“Lawyers who have been representing survivors of Canada’s residential school system are expected to get the biggest payment ever recorded for a Canadian class action case.” The federal government will pay about C$80 million in fees, of which half will go to the Regina-based Merchant Law Group and half to a consortium of other lawyers. (“Lawyers set to be paid $80M in school abuse deal”, CTV, May 8; “School abuse deal includes $80M for lawyers”, CBC, May 8). The fees are part of a $2 billion deal intended to resolve portions of the litigation over the federally-sponsored, church-run Indian schools, which were originally accused of permitting the infliction of physical and sexual abuse on some of their students; later the litigation expanded to include charges of “cultural deprivation” and alienation on behalf of thousands of Native Americans who attended the schools, which were geared toward assimilation into Canadian culture (FAQ from CBC on settlement). More: Aug. 23-24, 2000.
Author Archive
NYC anti-gun suits, cont’d
Errant golf balls, cont’d
Reader Matt Manor sums up this Newsday article about a controversy in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island: “Golf club loses suit on errant balls, faces injunction to end them, erects large net to comply, and is promptly sued by homeowners who think the net is ugly. You can’t win.” (William Murphy, “Golf course can’t seem to hit straight”, May 24). More on errant golf balls: May 24, Oct. 6, 2004 (Australia).
More time on your law school exams? $95, please
We’ve posted many times (Jul. 21, 2004, Mar. 24, 2006, etc.) on the subject of students who angle for extra time on exams through the use of debatable or borderline disability diagnoses, but Mike Cernovich has an anecdote from personal experience (Mar. 15) that should raise the level of alarm. P.S. Here’s more from Boston, where 12 percent of students in the affluent suburb of Wayland are getting accommodations (Ron DePasquale, “More time for SATs a concern”, Boston Globe, Jun. 1).
Federal Marriage Amendment vs. federalism
Among its other defects (see links gathered here), this misbegotten proposal would impose a single federalized outcome on states and localities which currently take widely differing views of same-sex marriage. Some FMA advocates have sought to depict the federalist objections to the amendment as mere makeweight and window dressing — tactical objections by opponents who dislike the proposal for its substance and are merely casting about for arguments against it. One hopes these advocates were suitably chastened in March when James Q. Wilson, doyen of conservative policy analysis, announced his opposition to the amendment citing exactly these federalist grounds:
The states should also decide about gay marriage. Some conservatives are urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment banning this, but this would be a mistake. People should vote on this matter and about the conditions of life they wish to experience where they live. Though I oppose gay marriage, voters in some states may approve it. If they do, we will have a chance to learn what it means in practice, with the costs and benefits falling on people who have accepted it….
The rising demand that every personal preference become a constitutional right is a worrisome disease. People, of course, do have rights; the Constitution and the first ten amendments spell most of them out. That document defines the essential requirements of life and liberty. Adding new invented rights by either a ratified amendment or judicial overreaching is a mistake.
(WSJ, Mar. 18, reprinted at AEI site). More: Jonathan Rauch, Dale Carpenter’s new paper for Cato, Julian Sanchez (& welcome Volokh, Sullivan, Independent Gay Forum readers).
Paid matchmaker $125K, sent on dud dates
On the expectation that leisured multi-millionaires would be lining up to spend time with her, 60-year-old Erie, Pa. grandmother and social worker Anne Majerik paid big bucks to Beverly Hills, Calif. matchmaker Orly Hadida. The dates were duds, but her consolation prize was an L.A. jury’s $2 million award. Both sides had been in court before fighting matchmaking-disgruntlement actions against other parties. The jury forewoman said her colleagues wished they could punish Hadida without rewarding Majerik, but an award to charity wasn’t an option. (Jessica Garrison, “Woman Gets $2 Million in Matchmaker Lawsuit”, Los Angeles Times, May 31; Lattman, May 31).
Runs away with online chum; mom sues school
Upstate New York: “The Honeoye Central School District failed to keep a teenage student off the Internet as her parents requested, and she ran away with an 18-year-old Syracuse man she met online, the girl’s mother claims in legal papers.” The 15-year-old used school computers to meet Michael Macbeth, three years her elder, on MySpace; the Ontario County sheriff’s office later arrested Macbeth “on charges of endangering the welfare of a child after he picked up the girl at Honeoye Central High School.” Now her mother, Luann Waden of Bloomfield, has filed a notice of intent to sue, saying she had asked the school not to let her daughter use the Internet. (Gary Craig, “Mom plans to sue school over Web”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, May 29).
Mass. high court: use of cigarettes inherently unreasonable
On May 18 Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court “rejected one of the tobacco industry’s most successful defenses in wrongful death lawsuits, ruling the companies cannot shield themselves from liability simply by claiming that smokers should know cigarettes are dangerous.” (Denise Lavoie, “Mass. High Court Rejects Tobacco Defense”, AP/Forbes, May 18). In particular, the court declared it to be “obvious… that cigarettes cannot be used safely and therefore that cigarette use is unreasonable” and ruled that accordingly “public policy demands” that liability be placed on cigarette manufacturers. (Childs, May 18). Jacob Sullum comments at Reason “Hit and Run” (May 22).
In other news, Sullum (May 17) also brings word (via tobacco control movement whistleblower Dr. Michael Siegel) of how “at least 68 anti-smoking groups” — the American Cancer Society most prominent among them — “are falsely claiming that a half-hour’s exposure to secondhand smoke can cause atherosclerosis and heart attacks.”
“$1 Billion Legal Fee Eyed in Enron Suit”
That’s what Bill Lerach, late of Milberg Weiss, could bag as Enron settlements mount toward $10 bmillion. It seems Lerach has a sliding-scale contingency-fee arrangement with his lead plaintiff, the University of California, starting at 8 percent and going upward from there. And — this is the beauty part — it seems there’s a good chance courts will simply extend the percentage rates to apply to the many other investors in the plaintiff class, even though they never signed up to be Lerach clients or were given a chance to negotiate fees with him. No wonder class-action lawyers are so concerned to butter up the universities, pension funds, unions and other big institutional plaintiffs who serve as their stalking horses in these actions. The university, it seems, did not employ competitive bidding to invite participation by other potential counsel.
A critic of class action litigation, Lawrence Schonbrun, said he is suspicious of the university’s claims that it has vigilantly overseen the Enron case. A retired judge the university hired as a consultant on the case, J. Lawrence Irving, was paid more than $1.4 million by the state school, before being hired this month as a consultant by Lerach Coughlin. “This was not the ideal choice to monitor plaintiffs’ counsel,” Mr. Schonbrun said.
(Josh Gerstein, New York Sun, May 31).
Open thread: design of this site
Should we put a search box in the upper right corner? Are trackbacks still of use to anyone? Is there some way to clean up the tangle of old archives resulting from our 2003 and 2005 switches to different archiving systems? Our fonts are optimized for Firefox; how can we make them look equally good in IE? Here’s the place to post any advice or observations on the site’s layout, design, graphics and internal structure — please save critiques of content for some other occasion.