Mike of the Crime & Federalism blog seems to have identified the next culprit to blame for the obesity epidemic. The record, however, should reflect that I beat him to the punch in publishing, in a law-review article that a reader informs me is the first to mention Count Chocula in the footnotes.
Posts Tagged ‘Ted Frank’
“A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation”
A Little Rock friend of mine had an emergency gap in his law review, and solicited me to write about the fast-food litigation. I’m not a big fan of the eight-footnotes-a-page-style that law reviews like, but I think the piece is a good overview of what has happened to date. The article, 28 UALR L. Rev. 427 (2006), can be downloaded at SSRN (help me catch up with Bainbridge!) or at the AEI Liability Project website. (cross-posted at Point of Law)
I worry that events have outstripped me; one sentence in the article, “Why is selling soda [to 17-year-olds] an attractive nuisance, but selling … Internet connectivity is not?” predates the MySpace litigation.
“The Lieberman Purge”
Off-topic, I add to the punditocracy’s surfeit of blather on the Connecticut Senate election at National Review Online.
One thing I didn’t mention in the article that is on topic for this site is that Lieberman is one of the few prominent federal Democrats still in office that is generally willing to stand up to the trial bar. If Lamont does supplant Lieberman, the trial-lawyer takeover of the Democratic party (commented on a year ago by Walter) will be all but complete.
Update: Walter reminds me of his 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed on Lieberman’s record on liability reform.
Center for Justice & Democracy and Americans for Insurance Reform
Martin Grace and I have written a Liability Outlook for AEI looking at the last several years of CJD/AIR studies on medical malpractice. The conclusion? “In many ways, the problem with AIR’s reports is a perfect microcosm of what doctors find most distasteful about the liability system: a trial-lawyer mentality that cherry-picks facts and twists data to reach knee-jerk conclusions under the guise of a false science.” See also Jim Copland’s dissection of one such study at Point of Law on Jul. 8.
We look forward to Kevin Drum giving this paper the same deference he credulously gave AIR’s last bogus report.
One flaw of the paper is that we didn’t include the story of “Bob,” the dummy literally used to scapegoat insurance-company executives by CJD at an ATLA conference. For other CJD shenanigans, see Dec. 23, 2004 and Mar. 19, 2004. (Cross-posted at Point of Law.)
AEI Liability Outlook: “Making the FAIR Act Fair”
The first edition of the AEI Liability Outlook is out today, and features my analysis of pending asbestos legislation:
The AEI Liability Project hereby inaugurates its Liability Outlook series, designed to guarantee a paper trail to exclude any of its authors from Article III appointments. This Outlook examines the congressional attempts at asbestos liability reform. The eventual cost of asbestos litigation is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the majority of which will end up in the hands of attorneys, thus affecting thousands of corporate defendants with little or no culpability and costing tens of thousands of jobs. The trust-fund approach is a congressional attempt to reach a compromise on the liability problem, so long as nationwide reform is not politically feasible. While a trust fund has the potential to save tens of billions of dollars, the current legislation suffers from dangerous flaws that could make the cost of the asbestos litigation crisis far worse.
Other Point of Law coverage of S. 852. (Cross-posted at Point of Law.)
Free Market Project & Katrina insurance lawsuits
The Free Market Project covers anti-business media bias, and has been issuing weekly exposes of media coverage of the various lawsuits over insurance companies’ flood exclusions: Oct. 5, Sep. 28, Sep. 14. Our coverage: Sep. 15, Sep. 12; POL Sep. 28, Sep. 26, Sep. 25, Sep. 23, Sep. 22, Sep. 9. I spoke about the issue at an AEI panel I moderated on October 3 that was broadcast on C-SPAN2. Transcripts will be posted in the next couple of weeks on the AEI site.