…federal tribal recognition of native Hawaiians. Michelle Malkin is on the case (Jun. 23) (& see Jul. 13).
Author Archive
It’s a common carrier, after all
Amusement park managements in California are unhappy about a new 4-3 decision by the state’s supreme court holding that operators of park rides constitute “common carriers” akin to bus and trolley lines for safety purposes, thus exposing them to a higher standard of care in injury lawsuits. Of particular concern: given that passengers on ordinary conveyances are supposed to be protected from dangers that would occasion acute personal fear and emotional distress, what are the implications for roller coasters and other thrill rides in which conveying sensations of that sort is the whole idea? Maybe the brass at Disney (which was the defendant in the suit at hand) weren’t being entirely overcautious when they slowed down the Mad Hatter’s spinning teacups (see Mar. 4 and Mar. 9, 2004). (Maura Dolan and Kimi Yoshino, “High Court Raises Bar for Safety of Thrill Rides”, Los Angeles Times, Jun. 17)(via Ken Masugi, Claremont).
N.Y.: no cameras in courtroom
The interests of a fair trial come first, rules New York’s highest court. The New York State Defenders Association, for one, had weighed in with an amicus brief in favor of the no-camera policy. The ruling “was a total loss for Court TV”, which “had attempted to achieve through litigation what its lobbyists at Ostroff, Hiffa & Associates of Albany could not achieve legislatively. Records maintained by the state Lobbying Commission indicate Court TV has spent next to nothing on lobbying the last few years as its attorney, David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner in Armonk, N.Y., pursued the legal case.” (John Caher, In Loss for Court TV, N.Y. Judges Continue Ban on Cameras in Courts, New York Law Journal, Jun. 17).
Patent reform legislation
Jim DeLong surveys the terrain and finds that many significant proposals being considered command a fairly broad consensus; the two most important categories of reform are those aimed at “(1) Reducing the transaction costs of the system, especially litigation; (2) The ‘patent quality’ issue”. (“Patent Reform Hits the Hill”, TechCentralStation, Jun. 21).
Housekeeping note
Mostly of interest to other webmasters: the continued assault of trackback spam (hundreds a day now) is making it increasingly hard to maintain our trackback function, especially given the tendency of this site to comment on matters involving casinos, obesity, pharmaceuticals, and other chronic spam-magnet topics. Rather than disabling trackback entirely, I’m going to experiment with turning it off for older posts that are heavily affected. If you happen to link to an older post on which trackback has been turned off, consider sending me an email to alert me (can’t guarantee a response, though, I’m afraid).
Blawg Review #11
…is now up, hosted by Al Nye the Lawyer Guy. Our post on the hapless Virginia couple who served liquor to their son’s friends comes in for a link, and the host has some very kind things to say about this site and about my book The Rule of Lawyers (which — have I mentioned? — makes a great gift for graduates, or belated Father’s Day offering).
Other highlights of the review: George Lenard discusses a Seventh Circuit ruling that the MMPI, a standard personality test, counts as a “medical examination” which when administered by an employer to applicants before a job offer is made triggers the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and Carolyn Elefant offers advice on how to benefit from blogs without spending a whole lot of time on them.
“Affordable housing” lawsuits
In Connecticut as well as some other states, land developers have teamed up with low-income housing advocates to promote laws which impose on towns a duty to boost their level of so-called affordable housing and give homebuilders willing to include such housing in their developments a cause of action to go to court to overturn local building restrictions. Norm Pattis of Crime and Federalism (May 9) isn’t buying the idea that the resulting litigation, with its tendency to replace the formerly diverse land-use practices of different towns with homogeneous sprawl, really should count as progressive.
“How the government blew $135 million in six years”
Here’s a Business Week writer who shares our general view of the federal tobacco suit: “The real affront is that this ill-conceived legal campaign was not halted years ago. … The Justice Dept. took a mountain of evidence, much of it uncovered by other investigators, applied speculative legal theories, and then proceeded to seek ridiculously overinflated damages. Now most of its original case has been thrown out by the courts, and the agency is scrambling to devise a remedy that will justify all the effort. …If they indeed are trying to get rid of a Clinton-era case they have never embraced ideologically, as Waxman suggests, the weakness of the case itself only made that all too easy to do.” (Nanette Byrnes, “The Tobacco Suit That’s Going Up In Smoke”, Jun. 27). “I don’t know that what the Bush administration has done is any more politically based than what Clinton did in bringing the case in the first place,” Paul Honigberg, a member of the Justice Department’s legal team on the case until September 2001, told the New York Times. (Eric Lichtblau, “Political Leanings Were Always Factor in Tobacco Suit”, Jun. 19)(via Orin Kerr). Before the Clinton White House intervened in the late 1990s, the Justice Department had taken the position that the federal government had no cause of action against the tobacco companies of the sort later asserted. For more, see Sept. 29 and Sept. 23, 1999 (filing of suit), Sept. 21, 2004 (start of trial), and more recently Feb. 5, Jun. 13, etc.
ADA and cruise ships
Do you run a cruise ship that may stop at an American port of call, in addition to those of a dozen other countries? Then you may have to retrofit your vessel in various ways to comply with the consumer-accommodation requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Or such is the apparent implication of a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down Jun. 6. Three Justices dissented. (Spector et al. v. Norwegian Cruise Line Ltd., opinion courtesy FindLaw; Brian Doherty, “Sea of Litigation”, Reason, June; Pat Cleary, NAM Blog, Jun. 6; Georgetown Law webcast). See Mar. 2.
RFK Jr. vs. thimerosal
One of America’s least credible public figures, celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wades into the mercury in vaccines/autism controversy (Dec. 29, 2003, earlier posts) with a “special investigation” for Salon and Rolling Stone rehearsing the contentions of anti-thimerosal activists (“Deadly Immunity”, Jun. 16). Orac at Respectful Insolence, who’s covered the controversy extensively, hits back hard here, here and here. Reactions from Salon’s readers are here, and the online magazine has already been obliged to post several corrections of Kennedy’s errors, including the following remarkably embarrassing one:
The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms — an amount 40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury.
More: Skeptico (Jun. 20) challenges RFK Jr.’s account of a supposedly hush-hush meeting of vaccine scientists held outside Atlanta (via Adler, the Corner).