- No, ma’am, I’m not going to diagnose your kids with PTSD after your low-speed auto accident, but I’m sure some other doc will [White Coat]
- In time to avert catastrophe? “FDA reboot of antibiotic development” [David Shlaes] Role of price controls in shortages of sterile injectables [ACSH]
- Trial lawyers launch campaign to roll back MICRA, law that has limited California med-mal payouts [KPBS, L.A. Times]
- DNA panopticon beckons: “Mississippi law requires cord blood from some teen moms” [Emily Wagster Pettus, AP, earlier]
- Dear N.Y. Times: please make up your mind whether it’s OK to break health privacy laws [SmarterTimes]
- Committee of AMA decides on schedules by which doctors are paid. And you were expecting it to be done how? [Arnold Kling]
- “The more your doctor worries about getting sued, the more you’ll end up spending on medical tests” [MarketWatch on Michelle Mello study in Health Affairs] Oklahoma high court used strained rationale to strike down certificate of merit law [Bill of Health]
Archive for August, 2013
Colorado foreclosure uproar could go national
“At the risk of losing their homes if they didn’t, scores of Colorado homeowners struggling to avoid foreclosure in the past year were each forced to pay hundreds of dollars in lawyer charges for phantom court cases against them, a Denver Post investigation has found.” In 126 of the episodes, the paper reports, no foreclosure lawsuit was actually filed. Related reporting on allegations against Colorado foreclosure law firms here, here, etc.
Along with the Colorado attorney general, various other law enforcers both state and federal are scrutinizing the billing practices of creditors’ law firms looking for evidence that they’ve been evading the fee and cost reimbursement limits for foreclosures that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA prescribe on loans they own, guarantee or insure. [Paul Jackson, Housing Wire via Funnell]
Here’s why: it turns out that many of the major law firms responsible for managing foreclosures for the GSEs also have a controlling interest in the ancillary service firms that generate the variable fees that appear as “costs” on the lawyer’s bill. Many law firms either outright own, or their partners have a significant interest in, the company that is posting and publishing notices; or they may own or have an interest in the company that manages process of service, as well.
Such arrangements are not illegal, but could land the firms and mortgage servicers in hot water if it develops that they have connived at fee padding by the ancillary firms. (& welcome Above the Law readers). More: Heather Draper, Denver Business Journal (and thanks for quote).
“Why hasn’t Filner resigned?…”
“…Because it’s leverage in negotiating a more favorable sex-harassment settlement.” [Tim Noah] More: Ken at Popehat.
Free speech roundup
- Chicago-area bus company keeps menacing customer-critics with lawsuits [Coyote]
- Some government officials want a say in who owns newspapers [Ira Stoll on Hartford Courant/Koch story] Using public apparatus to squelch political adversaries not exactly something new in America [David Beito on New Deal episodes]
- Barbarity: “Saudi Court Condemns Editor to 600 Lashes With Breaks” [Bloomberg (“insulting Islam”), Volokh]
- Scheme backed by many state AGs to roll back websites’ immunity for content posted by visitors “could singlehandedly cripple free speech online” [ACLU, earlier]
- Attention enemies of Ken at Popehat: even if you can find your bus pass you’ll still need to withstand his cat squirt bottle [Popehat; another speech case there (censorious bell can’t be unrung) and yet another (bogus DMCA notice)]
- State law providing that persons with erased records are “deemed never to have been arrested” never meant to muzzle discussion of arrests [Eugene Volokh]
- Nova Scotia: “cyberbullying legislation allows victims to sue” [CBC]
“Childproofing The World: How Much is Too Much?”
