- No answer at 911? “Florida Verdict May Threaten EMS Availability” [White Coat]
- New Orleans politico Steve Theriot drops suit seeking identities of online critics [Times-Picayune and more, NYT “Media Decoder”, Slabbed, earlier]
- On a vial of anesthetic: “One patient use only.” Nevada jury finds that warning inadequate to prevent multiple patient use and awards $500 million in punitives [Carter at Point of Law, Abnormal Use] More: Ted at PoL.
- Floodgates to litigation? “Parent Can Sue Ex for Turning Children Against Him” [NJLJ]
- Lawyer who isn’t honest is a threat to the social order: noted Allentown, Pa. attorney gets 6 1/2 years for fraud [Legal Intelligencer, earlier]
- “Another European Prosecution for Insulting Religion” [Volokh; pop star Dorota Rabczewska, Poland]
- A lawyer’s advice: try to get those Rand Paul types off your jury [Turkewitz]
- If SEIU craves respectability, maybe it shouldn’t send mobs to besiege bank execs at their homes [Nina Easton, Fortune, cross-posted from Cato at Liberty; related from PoL last year; more from Big Journalism including role of D.C. police, but note denials on last point]
Archive for May, 2010
WSJ: “The other Blumenthal scandal”
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal (paywall) quotes me on the subject:
The AG has challenged the verdict, but the Kolb case [Gina Kolb, formerly Gina Malapanis] fits a pattern that the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson calls “bullying, legally ill-founded ventures into litigation.” From his leading role in the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s to trying to repossess bonuses to AIG executives, Mr. Blumenthal has cultivated a reputation as the Eliot Spitzer of Connecticut.
For more on some of the cases that have brought Blumenthal his reputation as a bully and grandstander, start here, here, and here. And William Saletan at Slate is out with the piece I wish I’d written comparing Blumenthal’s repeated misstatements on his service record with the sorts of misrepresentations for which he’s gone after marketers and other businesses over the years.
For some light on how Blumenthal happened to obtain a photo opportunity in a VFW hall to denounce his critics, check out this post by Ronald Winter.
Whatever happened to Cass Sunstein?
Some were expecting the prominent law professor to make more of a public splash as the Obama administration’s regulatory czar. Tim Mak at FrumForum looks into why that hasn’t happened, and one of the observers whose opinions he quotes is me.
“Did 16 Law Schools Commit Rankings Malpractice?”
How far will law deans go in search of higher U.S. News ratings? According to one commenter, “some law schools deliberately hire their own unemployed third year students — to work in the alumni office, as research assistants to professors, etc.” — to boost their “employed on graduation” numbers. [Caron, TaxProf]
More: the magazine says it’s taking steps to keep schools from gaming the ratings.
“An Empirical Study of Class Action Settlements and Their Fee Awards”
Brian Fitzpatrick (Vanderbilt), on SSRN:
This article is a comprehensive empirical study of class action settlements in federal court. Although there have been prior empirical studies of federal class action settlements, these studies have either been confined to securities cases or have been based on samples of cases that were not intended to be representative of the whole (such as those settlements approved in published opinions). By contrast, in this article, I attempt to study every federal class action settlement from the years 2006 and 2007. As far as I am aware, this study is the first attempt to collect a complete set of federal class action settlements for any given year.
I find that district court judges approved 688 class action settlements over this two-year period, involving nearly $33 billion. Fewer than 40% of the settlements were in securities cases, but the the vast majority of the money involved in the settlements came from securities cases. The $33 billion transferred by these 688 federal court class action settlements is, according to one estimate, equal to 10% of the money transferred by the entire American tort system over this two-year period. Of this $33 billion, roughly $5 billion was awarded to class action lawyers, or about 15% of the total. Most judges chose to award fees by using the highly discretionary percentage-of-the-settlement method, and the fees awarded according to this method varied over a broad range, with a mean and median around 25%. Fee percentages were strongly and inversely associated with the size of the settlement. The age of the case at settlement was positively associated with fee percentages. There was some variation in fee percentages depending on the subject matter of the litigation and the geographic circuit in which the district court was located, with lower percentages in securities cases and in settlements from the Second and Ninth Circuits. There was no evidence that fee percentages were associated with whether the class action was certified as a settlement class or with the political affiliation of the judge who made the award.
Don’t drink the itch lotion
The things you have to warn against these days [Ted at PoL]
Britain tests what it hopes will be safer pub glasses
The old ones had to go because broken glass makes too handy a weapon [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
Do case resolutions track the merits?
80 percent of chief legal officers and general counsels in a new survey disagreed with the statement, “Outcomes are driven more by the merits of the case than by litigation costs.” [Tony Mauro, NLJ via PoL]
About those oil-spill-liability “caps”
Don’t trust the reports of a supposed $75 million limit on damages, which are being spread by some who should know better — including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
More: Katrina Kuh at Prawfsblawg takes a look at proposed legislation on the topic. And welcome readers of Daniel Gross’s Slate column.
Subway descends
“If you sell sandwiches that happen to be, oh, 12 inches long, and you dare to refer to said sandwiches as being a ‘footlong,’ then Subway would like to have a word with you.” [Bruce Carton, Legal Blog Watch; cease and desist letter, PDF, via NPR]