Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Manhattan Institute’

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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And for something completely different

I’ve written a literary review of a historical novel (Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask) for Sunday’s New York Times Book Review; it has nothing at all to do with problems of the legal system. I’m at work on a second review for the same outlet and hope the relationship will be a long and happy one. (Walter Olson, “Women in Love”, Sept. 26).

Back on topic: yesterday’s publicity roundup omitted a few recent clips. To wit: I’m quoted in an article in Legal Affairs on the controversial new “litigation-finance” industry, which advances money to plaintiffs (often at very high interest rates) in exchange for a share of the booty (Daniel Brook, Legal Affairs, Sept./Oct.)(see Aug. 4, 2003). My Manhattan Institute colleague Robert Goldberg quotes me in a piece on the attacks on FDA general counsel Dan Troy over his initiative to have the agency intervene in state-court liability suits which threaten to contravene FDA policies (“The sacking of Troy”, Washington Times, Jul. 25)(see Jul. 14). And very kind things are said at PokerPulse Forums about me, about this site, and about my book The Rule of Lawyers in the course of a discussion of the lawsuits under California’s s. 17200 against Google, Yahoo, etc. for supposedly promoting online gambling (see Aug. 9).

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“Symbolism 1, Substance 0”

I’ve got an op-ed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal (Aug. 23)(reprinted at Manhattan Institute site) examining what I term the “surprisingly conciliatory” line the Kerry/Edwards campaign has taken in recent weeks on litigation reform, and analyzing (insofar as that’s possible, given the thus-far-sketchy details) the five-point plan the two offer for addressing the malpractice-suit crisis. For more, see my Aug. 9 post and links from there. Also check out this site’s omnibus pages on politics, which includes many recent posts on Kerry and Edwards, and on medical liability. (Yet more: Point of Law).

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Products we don’t see

“Another measure of the magnitude of the high cost of lawsuit abuse is the number of products and services that have been withdrawn from the U.S. market due to fear of liability, irrationally applied. Volvo, for example, makes an integrated child booster seat that is not sold in the U.S. because of product liability concerns….

“Similarly, fears of silicone implant lawsuits in America caused Japanese silicone makers to quit production of silicone coating for hypodermic needles, which reduces the pain of an injection. The director of one of these firms stated, ‘We’re sure our product is safe, but we don?t want to risk a lawsuit.’…

? Monsanto Company abandoned the planned production of a safe, biodegradable, and effective reinforcing phosphate fiber that would have been a substitute for asbestos.

? Union Carbide decided to forego developing a suitcase-sized kidney dialysis unit and offering intravenous equipment.

? Sunstar, a health-spa manufacturer, decided not to market a safety device due to a liability-related increase in its insurance costs. The product would have set off an alarm every time the cover of a spa was opened. Because the product was a safety device, only one insurance company was willing to write a policy.

— Excerpted from Steven B. Hantler (DaimlerChrysler Corporation), “The Seven Myths of Highly Effective Plaintiff’s Lawyers”, Manhattan Institute Civil Justice Memo #42, Apr. (PDF) (more on paper)

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Welcome National Review readers

David Frum says very kind things about me and this site (and interesting things about lawyers, politics, and Sen. Edwards) in his column today for National Review (Jun. 8). Last night on NRO’s “The Corner” NR contributor John Derbyshire was generous about my latest literary production, The Rule of Lawyers (“Walter Olson’s book is a great source on the social harm done by the trial lawyer culture”, Jun. 7). And Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, managing editor of our related site Point of Law, has an NRO commentary on the Edwards affair, with a link to us (“Kerry-Edwards & Co.”, Jul. 8).

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Thanks to Mike DeBow…

…for his contributions as a guest blogger over the past week. Aside from Mike’s postings at Southern Appeal, be sure to check out the outstanding links page he maintains at his Cumberland School of Law faculty website, and the conservative/libertarian legal scholarship reading list and pre-law reading list that he co-edits in conjunction with the Federalist Society. Also watch for his work to appear soon on Point of Law, the new Manhattan Institute website I’m editing.

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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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New website coming soon: PointOfLaw.com

For a while now I’ve been at work on a project which will be of interest to many readers of this site, and I’m happy to say I can now divulge its general outlines. A few months ago the Manhattan Institute (with which I’m associated as a senior fellow) asked me to develop, launch and edit an entirely new website under its auspices (unlike Overlawyered, which is freestanding). The site’s mission: to take a more in-depth look at our legal system and how it might best be fixed.

Read On…

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“Panel Finds Mold in Buildings Is No Threat to Most People”

“Stepping into an issue that has alarmed homeowners and led to hundreds of lawsuits and billions of dollars in insurance payments, a government panel of experts reported yesterday that toxic mold in homes did not appear to pose a serious health threat to most people.” A panel of epidemiologists, toxicologists and pediatricians convened by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed existing scientific literature on the subject. “Though the experts said mold and indoor dampness were associated with respiratory problems and symptoms of asthma in certain susceptible people, they found no evidence of a link between mold and conditions like brain or neurological damage, reproductive problems and cancer.” (Anahad O’Connor, New York Times, May 26). For more on mold litigation, see Dec. 4 and earlier posts; “The Growing Hazard of Mold Litigation”, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy, Jul. 17, 2003 (paper in PDF format/press release). More: press release, video briefing and report links from National Academies.

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