Posts Tagged ‘New York’

Yes, tea is hot, too. (Redux: Villona Maryash edition)

Brooklyn mother Villona Maryash spills tea on her five-month-old infant, infant burned, sues Starbucks. But the complaint is not that the beverage was too hot, but that Starbucks should’ve served it on a tray and with a sleeve. Of course, protective sleeves are in ready reach of customers at every Starbucks I’ve been in, and it’s likely that Starbucks doesn’t insert the cups in sleeves automatically for environmental reasons. [NY Post; Gothamist commenters are not impressed]

May 16 roundup

1995 Washington Square sudden acceleration revisited

In 1992, Diana Maychick drove her mother’s Oldsmobile back to Washington Place in Greenwich Village, and got out. Her mother, the 74-year-old Stella Maychick, slid over from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat, readying herself to return to Yonkers. Maycheck, a shorter-than-average woman, suddenly took off in the car, which sped up, ran two stop signs, and tore through Washington Square Park, killing five and maiming several others.

Diana Maychick is now Diana Foote, a restaurant reviewer for a Palm Beach newspaper, and recently recounted the accident, claiming the recent Toyota troubles exonerated her mother.

Which I found fascinating, because I worked on that litigation—and the evidence that Maychick hit the gas instead of the brake was so strong that the plaintiffs’ lawyers abandoned the standard specious “mysterious gremlins caused the car to accelerate” theory and replaced it with a “General Motors knew that drivers were hitting the wrong pedal but didn’t do enough to warn them” theory. I took issue with Foote’s column in a letter to the newspaper.

As for the lawsuit itself, the judge excused everyone in the voir dire who expressed the remotest skepticism about plaintiffs’ theory, and GM settled shortly after the start of trial. One certainly marvels at the chutzpah of the theory of the case, given trial lawyers’ role in trying to persuade the public that driver error couldn’t possibly be to blame.

New York bill would ban restaurant use of salt in cooking

Assembly members Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn), Margaret Markey (D-Queens) and Nick Perry (D-Brooklyn) have filed a bill that would hit restaurants with $1,000 fines if their chefs use salt as an ingredient in their recipes. Some reactions: Russell Jackson, Metafilter via Althouse, Verdon/Outside the Beltway (“Is salt necessary for some cooking? Yes.”) via Bainbridge, Mangu-Ward (“$1,000 a pinch? $1,000 a grain?”) and more, Alkon, Gothamist. Four years ago we reported on a breathalyzers-for-everyone proposal from Ortiz.

Bank of America disclosure controversy

No good deed goes unpunished, suggest the editorialists at the Washington Post of an aggressive enforcement action by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo over the bank’s Merrill Lynch deal. “Dishonest dealing in the securities markets is a problem. So are duplicative state and federal laws that can make companies repeatedly liable for the same conduct under different legal standards.”