George Blake, a fugitive from British justice and MI6 double agent who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison 40 years ago and fled to Russia, has been awarded £3,350 in damages by the European Court of Human Rights because British authorities delayed too long in resolving a dispute over whether he could collect royalties for his autobiography. Blake, who is now 84 and still on the lam, is believed to have betrayed more than 40 MI6 agents, many of whom were killed, during his career as a double agent. The British government objected to his obtaining royalties on the grounds that he had violated confidentiality by publishing the memoir, but the ECHR accepted the arguments of Blake’s lawyers that it was a violation of his rights for the dispute to have dragged on for nine years in British courts. (Richard Norton Taylor, “MI6 double agent Blake wins damages from government”, The Guardian (UK), Sept. 27; Joshua Rozenberg, “Britain must pay traitor Blake for breaching his human rights”, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 27; Dave Zincavage, Sept. 27).
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Weird Al Yankovic, “I’ll Sue Ya”
The entertainer’s “Straight Outta Lynwood” album includes a song by that title, the first two stanzas of which are:
I sued Taco Bell…’cause I ate half a million chalupas,
and I got fat!
I sued Panasonic…they never said I shouldn’t use their microwave
to dry off my cat!
Fuller lyrics are here, and a sound sample can be found here.
Appearances: NPR, ABC “World News Tonight”
I was a guest this afternoon on Michelle Martin’s live National Public Radio talk show, “Talk of the Nation“, discussing New York City’s proposed ban on most uses of trans fats in restaurants. ABC News “World News Tonight” also had me comment for a news segment on the issue planned for tonight’s broadcast.
On NPR, NYC Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden claimed that it is always possible to duplicate the taste and other gustatory qualities of a trans fat recipe using other fats. For an example of a business that stumbled by buying into this particular premise, see Jun. 30 (West Virginia potato chip maker Mister Bee).
P.S. On the NPR audio clip, check out the section just before I come on where host Martin, interviewing Frieden, does a blind taste testing of two wafer cookies, one made with trans fats and one without. And here’s a mention by Bonnie Erbe at USNews.com (Sept. 27)(attributing to me “typical eloquently opinionated New York style”).
NYC plans to ban trans fats
Few Gotham restaurants paid much heed when city health commissioner Thomas Frieden announced supposedly voluntary curbs on the use of partially hydrogenated fats, so now the city is planning on making the restrictions mandatory. Among many, many foods that will apparently need to be either reformulated or bootlegged: Krispy Kreme “Hot Original Glaze” doughnuts. In the New York Sun, reporter Russell Berman quotes my reaction: “When is Nurse Bloomberg planning to let us fill up our own plates?”. (“City Wants to Ban Some Fatty Foods in Restaurants”, Sept. 27; “Freedom Fries” (editorial), Sept. 27).
Medical tourism
Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, treated 58,000 American patients in 2005, and looks to treat 20 percent more this year. Why?
At Bumrungrad Hospital, [spokesman Ruben] Toral said, the lower cost of living is a major factor in the savings, but so are differences in how the medical system operates.
Doctors in Thailand pay about $5,000 a year for malpractice insurance, compared with more than $100,000 for some specialties in the United States.
Thai courts will adjudicate malpractice claims, but the largest award ever issued was about $100,000 and the law there doesn’t permit damages for pain and suffering.
(Mark Roth, “Surgery abroad an option for those with minimal health coverage,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sep. 10). Apparently the Thais haven’t heard the propaganda from the American trial bar that caps on non-economic damages don’t lower malpractice insurance premiums or medical expenses. And apparently, thousands of Americans prefer cheaper healthcare to the opportunity to recover pain-and-suffering damages: unfortunately, plaintiffs’ organizations fight very hard to ensure that American consumers don’t actually get that choice. (Via, of all places, Bizarro-Overlawyered, where one can almost see the smoke coming out of the ears of the posting blogger because of the “Does-Not-Compute” cognitive dissonance.)
Jim Blasingame, “The Small Business Advocate”
I was a guest this morning on the nationally syndicated radio show, discussing rumored BlackBerry lawsuits, wage and hour law, and class actions.
Oprah: “My lawyers overreacted”
Bacardi responds to flaming-drinks suit
The rum maker contends that the three women’s injuries “were caused after a bartender poured rubbing alcohol on the bar of the ‘Secrets’ adult club and ignited it as part of a promotion for flaming drinks in 2002.” The complainants, it suggests, have already recovered damages from other and more culpable entities in the accident. The plaintiff’s lawyer says the 151-proof liquor has been the cause of other accidents when it caught fire, but Bacardi counters that the label warns against use in flaming drinks and that the bottle includes a “flame arrester”. (“Bacardi Denies Its 151 Rum Caused Bar Burn Injuries”, AP/FoxNews.com, Sept. 25). For our earlier coverage, see Jul. 27.
