Source: https://www.litigationandtrial.com/series/special-comment/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:57:54+00:00

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If football is abandoned by the parents of the next generation of potential players, it will not be the result of “liability suits” — it will be because the sport is increasingly being perceived, as Cowen and Grier tellingly analogize, as being as risky as “smoking or driving without seatbelts.” If, as they claim, “modern parents keep their kids out of playing football,” it will not be because of “our litigious society” but rather because parents are trying to protect their children from brain damage.
Several days later, the sadness over Aaron Swartz’s death — and outrage over the prosecution that his family and friends say played a role — still lingers. I wrote my thoughts about the meritless Swartz prosecution right after he was indicted in 2011, and have since updated the post to address the information disclosed since his death. But this post isn’t about the details of Swartz’s prosecution, it’s about him and the criminal justice system we built for him.
In September 2011, a few months after my post went up, I received an email from Aaron thanking me for my post, and asking, “If you have any time, I’d love to get your thoughts on a few things. Would it be possible to have a phone call at some point?” Much has been written about his brilliance and his extraordinary curiosity — which he himself said was all that distinguished him from everyone else — and about his uncompromising stances. I quote his introduction here to note that, when sending an email to a stranger, he was charming and unassuming, and when we spoke he was unfailingly polite.
In the conversation that followed his email, we talked about how the biggest challenge in a prosecution is the psychological stress. I told him to be mindful of the case but to still live his life. I told him, in all seriousness, to read Franz Kafka’s The Trial, because much of what was going to happen was going to be frustratingly incomprehensible. The law has a way of appearing to be rational even when it is being wholly irrational; after a few desperate initial years in law school and early practice, lawyers learn to be stoic and to accept the whims of the whirlwind, but to an outside observer any effort to comprehend the machinery of the law in a mere matter of months would leave them feeling powerless. I’m sure I’m not the only one who recommended it, given the circumstances.
Then we talked about history, politics, productivity, and a little bit of everything. Maybe our conversation was so pleasant because he was exceptional social engineer; reading his eulogies, it seems that most everyone who interacted with him had a similar engaging experience, regardless of the context or the topic. For what it’s worth, my impression was that he was so curious about the world that he was genuinely appreciative when anyone helped him explore an idea.
Today the Supreme Court holds oral arguments in Standard Fire v. Knowles, a Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) case. According to the defendant, an insurance company, the case involves plaintiffs’ attorneys “manipulating their complaints to evade federal diversity jurisdiction” by stipulating to the class recovering less than $5,000,000, the CAFA threshold that allows defendants to remove class actions from state court to federal court. According to the plaintiff, an Arkansas homeowner who alleges the insurance company routinely failed to pay for general contractors’ bills in home repairs, the issue here is just another example of the 70-year-old rule that a plaintiff can stay out of federal court by stipulating to recovering only damages below the jurisdictional amount.
federal courts are (and were even before Ashcroft v. Iqbal) more prone to grant motions to dismiss (and motions for summary judgment) than state courts.
Is any of that true? Does it make a difference to the bottom line when all is said and done? Who knows, but it’s lawyer’s lore that federal courts are better for defendants while state courts are better for plaintiffs. A lawyer wouldn’t disregard the lore about federal court, much like how a sailor wouldn’t leave port on Friday or a driver wouldn’t race in a green car. For what it’s worth, though, state courts are typically the home of large personal injury verdicts — because the vast majority of wrongful death cases are there — federal juries do indeed award large damages in many cases. In 2012, for example, the second largest non-patent verdict nationwide was $167 million from a federal jury in an employment / sexual harassment case.
