- Trial lawyers look for Democrats to punish. [Point of Law; Investors’ Business Daily]
- Point of Law Vioxx trial updates: California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
- Men seeking laws freeing them from child support when DNA proves they’re not the father. Earlier: May 10 and Feb. 3, 2004. [Time]
- Latest creative defense to a murder charge: Asperger’s syndrome. [Boston Globe]
- A complicated medmal case is trumped by the sympathy factor [Cortlandt Forum via Kevin MD]
- Cost of EMTALA (Sep. 2, 2005) in LA County alone: $1.6 billion. LA Times doesn’t
mention the law by name orconsider the obvious conclusion. [LA Times] - Why the painfully obvious explanations on painfully obvious objects? [comments at Obscure Store; New York Sun; new Mike Judge movie Idiocracy]
- Lessig: stop me before I regulate again! [Hit & Run]
- Right-wingers take on Dinesh D’Souza [roundup of links at Postrel]
- The meaningless and counterproductive Democratic House bill on student loans. [Novak @ WaPo]
- Do big law firms really care about attrition? One theory. [Ivey Files]
- My girlfriend thinks I spend too much time arguing with idiots. Relatedly, Eugene Volokh responds to Anisa Abd el Fattah about the First Amendment and Jews. [Volokh]
Posts Tagged ‘Louisiana’
Killer’s mom sues high school
Birmingham, Ala.: “Felicia Reynolds, the mother of former Hoover High School student Ricky Reynolds, has filed a $5 million claim against the city of Hoover, saying her son would not have fatally stabbed classmate Sean Joyner had her pleas for help been heeded. Ricky Reynolds is in a Louisiana prison serving a 20-year manslaughter sentence for the November 2002 incident at the high school.” (Robert K. Gordon, “Killer’s mother sues Hoover”, Birmingham News, Dec. 7).
December 2 roundup
- Tennie Pierce update: only 6 out of 15 members vote to override mayor’s veto of $2.7M dog-food settlement (Nov. 11). [LA Times]
- Reforming consumer class actions. [Point of Law]
- Judicial activism in Katrina insurance litigation in Louisiana. [Point of Law; Rossmiller; AEI]
- What will and won’t the Seventh Circuit find sanctionable? Judge Posner’s opinion gets a lot of attention for snapping at the lawyers, but I’m more fascinated about the parts where the dog didn’t bark, which isn’t getting any commentary. [Point of Law; Smoot v. Mazda; Volokh; Above the Law]
- Montgomery County doesn’t get to create a trio-banking system. [Zywicki @ Volokh and followup]
- “The Hidden Danger of Seat Belts”: an article on the Peltzman Effect that doesn’t mention Peltzman. [Time; see also Cafe Hayek]
- Pending Michigan “domestic violence” bill (opposed by domestic violence groups) criminalizes ending a relationship with a pregnant woman for improper purposes. [Detroit News via Bashman; House Bill 5882]
- Did Griggs causes distortion in higher education? I’m not sure I’m persuaded, though Griggs is certainly problematic for other reasons (e.g., POL Aug. 12, 2004). [Pope Center via Newmark]
- The Kramer cash settlement. [Evanier]
- Jonathan Wilson gives Justinian Lane a solid fisking on loser pays. [Wilson]
- Speaking of Justinian Lane, for someone who says he was “silenced” because I didn’t post a troll of a comment on Overlawyered, he’s sure making a lot of whiny noise. Hasn’t corrected his honesty problem, though. [Lane]
- The stuff Gore found too inconvenient to tell you in “An Inconvenient Truth.” [CEI]
- Islam: the religion of peace and mercy, for sufficiently broad definitions of peace and mercy. [Volokh]
- One year ago in Overlawyered: photographing exhibitionist students at Penn. Jordan Koko doesn’t seem to have gone through with the threatened lawsuit. [Overlawyered]
Update: Great 1998 Tobacco Robbery
Per Jacob Sullum (Nov. 14),
Yesterday a federal judge in Louisiana rejected a motion to dismiss [the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s] lawsuit challenging the Master Settlement Agreement that established a government-backed cigarette cartel for the benefit of state treasuries, trial lawyers, and the leading tobacco companies. The judge’s order is here [PDF]. CEI’s complaint and various other documents related to the case are here.
(see Aug. 4, 2005).
Also, Stanford economist Jeremy Bulow has published another in his series of always-excellent papers on the great tobacco robbery. As the Milken Institute’s Oct. 20 press release puts it, Bulow argues that
the public was conned: the tobacco companies passed on more than 100 percent of the cost to smokers, many states were locked into terrible financial settlements and billions in fees were set aside for trial lawyers.
“Few people trust tobacco companies, trial lawyers or politicians,” he writes. “But somehow when the three groups got together and spoke with one voice they were able to convince most people – particularly nonsmokers who benefit from higher cigarette tax revenue – that the settlement had achieved a noble public health goal. In reality, the settlement preserved tobacco companies’ profits, while it gave the trial lawyers an incredibly large ongoing source of income gouged from the hides of smokers, and handed state politicians bragging rights as Davids to Big Tobacco’s Goliath.”
