Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for February, 2013

Steve Chapman on pro football litigation

As I’ve been saying for a while, if the logic of other mass tort litigation is to carry over to suits over traumatic brain damage from pro football, it’s by no means clear how the organized sport can make it through the coming wave of litigation other than by turning itself into a very different game. Chicago Tribune-based syndicated columnist Steve Chapman gives me a chance to outline some of the reasons why, including the high likely damages, pressure to draw in peripheral parties and defendants such as doctors and equipment makers, and difficulties in relying on an assumption of risk defense [Washington Examiner] Background on risks for school-age players: WSJ.

P.S. Some more stirrings on the prevention and diagnosis front. A contrasting view from Max Kennerly. And discussion by Andrew Sullivan and readers, “Is Big Football the Next Big Tobacco?”

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Recess appointments, shmecess appointments, we’ve got the power

Although the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled its composition invalid, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) “declares that it will keep doing business as if nothing happened.” [WSJ via Fed Soc Blog]

This is by no means the first face-off between the D.C. Circuit and an agency resistant to its will: for another, see this 1981 Regulation account (PDF, scroll to page 11, “Reversing the D.C. Circuit at the FCC”) of a series of showdowns between the appeals court and the Federal Communications Commission. That one ended happily for the independent agency, but then the FCC may have been on firmer ground going to bat for its right to exercise policy discretion as an expert agency than it would have for its right to be constituted improperly through unconstitutional appointments.

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Indiana: “Couple Faces Jail Time For Nursing Deer Back To Health”

“The Indianapolis Star reports that the Indiana Department of Natural Resources wants to prosecute Jeff and Jennifer Counceller for taking care of an injured deer that showed up on their doorstep.” [CBS Cleveland via Amy Alkon, Dan Mitchell] A while back I wrote about the case in which a Virginia family got in trouble with the feds after their 11-year-old rescued a baby woodpecker in their back yard and cared for it for a day or two before releasing it.

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Medical roundup

  • “On Average, Physicians Spend Nearly 11 Percent Of Their 40-Year Careers With An Open, Unresolved Malpractice Claim” [Health Affairs via Pauline Chen, NY Times]
  • SCOTUS lets stand Feds’ “accept Medicare or lose your Social Security” edict [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
  • Robot surgery: from the Google ads, you might think lawyers are circling [Climateer via Tyler Cowen]
  • New York mandates more aggressive anti-sepsis measures in hospitals, and White Coat thinks it won’t end well [EP Monthly]
  • Shortages of generic FDA-regulated sterile injectables begin to take deadly toll [AP/Worcester Telegram, earlier]
  • Continuing the discussion of electronic medical records from a few days back: as medico-legal documents, EMRs are under pressure to be something other than candid and spontaneous [Kaus] While other patients wait for critical care, ER docs and nurses enter mandatory data fields for whether the infant is a smoker or the flu victim is a fall risk [White Coat]
  • Obamacare part-time-work fiasco “only starting to become news when it hits university professors” [Coyote, David Henderson, earlier]

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