- Telemarketers working for lawyers and chiropractors “line up every day” at police and public records offices to buy car-crash records [Dallas Morning News]
- Nice work if you can get it: Bernardine Dohrn’s terrorist-to-lawprof career track [Kass, Chapman @ Chicago Tribune, Ed Morrissey/HotAir, PoL, Horowitz/DtN, Daily Northwestern/FrontPage, Malkin, Power Line]
- Mystery of embattled Florida debt-relief law firm Hess Kennedy (Mar. 6) deepens as whereabouts of lawyer Edward Kennedy are questioned [ABA Journal]
- Criticism mounts of Calif. AG Jerry Brown’s lawsuits using global warming theories to force higher-density development [Stewart/LA Weekly, Walters/SacBee, via Kaus, scroll]
- Kevin Pho (KevinMD.com) on defensive medicine [USA Today]
- Colorado firm says lawsuit’s “settlement mill” allegations are concocted “by a competitor who doesn’t like (Azar’s) advertising.” [Colorado Springs Gazette]
- Hey, you can rig up a disposable camera to give you a little shock; it might also give you a D felony record under school zero tolerance [WTNH via Greenfield]
- One good thing about those anonymous snitchlines for domestic abuse, you don’t have to worry about bogus calls or anything like that [Colorado Springs Gazette on Texas polygamist raid backstory]
- Lawyers get $2 million in fees in Netflix class action [WSJ law blog; earlier]
- Supreme Court refuses cert on that very curious $112 million (originally $1 billion) land-contamination verdict from Louisiana [Exxon v. Grefer, Dow Jones/Fortune; CalPunitives link roundup; earlier; more background at Laura Hart/Louisiana Law Blog]
- Cow-pie bingo event falls victim to liability fears [three years ago on Overlawyered]
Author Archive
Nearer, my Capitol, to thee
Education expert Jay Greene, a colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute, has just launched his own blog, which is likely to be of wide interest. He gets off to a good start (Apr. 19) with a post based on a simple but clever idea for measuring influence:
If you stand on the steps of a state capitol building and throw a rock (with a really strong arm), the first building you can hit has a good chance of being the headquarters of the state teacher union. For interest groups, proximity to the capitol is a way of displaying power and influence. The teacher union, more than any other interest group, strives to be the closest. They want to remind everyone that among powerful interest groups, they are the most powerful – a prince among princes.
To see who has the most powerful digs, Jonathan Butcher and I actually bothered to measure just how close interest group offices are to state capitol buildings. We started with a list of the 25 most influential interest groups, as compiled by Fortune magazine. We then used Google Maps to plot the location of the state offices of those 25 interest groups and measured the distance to the capitol building.
The results are illuminating. Of the 25 most influential interest groups, the teacher union is the closest in 14 of the 50 states. The labor union, AFL-CIO, is the closest in 7 states. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and National Federation of Independent Business are the closest in 5 states, each. The trial lawyers lobby, the American Association for Justice, is the closest in 4 states.
The teacher union is among the four closest interest groups in 27 states. The trial lawyers are in the top four in 22 states, followed by the AARP in 20 states and the AFL-CIO in 19 states. …
If we gave four points for being closest, three for being the second closest, two for being third closest, and one for being the fourth closest, teacher unions would have a total of 85 points. No other group would have more than 60 points. Only four of the 25 groups would have above 40 points, with the trial lawyers, AARP, and AFL-CIO joining the teacher union in this elite group.
As Greene notes, the point of capitol proximity may be less a practical one (shaving a minute or two off the time needed to drop by to do some influencing) as that of making “a visible display of their power and influence”, like having the most sought-after seats at a sporting event. He’s followed with a state-by-state rundown of proximity here.
When blogs get blocked
Jane Genova gets a report that access to her blog Law and More is blocked in the Rhode Island State Court Law Library, and I offer some conjectures as to why based on similar experiences at Overlawyered, in which posting about sexual harassment cases and even gun litigation has been enough to get me (temporarily) blocked (& welcome Above the Law readers).
Hotel not liable for crash three hours after man’s eviction
“A negligence claim against the Marriott Marquis by a New Year’s Eve reveler who was injured in an automobile accident after being evicted from the Times Square hotel has been dismissed by a federal judge in Albany. … [After being told to leave the hotel, Jeffrey Dagen] retrieved his pickup truck and headed for his home in the Albany area. Three hours later, after driving about 90 miles north on the Taconic Parkway without stopping to rest or seek lodging, Dagen decided to exit for gas. As he did so, his truck skidded off the exit ramp and hit a tree. He sued the hotel for $750,000, claiming it was responsible for his injuries, which included a shattered leg and damage to his chest. In his complaint, Dagen alleged that he had told hotel officials that he had nowhere to go, was too tired to drive home and had been drinking.” A state trooper’s report indicated that Dagen had been speeding on the Taconic and had tried to exit too fast given wet road conditions. (Daniel Wise, “Eviction From Hotel Found Not Cause of New Year’s Accident”, New York Law Journal, Apr. 22).