The Governor’s complaint implicates the extraordinary power of a non-governmental entity to dictate the course of an iconic public institution, and raises serious questions about the indirect economic impact of NCAA sanctions on innocent parties. These are important questions deserving of public debate, but they are not antitrust questions. In another forum the complaint’s appeal to equity and common sense may win the day, but in the antitrust world these arguments fail to advance the ball. Plaintiff’s complaint fails on all prongs: it fails to allege commercial activity subject to the Sherman Act; it fails to allege that Defendant’s activity constituted a violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act; and, it fails to allege that Plaintiff suffered an antitrust injury. On thorough review, this Court can find no basis in antitrust law for concluding that the harms alleged entitle Plaintiff to relief.
I spent plenty of time on this blog discussing Penn State’s civil liability following the Jerry Sandusky abuse scandal, with most of my thoughts in this post. At this point, the Freeh report was rightly damning, and PSU has, as I hoped they would, brought in outside help (Ken Feinberg, the most prominent mediator in the country) to try to resolve the claims.
I didn’t dwell on the consent decree Penn State entered into with the NCAA sanctions — as they say, a deal is a deal, and that’s just as true for a university and an athletic association, except to point out that there was no reason for the NCAA to care that a minority of the Penn State’s Board of Trustees disagreed with the decision to enter into the consent decree. Corporations act through their management, chosen by their Board of Trustees; the thoughts and feelings of a minority of trustees aren’t relevant to anyone dealing with the party.
[T]he sanctions against Penn State do not even ostensibly serve the NCAA’s stated goal of protecting the fairness of intercollegiate athletic competition. Rather, they were taken for the purposes of debilitating a once-powerful football program, enhancing the NCAA’s own reputation, and boosting the competing football programs of cetrain member colleges and universities by removing from competition one of the leading competitors.
My workload has been heavy lately, as has life in general, so I figured it was time for a diversion. It’s the end of the year, and thus unfortunately almost time for more deceptive “most frivolous lawsuits” lists, so here’s a retrospective of the worst lawsuit defenses I recall from 2012, a retrospective on the evils of water-soluble chalk, the violent propensities of classic Kung Fu movie fans, and the layman’s understanding of how a penile implant should work.
[She] continued to draw for several hours, during which time she never blocked or obstructed public passage on the sidewalk. During that same period of time, many members of the public, including Philadelphia police officers, passed by and looked at her artwork — some commenting on the artistic quality of and the message communicated by her work — and no one ever advised the plaintiff that she was violating any law.
[The] allegation regarding the type of chalk she was using is DENIED, because Answering Defendants do not have such knowledge.
I’ve been blogging here for over five years, and this is my 880th post. I consider this blog to be a success: I was able to impress my mom, I’ve been invited to speak on panels, I was asked to write a practice guide for lawyers, and a reader once recognized me by my name tag at a party hosted by a law firm. Hundreds of thousands of strangers have read my work, and a couple dozen of them have taken the time to carefully explain to me how wrong I am about everything.
Last week, I wrote about a commonplace problem in product liability lawsuits: when courts forbid plaintiffs’ lawyers from sharing relevant discovery evidence amongst themselves, they inadvertently enable the defendants to engage in discovery fraud by cherry-picking which evidence they produce in each case. A new article by the federal judge (and the special masters he appointed) who oversaw the 9/11 Responders litigation reveals another critical component of a successful and fair resolution of high-stakes litigation: the cases need to move.
On the one hand, the 9/11 Responders litigation was indeed “unprecedented,” but, then again, so are most mass torts. Pharmaceutical liability mass torts are somewhat routine these days, but, for example, the consolidated asbestos litigation presented many of the same problems of scientific causation and varied individual exposure as the 9/11 Responders cases. Each case presents new and unique challenges.
In many ways, the most unique aspect of the 9/11 First Responders was the defendants’ interest in settling — the biggest defendant was the “Captive” billion-dollar insurance fund created by the government for the purpose of settling the claims. That certainly didn’t make the case easy, but it added an element missing from most mass torts: some willingness among the defendants to settle for a reasonable amount. Usually, defendants want to tell people to take their cancer, their uncontrollable hemorrhaging, their heart attacks, and go home penniless.
