The Scotsman takes a hard look at the legacy of the late patent king (Craig Howie, “New doubts on serial inventor”, Aug. 23)(more).
Author Archive
“Sit down, strap in, shut up”
Batch of reader letters
More reader correspondence appears on our letters page. Among topics this time: how to remove all the liability risks from a hotel shower; don’t blame all the woes of the litigation system on jury verdicts; after the Mississippi judicial bribery trial; and a rising political star in Connecticut.
Campaign finance law censorship
Now it’s being deployed on behalf of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) against the Scranton Times-Tribune. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, backing Santorum, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that the newspaper may have unlawfully made a “corporate contribution” to Santorum’s opponent, Bob Casey Jr., by printing in promotional material a mock headline that read “Casey to run for Senate”. (Carrie Budoff, “Scranton paper’s promo an issue”, Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, Aug. 16; Brett Marcy, “GOP files complaint of paper’s Casey ‘ad'”, Aug. 19; Ryan Sager, “Dirty Speech Trick”, New York Post, Aug. 19; Sager’s blog, Aug. 19 and again). For more campaign finance law censorship, see Jul. 11.
“For many, Vioxx verdict may mean more suffering”
Lisa Stringer, 38, of Chicago, who suffers chronic pain from a spine condition and gets little relief from other drugs, “is saving her last three precious Vioxx tablets for the really bad days”; she’s one of thousands of patients upset that the drug is unavailable now. Even one of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses in Ernst seems to agree that it ought to be on the market — slim chance of that now (Bruce Japsen, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21). WiredGC (Aug. 22) writes: “I know people who are desperate for it to go back on the market, as it was the only medication that made their pain bearable and a mobile life livable. They would gladly take the (slight) increased risk of stroke or heart attack, for the chance to be able to get out of bed in the morning.”
Derek Lowe (Aug. 21) doesn’t buy the notion that the execs, scientists and marketers at a company like Merck carry a map in their heads with a big line drawn between “Vioxx users” and “us”. And Ted has further expanded his big Point of Law post on the case to reflect new press accounts based on juror interviews: in particular, don’t miss the juror who wanted to be on Oprah, and the juror who bragged to the WSJ that he didn’t understand any of the medical evidence.
Osama and the comfy chair
Update: Scarborough in the Senate?
Around the blogs
Philadelphia lawyer/blogger “Eh Nonymous”, who has been reading this site since law school without necessarily agreeing, now offers some more than generous comments about us (Aug. 17). Nobody’s Business has a picture of an overprotective warning sign which we can only assume is a parody and which in any case is funny (Aug. 15). Dozens of blogs, including Gypsy Speaks and Rev. Marge, are onto the sequel of the Kelo v. New London eminent-domain case: the city of New London, having won its case against the homeowners, now is charging them back rent for the five years it took to kick them out of their homes, not unlike the foreman in the old labor song who, after an on-the-job explosion, docked the worker for the time he spent up in the sky. And Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty (Aug. 15) explores the question of “Why the [New York] Times likes Kelo so much”. More: Gunner at No Quarters has identified (Aug. 17) a provision in Connecticut law that might prove unexpectedly helpful to the Kelo “tenants”.
A new civil right
Namely, the “civil right to get a high-school diploma no matter how little you know, and consequently to have a high-school diploma that certifies precisely nothing about your abilities and which therefore has roughly no value in the job market.” Something at Harvard called the Civil Rights Project, in alliance with a bunch of litigious pressure groups, is planning to secure this new right for America’s schoolkids, notes Mark Kleiman (Aug. 18)(via Kaus).
Ill. high court tosses aftermarket auto parts verdict
By a unanimous vote, the Illinois Supreme Court has decertified and thus nullified a $1.2 billion class action verdict, much criticized here (Oct. 8, 1999) and in other places, which held that State Farm’s practice of specifying generic aftermarket parts after auto crashes had defrauded consumers. Among the many problems with the verdict were that the court had lumped together consumers holding a wide range of insurance policies applying different language to the handling of the aftermarket parts issue, that it had ignored wide variations among consumers in what if any harm they had suffered from the practice, and that it had applied Illinois law to policies issued mostly to consumers in states other than Illinois, some of whose regulators had specifically contemplated and approved (or even required) the use of generic parts after crashes. Martin Grace and Ted Frank comment at PoL, and discussions elsewhere include those of (again) Martin Grace and Larry Ribstein. More: Amy Joyce, “State Farm Wins Reversal of $1 Billion Suit”, Washington Post, Aug. 19.