Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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Tech difficulties and temporary hiatus

For the last 24 hours+ new postings to this site have been disabled due to technical difficulties. We’re back up now, for the moment, but the continuing recurrence of these technical problems is going to make it necessary to move Overlawyered to a new hosting service in place of Verio, which has been our host for the past few years.

With luck, we can accomplish this rehosting within a few days, and the site will resume its normal operation. Till then, expect a brief hiatus in posting. In the mean time both Ted and I will continue to post at the Manhattan Institute’s website PointOfLaw.com. If our ability to update Overlawyered fails again, or if the whole site goes offline, we’ll post status updates on Point of Law, so make sure to bookmark that site now.

Also, reader advice is welcome as we search for the right Movable Type-friendly hosting service. We’ve heard favorable things about Total Choice Hosting and HostingMatters. If you’ve got opinions about these or other services, drop me a line at editor-at-[this domain name]-dot-com, or if that begins bouncing, editor-at-[point of law]-dot-com.

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Thanks, Palmer & Dodge

For stepping forward to represent the prison grievances of one of Massachusetts’s most infamous killers, Daniel LaPlante, supposedly on a pro bono basis; for your skill at turning into a civil rights claim LaPlante’s complaints that jailers were intercepting the pornographic pictures he was being sent in the mail, and that a guard had stolen his shower shoes; and for the smoothness with which you turned your supposedly pro bono efforts into a profit opportunity after you prevailed, submitting a $125,000 bill to state taxpayers of which federal judge Nancy Gertner approved $99,981. “We did it as efficiently as we could,” claimed George Olson [no relation], a partner at the elite Boston firm. “When we took the case, we didn’t expect to be compensated.” Thanks for that too! (Brian McGrory, “Injustice for almost all”, Boston Globe, Sept. 16).

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“Lawsuit blames oil companies for hurricane damage”

The AP reports that a “lawsuit seeks what attorneys say could be billions of dollars from a long list of oil companies for damages to wetlands that allegedly would have softened Hurricane Katrina’s blow.” Attorneys from the New Orleans firm of St. Martin & Williams are seeking class-action status on behalf of all persons and entities in Louisiana that suffered injury from Katrina’s wind and storm surge. They’re naming as defendants 11 oil and gas companies including Shell Oil, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP Corp. whose activities they say depleted marshlands, including by building and neglecting pipeline canals. (AP/Shreveport Times, Sept. 17; “Class-action suit filed against oil companies”, BizNewOrleans.com, Sept. 15).

Meanwhile, environmental litigation over the years aimed at slowing levee and flood-control projects could come under Senate scrutiny, despite peals of protest from the Sierra Club, Sen. Chuck Schumer and others (Dan Eggen, “Senate Panel Investigating Challenges to Levees”, Washington Post, Sept. 17; Jerry Mitchell, “Senate panel investigates levee lawsuits”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17). See Sept. 9, Sept. 14 (& Baseball Crank).

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The question of unisex bathrooms

Blogger Amber points to the tale of a transsexual survivor of Katrina being arrested for using the woman’s room and asks “Why not have unisex bathrooms?” One obvious reason is that, in commercial establishments at least, unisex restrooms present a stronger risk of alienating customers with a preference for the single-sex model than vice versa. Still, social mores have changed in some places, and the architecture hasn’t caught up.

Here, I suspect there are liability-related reasons. The first innovator to create a unisex bathroom and be unfortunate enough to be the scene of a sexual assault in the bathroom is going to be sued for not conforming to the standard practice. So there’s a collective action problem even to the extent that institutions wish to create unisex restrooms. (The uber-trendy bar and restaurant Mie N Yu in Georgetown has a unisex bathroom, but they have a full-time attendant.)

Read On…

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Katrina volunteer liability protection

By a voice vote, the House of Representatives yesterday approved H.R. 3736, legislation “providing legal protections for volunteers assisting in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort”. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a sponsor, said in a press release (PDF):

“At the federal level, the Volunteer Protection Act [passed some years back] does not provide any protection to volunteers who aren’t working under the auspices of an official nonprofit organization, namely a 501(c)(3) organization, and it provides no protection at all to nonprofit organizations themselves….

According to recent press accounts, the Red Cross feels constrained in giving out the names of refugees to those who want to offer their homes to them for shelter because they have concerns about liability. The Red Cross has cited “liability issues” as a reason for people not to volunteer to take refugees into their homes, and complained generally that “There is so much liability involved.”…

The bill, Sensenbrenner said, would apply only to those who act without pay and without a prior duty to aid, and would not apply to those who “act in a willful, wanton, reckless, or criminal manner or violate a State or Federal civil rights law.” More: our Sept. 6 post, in which Ted calls attention to some of the same Red Cross complaints (coincidence?). And Glenn Reynolds’ list of Katrina relief outlets is here — please remember to give.

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Lawsuits on the levee

After reports (see Sept. 9) in National Review Online, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere that Army Corps of Engineers levees and other flood-control measures in southern Louisiana were derailed by litigation over environmental impact statements, critics of the projects respond that the measures in question were badly planned, ineffective in addressing flood dangers, and were eventually let drop for good reasons. (G. Tracy Mehan III, “Dam It”, National Review Online, Sept. 12; press release by University of Texas lawprof Thomas A. McGarity of the left-wing Center for Progressive Reform, Sept. 9 (PDF)). Jonathan Adler comments on NRO “The Corner” here and here.

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Busybody Tennessee AG vs. Gretchen Wilson

Tennessee attorney general Paul Summers sent a warning letter (PDF) to country music star Gretchen Wilson (“Redneck Woman”) demanding that she stop pulling a can of Skoal smokeless tobacco out of her pocket on the concert stage; she’d been waving the can to illustrate a song about the “Skoal ring” outline in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Summers’s letter invoked the 1998 multistate tobacco settlement, although neither Wilson nor her concert venues ever signed that agreement or could be in any way bound by it; it went on to insinuate that Skoal’s manufacturer had procured her “promotion” of the product, an insinuation that turned out to be quite false, the singer’s representative explaining that she had had no dealings with the company. Nonetheless, perhaps fearful of suffering the fate of the much-boycotted Dixie Chicks, Wilson capitulated instantly and promised not to display the tin on stage any more, whereupon Summers expressed satisfaction (PDF) and called her a “good citizen”. Had the object of suppression been something other than tobacco, do you think by now we might have heard any outcry about artistic freedom or musicians’ rights of expression? (“Country singer Gretchen Wilson asked to keep smokeless tobacco in back pocket”, AP/CourtTV, Aug. 29; Gail Kerr, “Wilson put quick stop to spat over Skoal”, Aug. 31; CommonsBlog, Aug. 27; Nick Gillespie and Jacob Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”, Aug. 29.) More: Will Wilson comments at the AEI Federalism Project’s AG Watch (Aug. 29).

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