I joined Scott Wolfson, communications director at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, as a guest on Angie Coiro’s “In Deep” radio show to discuss the Buckyballs case and safety regulation generally. Earlier in the same segment was ZenMagnets.com founder Shihan Qu, who is also battling the CPSC on the desk magnet issue. You can listen here. My coverage of the Buckyballs controversy is here and we also discussed a number of other noteworthy controversies including state attorneys general’s efforts to shut down the “Prescription: Coffee” mug and the status of dangerous consumer items home-produced by way of 3-D printers. CPSC Commissioner Nancy Nord’s statement on the magnet set issue is here.
Groklaw shuts down on NSA privacy fears
Chilling effects of the surveillance state [Glyn Moody, ComputerWorld UK]:
Groklaw is shutting down, as a direct result of the revelations that the world’s communications – including our emails – are being spied upon by the NSA and GCHQ. That’s a huge loss for the open source world: Groklaw played an immensely important part in fighting off the absurd but dangerous SCO attack on free software. Alongside that main work it has conducted countless legal analyses of various other attempts to use patents and copyright to undermine open source. And it has done it applying the open source method of collaboration, a significant achievement in itself.
But the guiding force behind Groklaw, PJ, feels she can’t go on when something so fundamental as the privacy of her communications can no longer be taken for granted. In her final post, she compares the feeling to an earlier one when her flat was broken into, and someone went through all her belongings.
More: Brian Barrett, Gizmodo. We’ve cited Groklaw a number of times in this space.
Not unrelated: “What Should, and Should Not, Be in NSA Surveillance Reform Legislation” [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
Was revenge a factor in feds’ Standard & Poor’s action?
“Standard & Poor’s is trying to show it was unfairly singled out in a $5 billion fraud lawsuit 18 months after it downgraded U.S. sovereign debt. Getting the government to provide supporting evidence will prove difficult.” [Bloomberg Business Week]
Ralph Nader’s scheme for a Connecticut tort law museum
We have occasionally posted (here, here, and here) about the lawyer advocate’s longstanding plan for a museum in his home town of Winsted, Connecticut, dedicated to the praise and glorification of the American tort law system. The project has now dragged on fitfully through many years of economic stagnation, unexpectedly costly environmental remediation, changes of venue, and community suspicion (“a lot of empty promises”, one resident puts it), which may function as some kind of metaphor, no? [Torrington Register Citizen, Connecticut Law Tribune]
John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,” on crop destruction
In one of the most powerfully felt scenes of his novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck indicts the private business system for engaging in a practice as foolish and wicked as the willful destruction of food crops while children went hungry. Did any of the novelist’s New Dealer friends inform him that it was in fact a deliberately planned element of FDR’s agriculture policy? [David Henderson; more from Henderson on John Kenneth Galbraith and the dire effects of FDR’s policy on tenant sharecroppers]
International human rights roundup
- Disabilities treaty might hit Senate floor soon; Sen. Hatch opposes [The Hill, Hatch, Heritage; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Right to expropriate trumps right to privacy? Georgetown lawprof claims Swiss bank confidentiality violates human rights [Stephen Cohen, SSRN via TaxProf]
- No thanks, we like our First Amendment: curbs on internet “hate speech” top agenda of UN committee;
- You know those unsound “no recognition of foreign law” bills popular in some state legislatures? Among their unintended effects could be to interfere with recognition of some international adoptions [Jefferson City, Mo. News Tribune, earlier] Court strikes down Oklahoma sharia ban [NPR]
- Two views of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty, which President Obama is due to sign any day now [Bob Barr/Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (editorial dismisses issue as mere “scarelore”)]
- Conservatives for looser asylum laws? About the German homeschooler case [Ann Althouse]
- Claim: international law forbids complicity in the death penalty [Bharat Malkani, OJ] Hans Bader on European court’s invalidation of “whole-life” sentences [CEI “Open Market”]
- “The War of Law: How New International Law Undermines Democratic Sovereignty” [Jon Kyl, Douglas J. Feith, and John Fonte, Foreign Affairs; Peter Spiro, OJ; related ForeignPolicy.com interview with Kenneth Anderson and Brett Schaefer]