Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for April, 2009

TARP money to settle shareholder class actions

Freelance journalist Dan Slater in the NYT’s “Dealbook” (via Above the Law) spies a “bailout for the plaintiff’s bar”:

…settlements resulting from the scores of shareholder suits against TARP entities will stretch into the stratosphere.

Sure, through TARP, taxpayer money may be used to pay off mortgages and fund bonus pools. But, in what will amount to a far more expensive proposition, TARP money will also be used to line the pockets of allegedly aggrieved shareholders and the lawyers who, wrapped smugly in the flag of corporate governance, are in the process of making a billion-dollar cottage industry out of filing strike suits.

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Want class-action benefits? Save those minor receipts, indefinitely

Paul Karlsgodt wonders how we arrived at a system in which consumer behavior that would ordinarily be considered eccentric at a near-Grey-Gardens level — such as saving receipts from the purchase of supermarket chicken years in the past — becomes an important determinant for entitlement to compensation. More on water-in-chicken class action: March 15 (cross-posted from Point of Law).

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April 30 roundup

  • “Sioux split on suit seeking money for Black Hills” [Associated Press]
  • More on nomination of Mothers Against Drunk Driving CEO to head highway safety agency [Balko, see also comments on earlier post]
  • Push by advocates in Congress to extend shakedown-enabling Community Reinvestment Act to all financial institutions [Victoria McGrane, Politico] And some numbers from Bank of America raise doubts about those oft-heard “CRA default rates lower than regular default rates” assertions [Weisenthal, Business Insider]
  • Illinois attorney general Madigan to Craigslist: purge vice ads or I’ll see you in court [L.A. Times]
  • Here and there, acknowledgments in the press of the damaging effects of laws entrenching auto dealers against termination [L.A. Times via Craig Newmark]
  • How many people get arrested for “contempt of cop”? [Coyote Blog] Blogosphere has helped spread awareness of police-abuse issues [Greenfield]
  • Virginia Postrel: I told you so on that light bulb ban story [earlier]
  • U.K. law reform panel: “charlatan” and “biased” expert witnesses put defendants at risk of wrongful conviction [Times Online]

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Judge tosses lawsuit over lack of men’s studies program

Anti-feminist litigant Roy Den Hollander had claimed that Columbia University violated the law by offering courses in the study of one gender but not the other. A judge disagreed. [Corey Kilgannon, NY Times City Room via Elefant] Hollander has made earlier appearances at this site through his lawsuits against “Ladies’ Night” discounts at drinking establishments.

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