- In “State of the Economy” speech, Bush says litigation and regulation harm U.S. financial competitiveness, praises enactment of Class Action Fairness Act [Reuters; his remarks]
- How many California legislators does it take to ban the conventional lightbulb in favor of those odd-looking compact fluorescents? [Reuters, Postrel, McArdle first and second posts]
- Levi’s, no longer a juggernaut in the jeans world, keeps lawyers busy suing competitors whose pocket design is allegedly too similar [NYTimes]
- Clinics in some parts of Sweden won’t let women request a female gynecologist, saying it discriminates against male GYNs [UPI, Salon]
- Is the new Congress open to litigation reform? Choose from among dueling headlines [Childs]
- Anti-SLAPP motion filed against Santa Barbara newspaper owner McCaw [SB Ind’t via Romenesko]
- Uncritical look at Holocaust-reparations suits against French national railway [Phila. Inquirer]
- Deep pockets dept.: court rules mfr. had duty to warn about asbestos in other companies’ products, though its own product contained none [Ted at Point of Law]
- Lawyering up for expected business-bashing oversight hearings on Capitol Hill [Plumer, The New Republic]
- “King of vexatious litigants” in Ontario restrained after 73 filings in 10 years, though he says he did quite well at winning the actions [Globe and Mail, Giacalone’s self-help law blog]
- Sen. Schumer can’t seem to catch a break from WSJ editorialists [me at PoL]
- South Carolina gynecological nurse misses case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever — that’ll be $2.45 million, please [Greenville News via KevinMD]
- Five years ago on Overlawyered: we passed the milestone of one million pages served. By now, though our primitive stats make it hard to know for sure, the cumulative figure probably exceeds ten million. Thanks for your support!
Author Archive
Millenia Black complaint and response
The lawsuit by an author who says her publisher, Penguin, steered her work against her wishes into “black interest” marketing channels is now online courtesy OnPointNews (complaint/answer, both PDF). The comments section on our original post (Jan. 24) has been busy indeed, and we’re continuing the discussion here.
Enviro suits sap wilderness upkeep budgets
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, described as the nation’s most heavily visited wilderness area, is a part of the Superior National Forest. These days the forest’s managers
face the financial repercussions of legal decisions they say are stripping scarce resources from their wilderness budget, undermining maintenance work, and leaving many wilderness restoration projects on hold….
While many environmentalists fervently believe that such suits help protect the wilderness, Forest Service officials say many of the agency’s legal expenses come straight from the Superior’s wilderness budget— money that would otherwise pay for the kind of on-the-ground maintenance and restoration work that everyone seems to agree is badly needed in the nation’s most heavily-visited wilderness area.
“When you start figuring out what that means in terms of hiring wilderness rangers or buying fire grates or latrines, it has a huge impact,” said Barb Soderberg, public affairs officer for the Superior National Forest. …
The local forest officials receive a modest $1.5 million a year to manage the 1.1 million-acre wilderness area. According to its supervisor, the forest has been in court continuously since 1949. Under the “one-way” fee structure of federal environmental law, the forest like other defendants can be ordered to pay a plaintiff’s full attorneys’ fees even if the plaintiff wins on only some issues in a case, but cannot collect itself even if it manages to prevail on all issues. Last year a court ordered the forest to fork over $90,000 to prevailing environmentalist lawyers from the elite Twin Cities law firm of Faegre & Benson. Not by coincidence, the forest has found itself obliged to slash its budget for temporary wilderness rangers, from $240,000 to $135,000, “in large part due to ongoing litigation costs”.
The environmental representatives contacted for this story all acknowledged they don’t weigh the costs to the Forest Service when deciding whether or not to file suit against an agency decision….Brad Sagen, the new board chairman of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, said it isn’t his organization’s job to consider costs of lawsuits— indeed, he called the question “absurd.”
In fact, Sagen and another environmentalist expressed surprise that legal expenses and payouts come out of the agency’s operating budget, apparently unaware that such a practice is widespread in government, commonly defended as a variety of accountability that helps give agency officials proper incentives to bring their activities into full compliance with all applicable laws (if that’s possible).
Meanwhile, environmentalists are piling on with more new lawsuits, over a new forest management plan and a snowmobile trail, while continuing to pursue an old one about motor quotas. Much, much more here for those with an interest in this area. (Marshall Helmberger, “Environmental lawsuits sap U.S.F.S. wilderness maintenance budgets”, Ely, Minn. Timberjay, Jan. 26)(profile of author at Minnesota Public Radio).
