That’s what the Westchester County, N.Y. town has pledged as part of the settlement of a lawsuit charging that cops were overly aggressive in policing an area where Hispanic day laborers hung out to solicit work. Because it’s not as if local police have any business concerning themselves with whether anyone’s violating federal law, right? Or something like that. You can see why David Frum (Jun. 15) might get riled up (Jim Fitzgerald, “Hispanic day laborers, NY village reach tentative agreement over discrimination lawsuit”, AP/Canton Repository, Jun. 11).
Author Archive
Mother Nature’s pesticides
John Tierney is challenging some common environmentalist presumptions at his New York Times blog (Jun. 12).
Keeping of caged birds
…could soon be banned in Norway under pending animal welfare regulations. (“May ban caged birds”, Aftenposten, Jun. 13).
AutoAdmit message board lawsuit
The controversy over bathroom-graffiti postings at the law student site Autoadmit/xoxohth.com (May 3, May 20) has now developed into litigation:
two [unnamed] female Yale Law School students have sued Anthony Ciolli, the Web site’s former “chief educational director,” and more than two dozen others who allegedly used pseudonyms and posted the students’ photos as well as defamatory and threatening remarks about them on the online law-school discussion forum.
(Amir Efrati, WSJ Law Blog, Jun. 12). Lawprofs David N. Rosen (Yale) and Mark A. Lemley (Stanford) are assisting the plaintiffs, and Rosen told the WSJ Law Blog in an interview that the case was about “bringing the right to protect yourself against offensive words and images into the 21st century,” calling the postings “the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe.” Discussion: Eugene Volokh, Ann Althouse , Glenn Reynolds, David Lat, Patterico.
Nastygram over renting out DVDs
Travis Corcoran gets an “angry and curt” call from an intellectual property lawyer over this practice, and reacts with some ferocity (TJIC, May 17).
U.K.: Clown told to stop blowing bubbles
Sheffield, U.K.: “Tony Turner, also known as Barney Baloney, will now stick to clowning and juggling after being refused insurance by several companies which feared youngsters might slip on the bubbles’ residue.” (Paul Stokes, “Safety mania bursts clown’s bubbles”, Daily Telegraph, Jun. 15). Earlier on clown liability, also from the U.K.: Apr. 9, 2001.
June 14 roundup
- Encouraging kids’ adoption is a great thing to do, but there are right and wrong ways of going about it [U.K. Daily Mail]
- Defensive medical testing: “Every day I work as a doctor, I must choose between committing malpractice and committing insurance fraud.” [Dr. Paula Hartzell in Medical Economics]
- After serving 2+ years for consensual sex with fellow teen, Genarlow Wilson (Feb. 8, Mar. 6) may walk free, or maybe not [CNN; views of some Andrew Sullivan readers]
- “We need to eliminate nuisance lawsuits through ‘loser-pays’ provisions.” [candidate Giuliani @ NRO]
- Boston Herald (May 11, etc.) pays $3.4 million to local judge to settle libel verdict [Globe]
- Blind squirrel finds acorn dept.: American Prospect weblog promotes a good idea, abolishing peremptory challenges [Tapped; more]
- Disciplinary hearing begins against Duke DA Nifong [ABCNews.com]; you’d think lacrosse player’s out-of-town alibi might have raised a red flag [K. C. Johnson via Cernovich]
- Another flap, this time from Oklahoma, about a doc who vows to turn away malpractice-suit advocates as patients [Enid News & Eagle via KevinMD]
- No shock, Sherlock: mud-slinging, money-flinging found to be big problems in state high court races [AP]
- In that curious saga of Madison County, Ill.’s oft-suing Peach family (earlier posts here and here) Armettia Peach has settled her leaky-roof case against Granite City [M. C. Record]
- New York “plastic surgery addict” loses case claiming doctor should have counseled her against going under the knife so often [six years ago on Overlawyered]
Spoof of “The Hammer” TV ads
It seems those Jim (“The Hammer”) Shapiro TV ads (Feb. 6, Mar. 7, Apr. 9), in which the ethically-challenged former Rochester attorney rants in manic style as explosions and other violent footage roll in the background, have inspired parodies on YouTube. The one above, featuring “Jack (The Hammer) Shapiro”, is from Canada-based DevoImprov; a second parody of a more homemade texture can be found here.
ABA Journal on tobacco settlement
The piece’s subtitle: “How greed, hubris and high-stakes lobbying laid waste to the $246 billion tobacco settlement”. Without necessarily endorsing every point in the piece — this is the ABA Journal, after all — it’s still striking how what was once a lonely critique of the settlement has now been accepted as history’s verdict:
The only big winners in the litigation appear to be the tobacco companies, the state treasurers and the lawyers who represented both sides….
…$15 billion has been awarded to the private lawyers hired by the state attorneys general. That’s the largest attorney fee award in history. More than $100 million — Big Tobacco won’t say precisely how much — has been paid to the lawyers defending the companies.
“The tobacco litigation was a failure of historic proportions,” says Linda Eads, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas. “A complete and utter failure in every sense.”
(Mark Curriden, “Up in Smoke”, ABA Journal, March).
On gender, L.A. fire department can’t win for losing
Like pretty much every big-city fire department, the one in Los Angeles has come under intense legal pressure to hire more female applicants, and in doing so to water down or eliminate whatever former prerequisites for hiring (such as physical tests calling for a show of upper-body strength) show “disparate impact” against women. And having been whipped up one side of the street on those grounds, it now gets whipped down the other side for having apparently responded in the most direct and practical way to the first set of legal pressures:
In the latest bizarre court case involving the Los Angeles Fire Department, a jury has awarded $3.75 million to a male fire captain who said he was retaliated against for not making training exercises easier for women.
Fire Capt. Frank Lima alleged in his lawsuit against the city that he was told by superiors that he shouldn’t hold women to the same standards as men. The reason: The Fire Department was under pressure from City Hall to increase the number of women within its ranks.
Thursday’s judgment in the 2 1/2 -week case in Los Angeles County Superior Court was notable because it involved $2.96 million in noneconomic damages — in other words, money for pain and suffering.
In his lawsuit, Lima alleged that he suffered heart problems and stress after the department tried to punish him and subsequently denied him certain assignments.
(Steve Hymon, “L.A. fire captain awarded $3.75 million”, Los Angeles Times, Jul. 9). For more on the legal pressures on fire departments to relax performance standards that women have trouble meeting, see Jan. 18. For a related set of sued-if-you-do, sued-if-you-don’t dilemmas for fire departments, see Mar. 24, 2005 (reverse discrimination suits by whites after Chicago altered rules to encourage black applicants). Finally, we covered (Dec. 5, 2006 and earlier posts) the saga of the $2.7 million settlement that the LAFD paid to a firefighter subjected to a prank in which he was tricked into eating dog food.