Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘on other blogs’

October 28 roundup

  • Alleged wife murderer “sues J.P. Morgan for cutting off his home equity line of credit.” Reason cited: “imprisonment”. [Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider via Fountain]
  • Charles Krauthammer on the need to “reform our insane malpractice system. … I used to be a doctor, I know how much is wasted on defensive medicine.” [Der Spiegel interview]
  • Popehat looks back on turning two, in customarily entertaining fashion [unsigned collective post]
  • Sigh: “Chamber of Commerce Sues ‘Yes Men’ for Fake News Conference” [ABA Journal]
  • Coverage mandates explain a lot about why health insurance is so much costlier in some states than others [Coyote] More: Tyler Cowen (autism treatment)
  • Watch out for those default judgments: PepsiCo hit with $1.26 billion award in Wisconsin state court, says word of suit never got to responsible officials within the company [National Law Journal]
  • Ohio appeals court: characterizing incident as “Baby Mama Drama” is not prosecutorial misconduct [The Briefcase]
  • Ideological tests for educators? On efforts to screen out would-be teachers not seen as committed enough to “social justice” [K.C. Johnson, Minding the Campus]

Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,

“Negligent-security” law, down Memory Lane

Eugene Volokh recalls (with a followup) a groundbreaking 1973 case in which the Tenth Circuit ruled that it could be found negligent for a supermarket to have installed a silent alarm that summoned the police when a holdup was in practice; a hostage was killed in the resulting shootout. The case is consistent with others in which lawyers have advanced theories summed up in the phrase “negligent provocation”.

Filed under: , ,

Med-mal on Andrew Sullivan’s blog

Longtime reader P.W. writes:

I’ve been biting my fist while I read the recent series of guest posts on tort reform and medicine on andrewsullivan.com, such as this one. Lots of readers breezily asserting that there’s no problem, pretty much a fact-free debate. I’ve emailed them myself, but no luck so far….

P.S. More or less relatedly, Democratic strategist Bob Beckel sees medical liability reform as the possible pivot of a health care deal [Real Clear Politics]

P.P.S. Sullivan’s guestblogger Patrick Appel has now posted good emails from one reader dismantling some of the trial bar talking points that had figured prominently in earlier posts:

Easily disprovable lie #1: Texas malpractice insurance rates have declined every year since tort reform was enacted. Here’s a link to TMLT, the largest insurer in Texas…

[#3:] …the inflation-adjusted decrease in overall indemnity payments is due precisely to tort reform, primarily in the country’s largest economy, California, where MICRA was established in 1974. In non-tort reform states, indemnity payments have steadily increased. In Illinois, which only adopted tort reform in 2007, the average (pdf, page 15) indemnity payment increased from $70,000 in 1980 to $630,000 in 2008. If you adjust for inflation, those 1980 dollars would only be $182,943.81 in 2009. Clearly, this is not a decrease. …

Filed under: ,

Welcome Free Range Kids readers

As readers may have noticed, I’m a big booster of Lenore Skenazy’s wonderful Free-Range Kids website (subtitle: “Giving our kids the freedom we had without going nuts with worry”), and yesterday she returned the favor with some more than kind words about this site (“great, nay mindblowing”) and a discussion of our recent post about a Staten Island mother’s suit against Little League and volunteer coaches. Interesting reader discussions ensue. (Also, more on her book here.)

While on the topic of that Little League suit, Rick Reilly of ESPN Magazine has a new column that a lot of people are talking about: “A tale of two Little Leaguers”

Filed under: , ,