“100+ All-American Ideas: Stay Out of Court”
Belatedly noted: Reader’s Digest gives us another generous mention (latest in a long series of such) as part of a wider project cataloguing ideas and proposals that could make the country better (Sacha Zimmerman, Reader’s Digest, posted Sept. 14). For another generous mention from the Digest, see Jun. 12, linking to an article by reporter Michael Crowley. And we’ve also been slow to link another good piece from Digest reporter Crowley, on the problems introduced by jury consultants “paid to stack the deck” (Michael Crowley, “Jury Riggers”, Apr. 2006). Sample:
A recent guide published by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America warned lawyers about jurors who may show “personal responsibility bias.” These jurors, the guide said, feel that “people must be accountable for their conduct.” Now there’s a chilling outlook! The guide advises: “The only solution is to exclude them from the jury.” That is, get rid of anyone who might actually care about seeing justice done.
Short ’em, then sue ’em II
According to a WSJ news report, Greenlight Capital, a $4 billion New York hedge fund, has filed a federal False Claims Act lawsuit against Allied Capital Corp., alleging that a subsidiary of Allied known as Business Loan Express LLC, or BLX, “submitted fraudulent loan documents to the Small Business Administration, bilking the U.S. of millions of dollars. Greenlight and James Brickman, an individual working with the fund to bring the suit, are entitled to 25% to 30% of the proceeds if their complaint results in an award.” Aside from the novelty of a hedge fund’s getting into qui tam litigation (perhaps no real surprise, given the proven money-making scope afforded by that bounty-hunter’s statute) the even more noteworthy twist is that Greenlight has also taken a short position in Allied’s stock, so that it will profit if the stock falls independently of whether the litigation results in a successful recovery. (Carol S. Remond, “Greenlight Heads to a Courtroom”, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 29)(sub-only).
We’ve reported at some length previously (here and at Point of Law) about the evidence that plaintiffs and their lawyers sometimes short target companies’ stocks before filing lawsuits, and about the fairly grave implications of that both as a matter of legal/litigation ethics and for the “market integrity” rationale of securities regulation. See, for example, May 5, 2005 and Sept. 14, 2006, as well as (relatedly) Nov. 14, 2006, and at Point of Law, Feb. 6 and Mar. 3, 2006, and this Featured Discussion.
“Net neutrality”
My Manhattan Institute colleague Peter Huber does the best job I’ve seen of raising doubts about the proposal (“The Inegalitarian Web”, Forbes, Feb. 12).
For their own good dept.
In the U.K., childhood obesity has now developed into a grounds for social service agencies to take kids away from their parents. (Sarah-Kate Templeton, “‘Fat police’ put children on abuse list”, Times Online, Jan. 28).
“Everyone’s a Lawyer”
Our very first embedded YouTube video. It originally appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Hollow Men” (via Nicole Black):
“Telecommuters Are Reaching Out to Sue Their Employers”
A possibly more accurate headline on this National Law Journal article from last month would have been, “Class-Action Lawyers Are Reaching Out to Sue Employers on Behalf of Telecommuters”. And for many of the putative beneficiaries,the consequences are apt to be unpleasant: some employers will curtail their use of telecommuters, while others will insist on legally defensive paperwork and work rules which add dreariness to the job, such as those suggested by a lawyer with one leading employment-defense firm:
Companies can minimize the risk of legal disputes with work-at-home employees by inking formal agreements about the work and hours, said Mark Batten, a Boston lawyer for New York-based Proskauer Rose.
Batten, a defense attorney, also recommends timesheets, a written policy banning overtime without prior approval and rules requiring employees to monitor and record work-related activities such [as] logging on or off a computer. …
“Just allowing employees to work at home without an understanding about how much time is actually needed for work will get the employer in trouble,” Batten said.
(cross-posted from Point of Law).
Penguin “black interest” lawsuit, cont’d
Our post of Wednesday on an author’s complaint that Penguin Group steered her work into “African-American interest” marketing channels, although she would have preferred for it to be marketed as a general interest book, has spurred a somewhat heated discussion in the reader comments section. It also drew an informative comment in email from Charles Petit, author of the publishing-law blog Scrivener’s Error, which we’ve appended to the original post.