I’d like to thank Walter and Ted for letting my play in their sandbox this past week. Before I go, I’d like to highlight a few more antitrust cases and stories to watch in 2007:
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Rambus, Antitrust & the Common Law
In the next few weeks, the FTC is expected to issue a final order in its five-year case against Rambus Inc., a California-based developer of memory technology. Rambus has proven to be the longest and possibly costliest litigation in FTC history. The FTC’s trial costs alone approached $3 million, with over $1 million going to “expert” witnesses and consultants.
The Rambus case started as a patent infringement dispute between the company and several memory manufacturers. Rambus doesn’t produce any memory itself; it develops and patents technologies and licenses them to manufacturers. During the mid-1990s, Rambus participated in a memory standard-setting group, JEDEC, and this is where the trouble began. The manufacturers claim Rambus misled JEDEC into incorporating Rambus patents into certain memory standards. Rambus said it was denied permission to present its technologies for standardization and that JEDEC members simply infringed Rambus’s patents.
FTC snares doctors in price fixing trap
The Federal Trade Commission ended its year by prosecuting a 1,900-member physician group in Chicago for price-fixing. Since 2001, the FTC and DOJ have coerced 29 physician groups—some with as few as six members—into signing consent orders that restrict the right of doctors to negotiate contracts.
The FTC and DOJ apply a double standard to doctors and third-party payers. Payers may represent thousands of individual consumers and present doctors with a “take it or leave it” contract offer. But if even a handful of doctors get together to present a counter-offer, it’s a “per se” antitrust violation.
Best of 2006: October
- Safety vs. “discrimination”:9th Circuit: UPS must hire deaf drivers; EEOC challenges Exxon’s pilot age limit; “To avoid charges of ‘racism,’ we disciplined black and white students differently.”
- Jackpot justice: $217M for misdiagnosed stroke in Florida (and followup)
- Trespass atop rail car, win $24 million
- Jackpot justice: $20M for $25,000 insurance claim
- Judicial elections and the New York Times
- On picking a jury
- Public Citizen and DMI caught using misleading statistics
- Encore on the falling-out-of-a-loft-bed case
- Why there aren’t DVDs of some of your favorite old TV series
- Tag banned because of liability fears
- Punitive damages and the Supreme Court
- Two more hot-coffee-lawsuit datapoints. It might be easier to list the chains that haven’t been sued for serving coffee.
Best of 2006: September
- Calif. AG sues automakers for global warming
- Plaintiff: McDonald’s should’ve warned me and my boss not to be gullible. Incidentally, the circumstantial criminal case against the guy behind the insidious phone calls fell apart because his defense attorney was able to impeach the victims (in a different Louisville case) by accusing them of trying to shake down McDonald’s for hundreds of millions. So he’s still on the street. Thanks, plaintiffs’ bar!
- The burglar and the skylight: another debunking that isn’t
- First rumblings of NYC trans fat ban gets Wally TV coverage.
- Suit: plaintiff was too stupid to be admitted into law school
- Neglect your kid now, sue for $5 M later
- Lonelygirl 15 creator defends Grand Theft Auto against meritless lawsuit
- NAACP suit: unlawful for clinic to close on Jewish Sabbath
- Can we blame lawyers for pro se claims?
- New Bizarro-Overlawyered blog writers don’t realize they’re arguing for reform, or providing excellent examples of how lawyers hurt medical consumers. See also the relationship between efficiency and safety; Milberg Weiss Fellow Cyrus Dugger visits the comments in an unrelated post to make an unfounded accusation that he refuses to back up.
- Pelman allowed to sue McDonald’s over getting fat.
Best of 2006: August
- Wal-Mart lawn mower suit: newspaper reporter parrots plaintiff’s attorney’s implausible tale without fact-checking
- The Kessler RICO ruling on tobacco
- NJ court: no warning that one might fall out of loft bed required
- $18 million “sudden acceleration” verdict in South Carolina
- Another way lawyers hurt safety
- ADA frequent filer forgets who he’s suing
- Lawyers fake evidence in $2B suit, still practice today
- The return of the spilled-coffee tort—or is it?
- Trial lawyer wikiality
Best of 2006: July
- Junk faxers get a bigger bounty than Osama bin Laden (and here)
- Wore boxer shorts to game, sues over yearbook photo
- Mistaken for Michael Jordan, so he sues
- Revealed preference for trans fats
- 151-proof rum is flammable, who knew?
