I’ll be taking the next two days off while I deliver a speech at a private conference and catch up on other matters. You should keep checking in for posts by Ted Frank, but there won’t be any by me before the weekend. In the mean time, you might consider dropping by some of the weblogs listed on our blogroll on the lower right column of the front page. Or check out one of the following very disparate blogs from our bookmark list: Aaron Haspel, Lawrence Solum, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, Jim Henley, Agenda Bender, Matthew Yglesias, The Agitator. See you soon.
Posts Tagged ‘about the site’
New reader letters
Latest batch includes letters upbraiding us for our ignorance of the Olympic sport of curling; calculating the impact of head-on crashes; wondering about how things may look when judges get awards; and offering a proposal for trial lawyer accountability.
As an experiment, we have occasionally been enabling comments to entries in our letters section. In the case of the letter we ran Dec. 14 on the Schwartz v. Citibank late-fee class action, this resulted in more reader discussion than we could have anticipated, with more than 80 readers putting in their two cents (or 5 cents, or 17 cents, depending on how big their refund was from the legal settlement). We’ve now closed the comments, but left the discussion intact.
Another record traffic day
Yesterday set a new record for visitor traffic at this site, with 10,798 unique visitors (up from the 4,000-5,000 we get on a typical weekday) and something like 24,000 pages served. All we can say is that a whole lot of people read Walter Williams’s column.
Yet more from the publicity file
Your editor was recently quoted in Reason (Brandon Turner, “Citings: Snow Job”, Jan., not online), where he predicted (in an interview conducted this fall) that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Hernandez v. Hughes Missile Systems, the ADA right-to-return-after-drug-misconduct case. (How accurate was this prediction? See Dec. 13). I also contributed a quote this fall when the New York Times took a look at New Jersey’s office charged with cracking down on unethical attorneys, which it’s fair to say has its hands full (John Sullivan, “In New Jersey, Rogue Lawyers Are on the Rise”, New York Times, New Jersey edition, Oct. 19, not online). And the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, covering local attorney Elliot Rothenberg’s challenge to a rule requiring all Minnesota attorneys to enroll in “elimination of bias” classes, mentions this website and our description of the program as “compulsory chapel” (see Nov. 21) (“Attorney challenging state requirement of anti-bias classes for lawyers” Jan. 2).
Back in October, we were quoted by Legal Times’s Jonathan Groner in an interesting piece on a little-publicized crusade by “public interest” lawyers to extend the constitutional right to taxpayer-provided counsel, ushered in with Gideon v. Wainwright for persons facing criminal prosecution, to civil matters such as child custody fights (“On a Crusade for a ‘Civil Gideon'”, Legal Times, Oct. 20). The idea, quietly promoted by the Soros-backed Public Justice Center and by NYU Law’s Brennan Center, is far-reaching and actually quite scary in its implications. See George Liebmann, “‘Civil Gideon’: An idea whose time has passed”, Daily Record, Jul. 18, reprinted at Calvert Institute site. Advocates were hoping to convince the Maryland high court to embrace civil Gideon, in what would have been the first such ruling in the nation, but this month the court dodged the issue in ruling on the case, Frase v. Barnhart. (Ann W. Parks, “Top court sidesteps ‘Civil Gideon’ issue, strikes down custody conditions”, Daily Record, Dec. 12; Jonathan Groner, “Inadmissible — No ‘Civil Gideon’ — for Now”, Legal Times, Dec. 15).
Also from the publicity file
National Journal, the ultimate Washington insider’s magazine, gave this site a nice write-up earlier this month. It says we provide “juicy morsels” as well as “ammunition” in legal reform battles (Peter H. Stone, Dec. 6, not online to nonsubscribers at least). In Claims magazine, for insurance professionals, columnist Kevin Quinley names The Rule of Lawyers (St. Martin’s) as #3 in his list of 2003’s “Top Ten Risk Management Books” (Dec.), calling it “a devastating critique of the current wave of class action and mass tort litigation” and “good catharsis” for risk managers. And talk radio WGOW-FM in Chattanooga picks this site’s much-visited personal responsibility page as its “Website du Jour” for yesterday.
U.S. lawyer count now exceeds 1 million
Welcome USA Today readers: the national newspaper reports that the number of lawyers in the U.S. now exceeds one million, and that the number of students taking the Law School Admission Test is nearing the previous record, set in 1990-1991. The article quotes yours truly at some length and mentions this website. “Lawyers say they are busy. Fifty-three percent say their greatest challenge is managing increased workloads, according to a November poll by the Affiliates, a lawyer and paralegal staffing service.” (Del Jones, “Lawyers, wannabes on the rise”, USA Today, Dec. 26) (also reprinted, via Gannett News Service, in Indianapolis Star, Arizona Republic, Salt Lake Tribune, and others)
Latest newsletter
Our latest free newsletter, summing up the past 3-4 weeks’ worth of items on the site, went out this afternoon to its 2100+ subscribers. If you didn’t receive it, you can sign up here for future mailings and to read older newsletters. It’s a great way to keep up with items on the site you may have missed.
New batch of reader letters
We’ve posted another batch of letters from readers. Among topics: a Pennsylvania case in which a doctor was ordered to pay for a mistake by nurses in the operating room; an outcry by consumers over the results of a class action (Schwartz v. Citibank) over late fees which is resulting in a $9 million payout in lawyers’ fees and refunds in the range of 18 cents for many credit card holders; a report from a reader that Norton Internet Security is blocking access to our site because we have too much talk about “weapons”, presumably meaning too much discussion of firearms litigation; and a letter on the prospect of lawyers’ going after the personal assets of Connecticut doctors in negligence cases after exhausting their insurance coverage.
Welcome FoxNews.com readers
We’re quoted and this website is mentioned in a Fox News feature about “lawyers of the moment” who find themselves in demand for multiple celebrity cases, such as Mark Geragos, who has represented Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson and Winona Ryder. (Amy C. Sims, “Trendy Lawyers Share Stage With Celeb Clients”, Dec. 16).
Newsweek and Weekly Standard cover stories
Newsweek has a new cover story (“Civil Wars”, Dec. 15) on “Lawsuit Hell”, with sidebars on what litigation is doing to schools, medicine, and municipal governance (Chicago), with balance from Sen. John Edwards. The good news to report is that it’s a superior package, no surprise since one of the lead writers is Stuart Taylor Jr. (writing with Evan Thomas). The less good news is that although many of the colorful cases cited will seem, um, familiar to our readers (see Nov. 26), this website wound up not getting mentioned in the final draft. (Maybe someone will recommend us in a letter to the editor). NBC/MSNBC is doing related broadcast features all week, and the authors will be taking part in a live Web discussion on Thursday 12/11 at 11 a.m. EST.
And it’s a busy week on the newsstands, since our friend Bill Tucker has a cover story in the new (Dec. 15) Weekly Standard entitled “In Defense (sort of) of Trial Lawyers”. We disagree with quite a bit of it, as you can imagine, but it does give us a couple of nice mentions, which counts for a lot, no?