(“The tobacco settlement: when trial lawyers meet tobacco execs”, Milken Institute Review, December)(reg). For more from Bulow, see PoL, Nov. 18, 2005, and Jan. 20 and May 18, 2006.
The 1998 multistate tobacco settlements were a central theme of my 2003 book The Rule of Lawyers and have been covered in depth on this site, including Aug. 4, 2005 and links from there, Sept. 11, 2005, and Jan. 3, 2006, as well as at Point of Law: May 17, Jul. 20 and Jul. 26, 2004, Oct. 6 and Oct. 14, 2005 and Mar. 20, Mar. 29 and Apr. 12, 2006.
Welcome Shane Warner listeners
Bureaucracy vs. Katrina recovery
Jonathan Rauch has a must-read dispatch from devastated St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana:
Cleanup and repair cost the school system tens of millions of dollars, but federal payment has been slow. Reimbursement for small projects goes through five to 10 weeks of federal and state review, according to David Fernandez, the school system’s financial manager. Any expenditure over $1 million is subject to another four to 12 weeks of review in Washington, he said.
This is the so-called “million-dollar queue.” “Anything over a million dollars has to be reported to Congress,” says Brown, the former FEMA director. “Why do you think that is? Congress wants to make an announcement.” In other words, members of Congress want to be the first to boast of a federal project in their district.
“This is all political,” Brown says. “It has nothing to do with good public policy.” …
On private property, even debris — including, for example, 1,600 tree stumps — had to be reviewed for archaeological value before FEMA would pay for removal.
(“Struggling to Survive”, National Journal, Aug. 11; “Stretchier Red Tape”, Aug. 11).
Jack Thompson, friend of the court?
Jack Thompson at it again
Perennial anti-videogame action-filer (and Overlawyered favorite) Jack Thompson is at it again, this time in Louisiana:
Acting on a Florida lawyer’s suggestion that violent video games may have figured in Tuesday’s slaying of a West Feliciana Parish man, sheriff’s deputies searched the home of one teenage suspect again on Thursday.
West Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Capt. Spence Dilworth said deputies seized several video games rated “M” for “Mature” from the residence of Kurt Edward Neher, 16, but the detective said he is not drawing any conclusions from his findings.
Thompson says “published reports of Gore’s injuries ‘raised a red flag’ in his, Thompson’s, mind.” For instance? Well, reports that the youths killed their victim because he would not lend them his car reminded Thompson of scenarios in “Grand Theft Auto”, and that “the apparent repeated ‘pummeling’ of the victim is consistent with scenes in violent video games.” Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, responded in a rather restrained fashion, pointing out that “Violent crime involving kids predates video games”. (James Minton, “Video games seized from teen’s home”, Baton Rouge Advocate, Jun. 3).
New Orleans judicial expense account spending questioned
A reader asks me to blog about an expose in this Sunday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune, calling it “appalling.” In 2003-2004, one judge (presumably the highest-spending judge) spent $16,717/year on travel, compared to the average $8,000 spent by other judges.
I don’t know whether this is a good judge or a bad judge, but that shouldn’t matter to my analysis. I’m less appalled. Someone has to be the highest-spending judge, and this one doesn’t appear to have violated any rules. $4,400 in taxpayer money was spent to teach a course in Colorado, but if the judge had been reimbursed by the Louisiana Association of Defense Counsel, different people would be complaining about the supposed conflict of interest. The newspaper successfully nitpicks rental-car and airport transportation costs—but the judge must have travelled coach, because there’s no complaint about his airplane tickets. One can question the political savvy of a judge who doesn’t realize that his expense account reports are going to be scrutinized. One can also complain that the money comes from civil district court filing fees, but, at the end of the day, money is fungible and it doesn’t really matter what pot the money comes from. It would probably be more efficient to end travel reimbursements and just raise salaries—but because of tax implications, maybe not.
Louisiana state judges make less than first-year associates in private law firms, and I’m not about to complain that a judge was a little generous with himself in taking advantage of available and legal perks to the tune of a few thousand dollars. There appears to already exist a check in the system, in that this judge’s request for a week-long educational trip to Italy was rejected.
Or am I so overly jaded by plaintiffs’ bar abuses in the billions that I should be more appalled? Feel free to comment in the comment section, but be polite and on-topic.
Katrina medical volunteers, cont’d
“Dozens of federally insured medical providers have been blocked from helping the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina because their medical liability protection doesn’t apply outside their own states.” (“Law keeps federally insured doctors on sidelines in disasters”, AP/Biloxi Sun-Herald, Feb. 9). More on Katrina medical volunteers: Sept. 19, Sept. 6, Sept. 2, Aug. 31.