Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Round-up

Some quick links:

  • Michael Krauss reviews a Mississippi Court of Appeals decision on a bogus fender-bender claim. [Point of Law; Gilbert v. Ireland]
  • Yet another example of overbroad laws on sex offenders (see also Jul. 3, 2005). [Above the Law]
  • “As far as the law is concerned, those individuals whose pacemakers fail are the lucky ones.” [TortsProf Blog]
  • Emerson Electric sues NBC in St. Louis over a scene in an hourly drama where a cheerleader mangles her hand in a branded garbage disposal. [Hollywood Reporter, Esq.; Lattman; Defamer and Defamer update; St. Louis Post Dispatch]
  • A case that’s really not about the money: Man stiffs restaurant over $46 check, defends himself against misdemeanor charge with $500/lawyer. [St. Petersburg Times; Obscure Store]
  • Bill Childs catches yet another Justinian Lane misrepresentation. See also Sep. 26 and Sep. 17 (cf. related posts on Lane’s co-blogger Oct. 3 and Sep. 25), and we might just have to retire the category, since we can only hope to scratch the surface. Point of Law has the Gary Schwartz law review article discussed by Childs. [TortsProf Blog and ] Lane’s post also deliberately confuses non-economic damages caps with total damages caps: nothing stops someone with more than $250,000 in economic damages from recovering more than $250,000, even in a world with non-economic damages caps.
  • Update: Bill Childs in the comments-section to Lane:

    “Of course, all of this gets pretty far afield from what I originally wrote and that you’ve conceded, which is that you (unintentionally but sloppily) misrepresented the facts of the Pinto memo, failed to research its background beyond what was apparently represented to you, and still haven’t (last time I checked, at 9:10 p.m.) updated your site to reflect your error. Nor have you approved the trackback I sent to the site. You’ve posted comments to that very entry and another entry has gone up on the site, but readers still see the plainly inaccurate statement that the memo excerpt you show was Ford evaluating tort liability for rearendings, when in fact it was Ford evaluating a regulatory proposal for rollovers using numbers from NHTSA.

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Sued over blog posts

USA Today has a survey of cases filed against bloggers and commenters. A religious broadcaster and publisher has sued over a description of its president as “a shark” who comes from a “family of nincompoops.” And an ad agency that produced a tourism campaign for the state of Maine filed, but soon dropped, a suit against a critic who ridiculed the ads as a waste of money. (Laura Parker, “Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites”, Oct. 3). More: Sacha Pfeiffer, “In court, blogs can come back to dog the writers”, Boston Globe, Sept. 28.

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Stage-mom animal owners sue trainer

Hollywood Paws offers basic behavior training, and advanced training to respond to cameras. The trainers warn that training is not a sure route to television stardom, but they’re still facing a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit from a dozen pet-owners complaining of broken dreams. What sort of stardom plaintiffs think they were legally entitled to is uncertain; for example, one of the plaintiffs’ dogs, Goliath the Rottweiler, had a scene on the Tyra Banks Show that was cut, and is now making $100/day on a low-budget movie. (Jessica Garrison, “No Bows, No Wows for Pooches Pursuing Fame”, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 3 (h/t F.R.).)

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NAACP suit: unlawful for clinic to close on Jewish Sabbath

The Spring Valley, N.Y. chapter of the NAACP “has filed a complaint accusing the Ben Gilman Medical and Dental Clinic of religious discrimination for closing on Saturdays. The complaint, filed Sept. 6 with the state’s Division of Human Rights, alleges that the clinic’s practice of remaining closed Saturdays in observance of operators’ Jewish Sabbath, unlawfully imposes their religious beliefs on others.” (Suzan Clarke, “NAACP sues Spring Valley clinic”, White Plains, N.Y. Journal-News, Sept. 15). Eugene Volokh has a thorough discussion (Sept. 25).