA Times via Postrel]
- U.K.: nursery schools urged to report as “racist” incidents in which pre-schoolers say “yuk” about spicy foreign foods [BBC, Telegraph, Taranto; the author speaks, via Michael Winter, USA Today]
- Blawg Review #167 creatively assigns each of 50+ blog posts to its own “state”, though it took some doing to associate us with “Maryland” [Jonathan Frieden, E-Commerce Law]
- I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… [Daily Business Review, earlier]
- “‘I’m thinking of getting disability.’ … This individual figured that [it] was tantamount to a career choice”. [physician blogger Edwin Leap]
Next: Esquire magazine vs. all those lawyers?
The developer of a $3.9 billion casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip with the proposed name Cosmopolitan is being sued for trademark infringement by Hearst, publisher of Cosmopolitan magazine. A local IP attorney not involved with either side says the claim could “go either way” and is “not a frivolous lawsuit”. Does this mean there is evidence that the casino people were seeking to sow confusion about which business was which, or just that another valuable English word is falling prey to the trademark Enclosures? (Arnold Knightly, “Fashion mag publisher sues Strip project”, Las Vegas Business Press, Jul. 2).
Hospital probed after calling cops on patient
Yesterday the New York Times reported on the longstanding problem of patient assaults on medical personnel, particularly in psychiatric care: citing Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, it said “half of all nonfatal injuries resulting from workplace assaults occur in health care and social service settings”. (David Tuller, “Nurses Step Up Efforts to Protect Against Attacks”, Jul. 8). So it’s worth noting what happened to Northfield City Hospital in Northfield, Minnesota when a man showed up at the emergency room at 2 a.m., ranting and yelling in an increasingly agitated manner. Hospital staff finally called the police, who arrived on the scene at 7 a.m., assessed the situation and tasered the man. (He was uninjured otherwise and was subdued without losing consciousness.) “Now federal and state health officials have cited the Northfield hospital for violating the patient’s rights,” a development that has outraged hospital officials in the state. The state health department says it believes that staff at the facility, a small one with fewer than 100 beds, “needs more training in deescalation techniques”. The hospital has hired two security guards and is negotiating other steps with the state (Maura Lerner, “Hospital calls cops and feels the sting”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jun. 15). A commenter at KevinMD asserts:
A few years ago, Medicare tried to prohibit physicians from discharging a patient for any reason, up to and including physical attacks on physicians and staff.
Just as the doctors were required to hire translators at the doctor’s expense, they would be required to hire security at the doctor’s expense.
They backed off then, when they physicians called them on it. Not surprised they would try again.
Schwartz Zweben and the Ms. Wheelchair pageant, cont’d
Three years ago we noted (following reporting by Ed Lowe and J.E. Espino of the Appleton, Wis. Post-Crescent) (more) that
Representatives of the Hollywood, Fla.-based law firm of Schwartz Zweben & Associates have played a substantial role behind the scenes in helping organize, promote and support the Ms. Wheelchair America pageant and some of its state affiliates. And lawyers with the firm have filed more than 200 lawsuits in at least seven states and the District of Columbia on behalf of at least 13 pageant participants, “including state and national titleholders, state coordinators and pageant judges”.
Now the Birmingham, Ala. News follows up on the case of Colleen Macort, Ms. Wheelchair Florida 2002, who has filed more than 73 disabled-accessibility actions in Alabama “but has never spent a day in court because of settlements”. Local law provides that Macort cannot be compensated for filing the lawsuits, but the Wisconsin paper reported that the firm of Schwartz Zweben had engaged her as a consultant on other cases. The reporter is kind enough to quote me and mention this site (Liz Ellaby, “Bessemer woman crusades to address disability act violations, provoking critics”, Birmingham News, Jul. 3).
In the state of Washington, Ms. Wheelchair Washington 2005, Michelle Beardshear, has teamed up with the Florida firm to file 15 lawsuits, of which twelve have been settled, against enterprises in Clark County (Kathie Durbin, “Advocate for disabled not hesitant to sue for access”, The Columbian, May 27 courtesy Chamber ILR). And in March, Schwartz Zweben & Slingbaum (as it is now called) swooped down to sue twelve defendants in the Tucson area, including a number of well-known restaurants, alleging ADA violations. (Josh Brodesky, “12 Tucson businesses facing suits alleging Disabilities Act problems”, Arizona Daily Star, Mar. 28).