So says the health department in Ventura County, Calif., rebuffing the B & B Do It Center of Camarillo. [Ventura County Star]
More: In a followup story (h/t gitarcarver), county officials say they were drawn into enforcement action because the store had been demonstrating barbecue makers using actual meat, and then proceeded to add the edict barring coffee and doughnuts.
Kim Strassel reviews it in the Wall Street Journal:
Much of the riveting detail in “Circle of Greed” comes from Mr. Lerach, who cooperated fully with the authors. They seem to buy his line that his actions were motivated by his desire to protect innocent shareholders from greedy corporations. The book’s overall argument—as the title suggests—is that it was corporate greed that created Mr. Lerach and provided a model for his ethical failings. That claim is unfair to the many honest companies who were Lerach victims and implausible in any case, thanks to the authors’ own vivid evidence of Mr. Lerach’s outsize criminal behavior.
More: At New York Times “DealBook” (via Pero), Peter Henning reviewing the same book traces Lerach’s downfall in part to the nature of his famous “I have no clients” practice:
Clients are an important constraint on lawyers, the restriction on their desire to push as hard as possible for every little victory in a case. …
When your opponent is your enemy, and you can say whatever you want because there is no client there to restrain your baser instincts, then at some point you will step over the line and perhaps eventually pay a price.
Henning also recounts Lerach’s famous vendetta against scholar/consultant Daniel Fischel (“I will destroy you”), which put the world on notice of the class actioneer’s character years before the main scandal hit.
I’ll be on KOGO-600 AM’s Top Story with Chris Reed tonight at 6:35 pm Pacific discussing recent CCAF cases and the problem of bad class action settlement cases generally.
Could the legislative results be even worse than CPSIA’s? The Handmade Toy Alliance notes that legislation in several states purports to ban all presence of the heavy metal, which is ubiquitously found in nature at small concentrations. The worst bills, they say, are pending in California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut. More: NJ.com (New Jersey bill)
The March 2 Wall Street Journal (link dead after 7 days) covers all-for-charity-none-for-the-class “cy pres” settlements of Facebook and AOL—the latter of which was the subject of a Center for Class Action Fairness objection:
Late last year, in a class action claiming that tech giant AOL LLC improperly inserted footers in its users’ emails, Los Angeles federal judge Christina Snyder awarded $25,000 in settlement funds to a Los Angeles legal-aid organization that has the judge’s husband on its board. …
The Virginia-based [sic] Center for Class Action Fairness objected, claiming the settlement raised a conflict of interest. Ted Frank, president of the group, said that to avoid potential conflicts, it would be better to require unclaimed settlement funds to be deposited into state coffers. “The problem is that parties can now give money to a judge’s preferred charity in the hopes that it will prompt the judge to rubber stamp a settlement,” he said.
I’m still recovering from a 2 1/2 day power outage and computer trouble, but don’t hesitate to talk amongst yourselves.
Lenore Skenazy (Free-Range Kids) in the Washington Post on the urge to protect children from hot dogs and countless other statistically rare dangers. Quotes me on the litigation that led to the warning labels [Washington Post]