Paul Harris show, KMOX
I was a guest this afternoon on Paul Harris’s radio show on KMOX, St. Louis. We discussed Judge Weinstein’s ruling certifying a national class action over “light” tobacco claims (see PoL Sept. 25), the court decision last week keeping alive the Pelman obesity case against McDonald’s (Sept. 22), and a deaf group’s lawsuit demanding captioning at Washington Redskins football games (Sept. 21). You can listen here — it’s practically a podcast.
The burglar and the skylight: another debunking that isn’t
Bizarro-Overlawyered is upset about the fact that a legislator, over twenty years ago, mentioned a lawsuit involving “a burglar [that] fell through a skylight and injured himself only to recover thousands of dollars from the owner of the skylight,” and points to this MS Word account of the case of Bodine v. Enterprise High School to debunk the tale. Those dastardly reformers, misrepresenting the facts once again! (Of course, there are several thousand posts on Overlawyered over the last seven years, and not a one before today mentions this case, so it’s hardly central to the reform movement. It doesn’t appear on the ATRA website, either. But why split hairs when there’s a chance to demonize reformers?)
Except if one actually goes to the document, buried within a lot of rhetoric criticizing reformers for mentioning the Bodine lawsuit, we learn: Ricky Bodine was a 19-year-old high-school graduate who, with three other friends (one of whom had a criminal record), decided the night of March 1, 1982, to steal a floodlight from the roof of the Enterprise High School gymnasium. Ricky climbed the roof, removed the floodlight, lowered it to the ground to his friends, and, as he was walking across the roof (perhaps to steal a second floodlight), he fell through the skylight. Bodine suffered terrible injuries to be sure, though one questions the relevance: if the school is legally responsible for burglars’ safety, it doesn’t matter whether Bodine stubbed a toe or, as actually happened, became a spastic quadriplegic. But I fail to see what it is that reformers are supposedly misrepresenting. A burglar fell through a skylight, and sued the owner of the skylight for his injuries. Bodine sued for $8 million (in 1984 dollars, about $16 million today) and settled for the nuisance sum of $260,000 plus $1200/month for life, about the equivalent of a million dollars in conservatively-estimated 2006 present value.
In other words, a burglar fell through a skylight, and blamed the skylight’s owners for his injuries; because the law permits such suits, and because the law does not compensate defendants for successful defenses, Bodine had the ability to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers for injuries suffered in the course of his own criminal behavior. Bodine’s only hope of recovery is the law’s rejection of proximate cause as prerequisite to liability. Assemblyman Alister McAlister, the Democratic legislator who used the story to push for reform, described the facts correctly. McAllister didn’t mention that Bodine was 19, but so what? He didn’t mention that Bodine was 6’1″ and a waiter, either, and all three facts are irrelevant. Lilliedoll accuses McAlister of falsely claiming that the legal theory was “failure to warn,” but that’s hardly an inaccurate description of a duty-to-trespassers theory: the alleged duty could have been fulfilled by posting visible warnings to trespassers of the dangers of traversing the roof.
Were the skylights safe? Perhaps not; there had been other accidents (all involving trespassers) at other schools, though not long enough before Bodine’s accident for a school bureaucracy to have time to react. But, for most people’s sense of justice, that is hardly relevant: Bodine had no business being on the roof in the first place. In the words of anti-reformer Justinian Lane, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
If this is the best the anti-reformers can do to point out “distortions” in the reform movement, I’d say we’re doing a pretty good job. (Earlier in the series: Sep. 17; Sep. 18). And once again, the only people misrepresenting anything are the supporters of the litigation lobby, who once again fail to honestly engage with the reform position in their efforts to rebut it.
Update: David Nieporent notes in the comments:
Ted, you missed the best part of the skylight anecdote. In another post on Tortdeform, Cyrus Dugger approvingly cites a long passage from a book review of an anti-tort reform book. That passage also attempts to debunk the skylight story. But here’s how it describes it:
The actual case involved a teenager who was on the roof of a school and, by the best accounts we can find, was trying to redirect a light because they were trying to play basketball. And while he was on the roof he stepped through the skylight, which had been painted over black. So this may have been a trespasser, but it wasn’t a burglar. (Emphasis added.)
That’s right: in this account which is trying to debunk myths about the case, cited approvingly by Tortdeform, it turns a thief into a guy “trying to redirect a light.”