Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘legal blogs’

Coming up: Overlawyered hosts Blawg Review #33

Next Monday, November 21, this website will be hosting Blawg Review #33, the thirty-third weekly carnival of the best postings about legal matters from around the blogosphere. A different site hosts the roundup each week; last week’s Blawg Review #32 was hosted in honor of (U.S.) Veteran’s Day by JAG Central, which covers the world of military law.

You can help assemble the material for Blawg Review #33 by following the instructions at the Blawg Review site. If you’re a website proprietor, you should nominate your favorite post from the past week or so from your own site. And any reader can nominate a favorite recent post from any weblog on a legal topic (the weblog needn’t be one that specializes in legal issues). (Sorry, we can’t guarantee that all nominations will be used.) All submissions are due in by this Saturday night, but earlier submissions are greatly appreciated to reduce the last-minute editing duties.

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New bloggers at Point of Law

Atlanta attorney Jonathan B. Wilson, author of the newly released book Out of Balance: Prescriptions for Reforming America’s Litigation System, has now begun blogging at our sister site Point of Law and also has his own weblog site which is eminently worth checking out. And next week two guest bloggers — both already well established on their own blogs — are scheduled to begin guestblogging stints there as well. Check it out!

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Also at Point of Law

All sorts of other stuff is going on at our sister website:

* An all-new featured discussion on medical liability has just begun, proceeding from the publication of an important new empirical study by Stanford prof Daniel Kessler;

* Legal ethicist and law prof Lester Brickman has a commentary on a Manhattan judge’s questioning of legal fees in 9/11 cases;

* The Manhattan Institute is seeking applications for a research fellowship on legal issues;

* Law prof Michael DeBow, familiar to many readers for his guest postings here, is joining the Point of Law blog as a regular contributor, with comments already on flu vaccine, the dismissal of a charity hospital suit, FDA jurisdiction over tobacco, and a new antitrust blog;

* Ted Frank contributes items on malpractice by expert witnesses and on a new study suggesting that experts suffer from some of the same biases as lay observers in high-damage cases, on whether much “pro bono” litigation really helps the public, and on “Robin Hood” school-finance suits;

* Jim Copland welcomes a new and improved website, LegalReformNow;

* I’ve got posts on sanctions for wrongful litigation (did you know federal judges liked the sanctions in their old, stronger form?), collective business guilt, ski slope disclaimers, Sarbanes-Oxley, Judge Posner’s view that both Sherlock Holmes and law reviews are much overrated, liability’s burden on small businesses, and insurance broker scandals (posts in progress). Much more, too; bookmark the site today.

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EDDix guide to law weblogs

An outfit called EDDix, which markets services relating to the electronic data discovery (EDD) aspects of litigation, recently published an annotated list of its 50 favorite legal-related weblogs, which includes kind words about this site (we’re among 16 deemed “must reading”). Perhaps the list was meant to boost EDDix’s profile — it’s certainly done that — but it’s worth a look in its own right. I don’t remember seeing elsewhere such a useful pocket guide to the so-called blawgosphere, including information on the people who put out the sites, and it alerted me to the existence of a number of promising sites new to me.

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Ireland’s Personal Injuries Assessment Board

In a far-reaching reform intended to curb its rising litigation rate, Ireland recently adopted the system sometimes known as scheduled damages: an official panel, the Personal Injuries Assessment Board, has been established to publish recommended guidelines (the “Quantum”) for the pain and suffering component of sued-over serious injuries, thus reducing the need to litigate each damage determination afresh. Scheduled compensation and like devices are often encountered in European court systems but, aside from workers’ compensation, are virtually unknown here. I discuss the Irish reforms and their implications at more length today on Point of Law.

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PointOfLaw.com now open

Point Of Law, the new site that the Manhattan Institute is launching with my assistance, has now opened its doors. There’s a lot to explore including a series of top-drawer reprints of great law review articles of the past. The center attraction, however, is a new weblog on which both Ted Frank and I will be posting, along with Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute and some players to be named later. We’ve been putting up experimental posts for a couple of weeks now so there are dozens of them there now which have never appeared on this site; recent topics of discussion include the controversy over Judge Calabresi’s remarks at the American Constitution Society (posts by Jim Copland one, two); a report on the introduction of trial by jury into Japan; and tag-team coverage of New York Timesman Bob Herbert’s ineffably lame recent diatribes on medical malpractice (Frank, Copland, Olson).

Beyond that, we’ve enriched the site with selected highlights from the Overlawyered archives, including Ted’s must-save discussion of the Stella Liebeck versus McDonald’s hot coffee case. Many more features to come, and Prof. Bainbridge has already given the site a nice welcome, as have Prof. Grace, Prof. DeBow and “How Appealing”‘s Howard Bashman. Why don’t you give it a look/link now too?

P.S. In response to reader inquiries: no, I have no plans to scale back (let alone discontinue!) Overlawyered. PointOfLaw is separate and additional. (expanded and bumped 6/24).

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