Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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New Times column — age-bias law

My new column in the Times Online is up. First paragraph:

So now Britain has its own law banning employers from considering workers’ age in most job situations. If your experience follows ours in America, the results will include a range of unintended consequences, some of which will worsen the plight of the workers the law was meant to help.

(Walter Olson, “If the US experience is anything to go by, be sceptical of Britain’s new age-bias laws”, Times Online (U.K.), Oct. 18, newer link and reprint). I treated this subject at length in my 1997 book The Excuse Factory and did a USA Today opinion piece back then exploring some of the ways the law backfires against older workers. The new British law has been getting some attention in the States, in part because of the news item about the company that has banned office birthday cards as potentially ageist (Oct. 13) and the one about the recruiting agency (Oct. 17) that is barring use of any of a list of words including vibrant, dynamic, gravitas, ambitious, and hungry to describe potential employees.

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Great moments in predatory lending law

Paternalism in Chicago, working about as well as paternalism usually does:

The South Side neighborhoods affected by a controversial mortgage law designed to protect would-be homeowners from being gouged have seen a 45 percent drop in home sales in the law’s first month. …

Under the law, if a borrower’s credit score is 620 or less, or if there are other triggers, a borrower must get financial counseling from a U.S. Housing and Urban Development-approved counselor to make sure the borrower knows what he’s getting into, though a counselor can’t stop the loan.

The mortgage broker must pay $300 for counseling….

Some lenders have pulled out of the ZIP codes because they don’t want to deal with the accompanying paperwork. Real estate professionals have also complained that the four-year pilot law is discriminatory, because it is limited to just 10 ZIP codes.

Additionally, borrowers working through state or federally chartered banks are exempt from the law.

(Mary Wisniewski, “Mortgage law socks home sales”, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 16).

Postal worker’s discourtesy didn’t cause $250K injury

When Lucille Greene went to the Magnolia, Del. post office to mail holiday fruitcakes for her relatives and friends, a postal worker said “What kind of explosives do you have in here?” and shook the box. Others laughed. The humiliation and emotional anguish, she said, reduced her to tears and caused her to trip in the parking lot with consequent injury. A federal judge has dismissed her $250,000 suit, however, “because Greene had a prior eye condition, and contradictory testimony”. (“Grandmother Mails Fruitcakes, Sues USPS”, AP/ABCNews.com, Oct. 12).

WHYY Philadelphia, “Radio Times”

I was a guest this morning on host Marty Moss-Coane’s radio program, debating Yale professor Kelly Brownell on proposed trans fat bans. For more information on that and other food issues, see this site’s Eat Drink & Be Merry page.

P.S.: Prof. Brownell claimed the proposed New York City regulation banning most uses of trans fats wouldn’t be burdensome to restaurant owners, and quoted the owner of the Carnegie Deli, which has managed to dispense with most (though not all) use of those fats. Through the miracle of Google I was able to track down the New York Times’s coverage as we spoke and so was able to read the audience the entire quote from Carnegie Deli owner Sanford Levine, which included a portion Prof. Brownell was not so eager to quote: “They shouldn’t tell a businessman how to run a business,” Levine said. “They can make suggestions, but I don’t think it should be the law.” Prof. Brownell also claimed that there had been no great outcry in New York over the rules. The Times’s headline told a different story: “Big Brother in the Kitchen? New Yorkers Balk“.

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“Bully” update

Updating our Oct. 14 and Aug. 17 posts, Florida Judge Ronald Friedman, after viewing the game, chose not to censor it—this time. Whether that free-speech decision should be made by judges at all and whether Jack Thompson should be permitted to misuse public nuisance law in this way are, of course, the real issues. Needless to say, Thompson is dissatisfied with the ruling, protesting that the game was played by a Take Two executive in the one- or two-hour closed-door session with the judge, and that a longer session with a different player might have had a different result. (Bridget Carey, “Judge doesn’t object to video game ‘Bully'”, Miami Herald, Oct. 14) (via Bashman).

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“Crook”, “con artist”, “fraud”

Bloggers and blog-commenters might want to think very carefully before employing those epithets. Sue Scheff of Weston, Fla. obtained an $11 million default verdict in her defamation lawsuit against Carey Bock of Mandeville, La., who’d used the expressions in denouncing Scheff. (Laura Parker, “Jury awards $11.3M over defamatory Internet posts”, USA Today, Oct. 11). David Lat writes, “Eleven million dollars? You can call us whatever you like for that kind of money. … Most wrongful-death awards that are smaller than that.” (Oct. 11).

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