“Require that employees get permission first before using their BlackBerrys after work hours”
Otherwise, the employer may just be setting itself up for wage-hour suits based on the premise that the after-hours use constitutes uncompensated overtime, says Mitch Danzig, “an attorney in the San Diego office of Boston-based Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. Danzig advises his clients to give BlackBerrys only to employees who are exempt from overtime laws. ‘Plaintiffs’ firms are trolling for this,’ he said. ‘Now what you’re seeing on [plaintiffs’] firms’ Web sites are, “Have you been assigned a BlackBerry or a phone? If so, give us a call.”‘” (Ashby Jones, WSJ law blog, Apr. 22; Tresa Baldas, NLJ, Apr. 28). More: Jeffrey Hirsch, Workplace Prof Blog.
New at Point of Law
Carter Wood has been doing great things lately with the National Association of Manufacturers’ Shop Floor blog, which often treats legal reform topics. Since Monday he’s also been posting up a storm guestblogging at Point of Law. Topics include: ATLA/AAJ’s juvenile pre-nose-thumbing at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2008 Lawsuit Climate Report (which, like similar studies from ATRA and Pacific Research Institute, tries to pick best and worst state legal environments); the employment-litigation-expanding Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (more); some thoughts on journalistic shield laws; and sundry reports from the Geoffrey Fieger trial, Florida politics, and Texas Supreme Court-watching.
“Why we won’t be getting VW’s Lane Assist”
The automotive innovation (“gently guides the car back in lane if it senses it drifting”) has promising enough safety implications that German insurance companies offer premium discounts of up to 20 percent when it is purchased as part of a package with adaptive cruise control and park assist. No prizes for guessing why Volkswagen isn’t offering it to U.S. buyers of the Passat. “What other cool stuff have auto manufacturers dreamed up, but left on the drawing board because they fear our sharks in expensive suits?” (Edward Loh, Motor Trend, Apr. 17).
Update: judge quashes Seidel subpoena
[Bumped on breaking news: A federal court in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena and ordered attorney Clifford Shoemaker to show cause why he should not be subjected to sanctions. Also: Orac. Earlier Monday post follows:]
Autism blogger Kathleen Seidel reports that the online free speech project at Public Citizen has agreed to provide her with legal assistance in responding to vaccine lawyer Clifford Shoemaker’s subpoena (see earlier coverage here, here, and here). One way to read this is as a fairly devastating commentary on just how weak Shoemaker’s position is, since there is ordinarily no more potent public presence on behalf of the plaintiff’s side in pharmaceutical litigation than Public Citizen. Seidel also has discovered that as a Shoemaker target she is in distinguished company:
I learned that on March 26, 2008 — the same afternoon that I was greeted at my doorstep with a demand for access to virtually the entire documentary record of my intellectual and financial life over the past four years — Dr. Marie McCormick, Sumner and Esther Feldberg Professor of Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, was subjected to a similar experience at her Massachusetts home.
From 2001 to 2004, Dr. McCormick chaired the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), charged with analyzing and reporting on data regarding the safety of vaccination practices. …As a result of her voluntary work on the committee, Dr. McCormick has found herself a frequent target of suspicion by plaintiffs, their attorneys and advocates, and opponents of vaccines, who disagree with its conclusions, and whose legal and political positions are not supported by its reports.
McCormick’s lawyers are likewise seeking to quash the subpoena. Much more here (& Beck & Herrmann, Orac, Pharmalot).
“Earth To Be Made Child-Safe”
An oldie-but-goodie from The Onion.
Redirects: thanks to volunteer Andrew Grossman
This may be inside baseball for those who lack interest in blog mechanics, but since it is excellent news for Overlawyered and its readers, we’ll boast about it: volunteer Andrew Grossman has stepped forward to accomplish for us something we’d been dearly hoping to accomplish, namely installing redirects that will get several years’ worth of older (2003-2008) posts to display in current URL format. The underlying problem is that we’ve been through three iterations of Movable Type and each had a different way of creating the URL format for a post:
http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/001600.html (first method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr_didnt_warn_not_to_walk_on_t.html (same post, second method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr-didnt-warn-not-to-walk-on-t.html (same post, current method — note use of hyphens instead of underscores)
Simply discontinuing the old versions would cause thousands of old links, both incoming and internal, to break. But the continued existence of the old versions led to several kinds of problems: they could no longer be formatted properly, so they looked ugly if not unreadable; moreover, users of Google and other search engines would encounter two (or, more recently, three) textually identical versions of the same post, which was confusing at best. Hence the need for redirects.
Aside from his having done us this service, another reason to commend Andrew Grossman to your attention is his day job as Senior Legal Policy Analyst, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. His writing interests there include “federal criminal law and the problem of ‘overcriminalization’ — the practice of turning minor civil offenses into serious criminal acts,” and other topics equally well matched with ours here, including the likely boon to litigation from Congress’s CPSC expansion, the ill-conceived ADA Restoration Act under consideration on the Hill, and Judge Posner’s summary approach to dubious expert witness testimony. We hope he’ll be guest blogging in this space before long.