In suburban Milwaukee, 17-year-old Peer Larson wants to be in teacher Aaron Bieniek’s honors pre-calculus class, but isn’t happy about the homework assignments Mr. Bieniek required students to do over the summer. So he and his father are suing Mr. Bieniek, various school officials, and the Whitnall School District, saying summer homework assignments shouldn’t be allowed. (Jamaal Abdul-Alim, “Homework during summer vacation prompts lawsuit”, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Jan. 19). Update Mar. 15: judge dismisses suit.
Author Archive
Cop wins $1.6 M after videotaped beating
Sued if you do dept.: “A former Inglewood police officer who was fired for punching a black teenager and slamming him against a patrol car was awarded $1.6 million Tuesday by the jury in a discrimination lawsuit he and his partner brought against the city. … A bystander videotaped [Jeremy] Morse in July 2002 punching handcuffed Donovan Jackson in the head and slamming him onto a patrol car in Inglewood, just south of Los Angeles.” National publicity followed, as did protests in the heavily minority city, and the city eventually fired Officer Morse and disciplined other officers. On Tuesday a Los Angeles jury agreed with Morse’s suit contending that he would not have been lost his job had he been black. It also awarded $810,000 to another white officer, Bijan Darvish, who is still with the Inglewood department but was suspended for ten days in connection with the incident. (Chris T. Nguyen, AP/Wired News, Jan. 18).
The 2002 incident had led to the filing of criminal charges against both Morse and Darvish; juries deadlocked in two trials of felony charges against Morse, and acquitted Darvish on a charge of filing false police reports. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges against Morse. City mayor Roosevelt Dorn called this week’s verdicts outrageous, questioning why a 10-day employee suspension would be considered to be worth $800,000. (“Taped Punch Costly to City”, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 19; Matt Krasnowski, “Inglewood police officers get $2.4 million jury award”, Copley/Torrance Daily Breeze, Jan. 20).
But I’m not that good
…as Paul Winston, editorial director of the magazine Business Insurance, observes (“Making a Case for Tort Reform”, Business Insurance, Jan. 17).
Mutual funds sued
A lawyer at Baron & Budd thinks the funds’ managers should have been grabbier about money. (Jonathan D. Glater, “Suits Contend Mutual Funds Fail to Collect in Settlements”, New York Times, Jan. 19). More commentary on suit: Securities Litigation Watch, Jan. 25 (via 10-b5 Daily).
Business jets
“The stock market is not eager to fund this capital-intensive, risk-burdened, lawyer-strafed industry. … 40 years of lawsuits and heavy-handed regulation have made the bizjet industry hyperconservative.” (Rich Karlgaard, “Digital Rules: Cheap Jet Update”, Forbes, Jan. 10).
Stuart Taylor, Jr. vs. Stephanie Mencimer
Over the past year journalist Stephanie Mencimer, a frequent contributor to such publications as Mother Jones and the Washington Monthly, has written a series of articles intended to rebut what she calls “The Myth of the Frivolous Lawsuit”. In the course of these articles, Mencimer assails a wide range of writers, publications and institutions that have taken a visible public role criticizing excessive litigation, myself and this site included. Her research often seems to consist of little but the uncritical recycling of allegations circulated by the Litigation Lobby, some of them fifteen or twenty years old and many of them both baldly inaccurate and nastily ad hominem in tone.
I don’t make it a practice to respond to Mencimer’s writings, but the distinguished legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr., who writes an influential column for National Journal and contributes to Newsweek, was outraged by her attacks on his work in an article she wrote for the October Washington Monthly and took the time to craft a lengthy, devastating point-by-point rebuttal. He sent it on December 16 to the editors of the Washington Monthly including editor-in-chief Paul Glastris.
Remarkably, in the month since then, the Washington Monthly editors have neither posted the letter for their readers’ benefit nor made any attempt to rebut it. Now Taylor has generously consented to let me post his letter here. Readers can draw their own conclusions about how much of Mencimer’s credibility is left standing after his thorough dissection — and about what it means for the Washington Monthly’s reputation that it seems intent on stonewalling on her behalf. Update Feb. 16: Washington Monthly and Mencimer reply.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs
His column of a week or two back, on liability reform, is well worth a read and was kind enough to quote me (“Tort reform important to U.S. future”, Jan. 6).
At Point of Law
Our sister site includes regular commentary on workplace law issues. Among recent topics: the “earthquake” in employment law occasioned by courts’ more favorable attitude toward employee class actions; mote vs. beam on law firms’ “gender imbalance”; litigating pensions into oblivion; another employee-misclassification settlement; and overtime class actions.
Finally appreciating Eliot Spitzer
It seems wayward scion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to be Spitzer’s replacement (Jonathan P. Hicks, “Only in New York: Kennedys, Cuomos and Voters, Oh, My”, New York Times, Jan. 18). Well, this should be entertaining, at least.
Batch of reader letters
On our letters page, topics this time include: a high school hockey referee gets hit by a puck, and then invited to partake of a lawyer’s services; religious proselytizing; Rosa Parks’s $5 billion suit against hip-hop musicians; and what English lawyers think of their Law Society’s move to permit referral fees. As in previous months, we’ve left comments open on letters, but expect to close inactive threads within a few days given the high prevalence of comment spam.