- Plaintiff sues Con Ed because Dr. Bartha blew himself up with gas
- Red Buttons, comedian, litigant
- “Sued for expressing “glee” over lawyer’s indictment”
- Town seeks to hold parents liable for kids’ drinking in homes
Hussein executed
Saddam Hussein has been executed, according to numerous media reports. A few hours ago, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington denied a last-minute application for a stay of execution filed by Hussein’s lawyers.
The application was filed at 1 p.m. this afternoon by the law firm of Gilman & Associates, who argued that a stay was justified because Hussein was a named defendant in a civil lawsuit before the D.C. district court, “but his incarceration has prevented him from receiving proper due process notice of his rights to defend himself and his estate.” Military officials said Hussein could not meet with his lawyers to discuss the civil suit until January 4, which obviously is a moot point now.
U.S. v. Stolt-Nielsen: Unenforceable Contracts
Next week the Justice Department will file its response to a motion to dismiss made by Stolt-Nielsen Transportation Group and its two co-defendants in a criminal antitrust case now pending in Philadelphia. Four years ago, Stolt-Nielsen received amnesty from the DOJ in exchange for cooperating with the Antitrust Division’s price-fixing investigation of the parcel tanker industry. The amnesty was revoked less than three months later, however, after the Division accused Stolt-Nielsen of misrepresenting the timeline of the alleged conspiracy.
The Division had never revoked an amnesty granted under its 1993 Corporate Leniency Policy, and the unprecedented action against Stolt-Nielsen prompted the company to file a lawsuit to enjoin prosecutors from indicting the company. In January 2005, a judge granted the injunction, holding that Stolt-Nielsen did not breach the amnesty agreement. Specifically, the court said the terms of the amnesty agreement—which was drafted by the DOJ—made no reference to any specific timeline.
Chicago foie gras update: “I’ll have the special lobster”
Did you think the city famed for Al Capone and the Prohibition speakeasies would roll over for an even sillier nanny-statism?
When the letter came from City Hall threatening punishment if he continued to serve foie gras at his North Side restaurant, Doug Sohn framed the warning and set it beside his cash register.
And he kept serving the fattened duck liver without a care. …
The city has sent warning letters to nine restaurants believed to have served foie gras but issued no citations, Chicago Department of Public Health spokesman Tim Hadac said. Letters are sent after a citizen complaint and are followed by a visit after a second complaint. Visits that turn up evidence of the banished dish can result in fines from $250 to $500.
But Mayor Richard Daley is no fan of the ban–just this week, he called it “the silliest law” the City Council has ever passed.
Perhaps that helps explain why the Health Department is in no rush to boost their compliance checks.
“In a world of very limited public health resources we’re being asked to drop some things so we can enforce a law like this,” Hadac said. “With HIV/AIDS, cancer, West Nile virus and some of the other things we deal with, foie gras is our lowest priority.” …
Some owners have tiptoed around the ban by serving the dish under alternate or code names (“I’ll have the special lobster” will supposedly score foie gras at one restaurant), but renegades say they’ll do what they must to fight City Hall. …
At first, [restauranteur David Richards] said, restaurant owners worried their access to foie gras would be limited, and they crafted plots to keep their supply flowing–like getting it mailed to a suburban address for weekly covert pickups. Such cunning turned out not to be necessary, he said. Richards still gets foie gras from the same distributor he always did, and no one seems to care that it is still on his menu.
“We look at it as a choice,” he said. “We live in a free-market society and if people are truly offended they won’t buy it. If they don’t buy it, I won’t buy it.”
Instead, he said, his foie gras sales have climbed, making him even less inclined to heed the law. …
Many of those most vocally opposed to the ban have coolly stepped away from the debate by ending their foie gras sales or at least coming up with names clever enough to obscure the issue. Available on the menu at Copperblue, for instance, is “`It Isn’t Foie Gras any Moore’ Duck Liver Terrine”–a testy nod to the alderman who sponsored the foie gras ban.
Though the $16 cost seems closer to the price of foie gras than simple duck liver, Copperblue chef and owner Michael Tsonton would not say whether he had merely renamed the illicit dish. In September, when still serving foie gras, he got a warning letter that he said he hung in his kitchen.
(Josh Noel, “Let ’em eat foie gras, they declare”, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 22 (via Noonan, who says he was thinking of opening a restaurant called “Foie Gras Fried In Trans Fat”)). The Tribune story lists the nine restaurants that have gotten warning letters, and I can personally vouch for one of my favorites, Bin 36, where a date and I had a fine meal during a January 2005 blizzard.