Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for January, 2016

Climate deniers to the wall — 15 years ago

Checking back through the archives from our very first weeks at this site, I found this from August 1999:

In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Ignatius calls global warming a potential “plaintiff’s lawyer’s dream”, quoting former deputy energy secretary Lynn Coleman as saying that if doomsayers’ predictions prove accurate, lawyers could file trillions of dollars in claims against utilities, oil companies and others for weather-related effects. Significantly, Ignatius suggests (“the best analogy may be tobacco”) that future juries will be angered by some companies’ current boldness in debating the issue by way of counter-studies and newspaper ads. Apparently one “lesson of tobacco” is that it’s henceforth going to count as an independently punishable offense to defend one’s business in public controversy…

Devising punitive legal consequences for having argued the wrong side in public controversies isn’t just a notion Sheldon Whitehouse and Eric Schneiderman come up with the other day.

Filed under:

Real estate agent blew whistle on dodgy GM ignition plaintiff

A witness stepped forward with a story to tell about changed numbers on a check stub, and what followed was something of a “wow” moment as modern litigation goes [Erik Larson and Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg]:

Dramatic revelations are unusual in U.S. litigation these days, when reams of evidence and testimony are reviewed before the trial begins, making Kleven’s appearance on the scene a rare “Perry Mason” moment, said Leonard Niehoff, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

“The typical television scenario where a witness comes out of nowhere in a trial doesn’t actually happen much.”

Filed under: ,

Obama Department of Justice punts on web accessibility

Did our message finally get through? (See “How ADA-for-the-Web Regulations Menace Online Freedom,” 2013). Or that of other commentators like Eric Goldman, who warned (of a related court case) that “all hell will break loose” if the law defines websites as public accommodations and makes them adopt “accessibility”? At any rate, the U.S. Department of Justice, after years of declaring that it was getting ready any day now to label your website and most others you encounter every day as out of compliance with the ADA, has suddenly turned around and done this:

In an astonishing move, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it will not issue any regulations for public accommodations websites until fiscal year 2018 — eight years after it started the rulemaking process with an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM).

Yes, eight years is a very long time for a rulemaking, especially one pursuing issues that have been in play for many years (that link discusses testimony I gave in 2000). And predictably, some disabled interest-group advocates are already charging that the latest delay is “outrageous” and shows “indifference.” More likely, it shows that even an administration that has launched many audacious and super-costly initiatives in regulation has figured out that this one is so audacious and super-costly that it should be – well, not dropped, but left as a problem for a successor administration.

Besides, as so often happens, for regulated parties the issue is (to borrow a phrase) not freedom from obligation, but freedom from specification as to what that obligation might be. Court decisions, which for years ran mostly against ADA advocates’ “public accommodations” claim, now point confusingly in both directions. And in the mean time both private litigants and DoJ itself continue to sue online providers and fasten on them new settlements and decrees, as when Amazon lately agreed to caption more videos for the deaf; Harvard and MIT, meanwhile, were still being sued for the audacity of having offered uncaptioned online courses to the public. Minh Vu and Kristina Launey of Seyfarth Shaw:

…since issuing that [2010] ANPRM, DOJ’s enforcement attorneys have investigated numerous [entities claimed to be] public accommodations, pressuring them to make their websites accessible. DOJ even intervened in recent lawsuits (e.g., here, here, and here) taking the position that the obligation to have an accessible website has existed all this time in the absence of any new regulations.

The next administration – or better yet Congress – should summon the courage to give a firm and final No.

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

Filed under: ,

Live-tweeting last night’s GOP debate

I was otherwise engaged during the undercard debate but here are a few things I had to say during the Seven No Trump main panel:

Filed under: ,

“I myself escaped by a bare whisker from attending law school…”

My tell-all interview at Fault Lines gets into why I don’t hate lawyers (really), my various books, my views on Cato and other think tanks, law and economics, the lack of any real reckoning for the Great Tobacco Robbery, why law schools might actually serve as a counterweight to campus pressure for ideological uniformity, my writing outside law, and much, much more. I’m interviewed by Scott Greenfield, well known to our readers for his criminal law blogging; Fault Lines is a recently launched criminal justice website that’s part of Lee Pacchia’s Mimesis Law.

There have been many flattering reactions already, scroll down from the interview to this comment from Margaret Little which made me particularly happy:

Overlawyered made an enormous contribution to understanding where lawyers were taking the legal system over the past several decades and it continues to fill a vacuum in the discourse about law. For too long that discourse was plaintiffs vs. defense lawyers, with both sides vulnerable to attack for self-interest. Worse, the defense bar, which has an economic interest in the expansion of liability, is often silent or even complicit in the game. While Overlawyered’s postings were made with much-appreciated wit and style, the sheer comprehensiveness of the empirical data, and the mind-boggling attention to detail in its analysis makes it a gold mine for research and a landmark accomplishment. Well done! Don’t quit!

Whole thing here.

Filed under: , , , , , , ,

Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup

Filed under: , , , ,