Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for May, 2010

Joining Cato, and a farewell to the Manhattan Institute

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow, effective this week. As most readers of this site know well, Cato is the premier voice for individual liberty in our nation’s capital, and a think tank of tremendous accomplishments across the board. Its program on law, led by Roger Pilon, includes such outstanding thinkers as Tim Lynch, Ilya Shapiro and Robert Levy. Cato is particularly known as a place where free speech, civil liberties, and the Bill of Rights are given the centrality they deserve in legal thinking, and it’s also a powerhouse in studying the ill effects of government regulation. In fact, the publication where I got my real start in the policy world, the magazine Regulation (originally published by the American Enterprise Institute), has made its home at Cato for many years now. In short, it’s hard to imagine a better fit with my writing and research interests.

I’ll be saying goodbye to my colleagues and kind friends at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which has long supported my work in the most patient, good-humored and uninterfering way I could have hoped for. I’m immensely fortunate to have been part of MI for more than 25 years and I know I’ll learn much more from its formidable thinkers in years to come. While I’ll continue to contribute occasionally to MI’s blog/web magazine Point of Law, I’ve left its editorship, and I’m happy to say the Institute had the good idea of hiring as my replacement none other than Ted Frank, of Overlawyered and CCAF fame.

Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute has some extremely kind things to say at Point of Law about our long association. The blog Think Tanked reprints the MI’s generous announcement.

I’ll still be posting as usual here at Overlawyered, and I’ll also be joining as a contributor at the excellent group blog Cato at Liberty, which you should promptly place in your RSS feed if you haven’t already. In months ahead I’ll have more to say about some new projects I’ll be pursuing at Cato, as well as existing projects many readers already know about, like my forthcoming book on bad ideas from legal academia, Schools for Misrule.

P.S. Cato’s press release and bio page for me are up, as is a welcoming post from Roger Pilon at Cato at Liberty. And thanks for the very generous words to Dan Pero at American Courthouse, Carter Wood at NAM ShopFloor, and Alan Lange at Y’AllPolitics.

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Yes, tea is hot, too: Zeynep Inanli v. Starbucks

By popular demand, we note the existence of the case of Zeynep Inanli v. Starbucks Corp et al, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 105767-2010, where Ms. Inanli has alleged second-degree burns from tea that was “unreasonably hot, in containers which were not safe.”

You will recall that part of the trial lawyer defense of the McDonald’s hot coffee case are the factually false claims that (1) only McDonald’s sold beverages hot enough to cause burns and (2) after Stella Liebeck won her suit, hot-beverage vendors everywhere reduced their temperatures to a “safe” level. Of course, the Reuters account fails to indicate sufficient facts to determine whether Ms. Inanli’s scenario reflects injuries from a spill that was her own fault or the fault of Starbucks.

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St. Louis: A much-sued museum talks back

The City Museum in St. Louis is not your usual assemblage of annotated exhibits: it’s a thrill-seeker’s delight, with a giant jungle gym and slides, described as a cross between “a playground and a theme park,” and a huge success that draws 700,000 visitors a year. It also has been sued numerous times by patrons who managed to get hurt on its determinedly non-soft surfaces, and unlike the great majority of defendants, it has chosen not to clam up when sued. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch relates, the quirky museum used its Facebook page to call out by name some plaintiffs who have sued after taking (in its view) inadequate care for their own safety and, somewhat more acerbically, the lawyers who prosecute the suits. Its news release has more:

Just to give you a quick glimpse into what we go through at the City Museum, a couple of years ago our rock fell 4 feet. The next day we had over 12 people call and tell us they were injured when the rock fell. To investigate these claims, we reviewed the video of the rock falling and we posted the video clearly showing that there was no one next to the rock when it fell on our website. When this was brought to several of the caller’s attention they either hung up or changed their stories.

From a Wall Street Journal account (attorneys “take the fun out of life”):

A sign near the admission gate gives the names and phone numbers of law firms that have represented people who sued the museum, blaming them for a 9% surcharge recently added to the cost of a ticket.

More: Shield of Achilles (“naming and shaming”), Free-Range Kids (with reader comments).

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May 3 roundup

  • Lawmakers in Georgia vote for bill to forbid forced micro-chipping after listening respectfully to “this happened to me” story [Popehat]
  • “Why does the Wall Street regulation overhaul give FTC authority over the Internet?” [Morrissey and WaPo via Gillespie]
  • “Woman alleges termination due to gender, not sleeping on the job” [SE Texas Record]
  • Writers’ Union of Canada surprisingly unfriendly toward writers’ freedom regarding fair use/fair dealing [BoingBoing]
  • Despite purported bar on strategic use, Senate bill to stay deportation of illegal aliens while workplace claims are pending would create incentive to come up with such claims [Fox, Employer’s Lawyer]
  • “California Magistrate Scoffs at Plaintiff’s MySpace Page, But Awards Damages Anyway” [Abnormal Use]
  • State of free speech in Britain: police confront man over political sign in window of his home, arrest preacher over anti-gay remarks [Mail and more, Telegraph via Steyn, related from Andrew Sullivan and MWW]
  • “Should Tort Law Be Tougher on Lawyers?” [Alex Long, TortsProf]

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