Defendants exert leverage by pressuring the plaintiffs’ contingent fee structure. Defendants’ counsel are paid on a current and hourly basis and staff liberally. The result is extensive discovery, numerous motions, and a general prolongation of proceedings. It becomes expensive for plaintiffs’ counsel to fund the litigation, and a practice has grown of financing mass tort actions at high compound interest rates with repayment deferred until a settlement or recovery is accomplished.
Was Hurricane Sandy (Legally) An Act of God?
Saturday morning, I took my kids to one of their extracurricular activities and, as is our custom, struck up a conversation with one of the other kids’ parents, a doctor. He told me a story about when he was buying his house (a new house from a homebuilder): the contract included a 1-year warranty for defects in the house, but excluded problems caused by “Acts of God.” Reasoning that an “Act of God” could mean anything — it is indeed a central tenet of the Abrahamic religions that God is omnipotent and omnipresent — he crossed it out with his pen and initialed the change.
When it came time to sign the documents, the homebuilder’s agent looked at the scribble, shot a glance at the man and his wife, and said, “so who’s the amateur lawyer?” The man opened his mouth to explain, his wife gave him that look, and the “Acts of God” language was restored. Thankfully, nothing went wrong with the house that first year, and so he was spared further theological or marital arguments.
I told him that, though the phrase was on its face ambiguous, there was caselaw interpreting “Acts of God” — regularly used in construction, insurance, transportation, and other contracts — to generally mean completely unforeseeable events, and there was a whole body of law relating to the interpretation of these “force majeure” clauses. “So,” he asked, “would Hurricane Sandy be an ‘Act of God’”?
Good question! My off-the-cuff answer was: it depends on what geographic location and what damage you’re talking about. Here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, although Hurricane Sandy was itself unusual in how it came about — i.e., a warm hurricane being pulled into a cold, low pressure front — the mere fact of a strong storm with high winds was certainly not unforeseeable. Similarly, anyone who lives on the beach anywhere in the world runs a risk of a major storm surge flooding their home entirely. The trickier issue would be, say, Lower Manhattan, which was damaged primarily by a 100-year flood.
One of the points I’ve made several times on this blog is that, for all the times liberal or progressive judges are accused of “judicial activism,” many “conservative” judges (usually members of the misleadingly-named The Federalist Society) are more than happy to ignore their own claimed principles of judicial restraint when it serves their purposes. Justice Scalia has made a habit out of it, completely ignoring his own “textualism” and “originalist” approach when it suits his political purposes, while other Judges content themselves to sporadic outbursts of judicial activism when the stakes are high. I gave an example of conservative judicial activism three years ago when the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ignored several recent Department of Defense regulations, a sixty-year-old Act of Congress, and a basic principle of federalism to dismiss lawsuits brought by more than a dozen Iraqis who were “beaten, electrocuted, raped, subjected to attacks by dogs, and otherwise abused” by private contractors working as interpreters and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison.
This week, another example jumped into the public consciousness, when Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote about “The judicial jihad against the regulatory state,” using the recent Homer City Generation v. EPA opinion written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush after serving the Republican Party to help impeach Bill Clinton and to fight Bush v. Gore in 2000. The American Constitution Society’s blog chimes in with another example of Judge Kavanaugh attacking the Environmental Protection Agency (and, to be fair, with a counterexample of Judge Kavanaugh blocking the State of South Carolina from implementing its “Voter ID law,” apparently another disenfranchisement tool like Pennsylvania’s Voter ID law). Ed Whelan at National Review Online attempted a tepid defense of Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion, but in the end he merely parroted Judge Kavanaugh’s own assertion that he was following the will of Congress.
Now on to Homer City Generation v. EPA. The case involves the EPA’s attempt to implement the Clean Air Act, specifically the parts relating to upwind States’ obligations to ameliorate pollution to downwind States. Despite the length of the opinion (60 pages) and the dissent (another 44 pages), and the case’s tortured procedural history, the case isn’t that complicated. As you read it, bear one important principle of federalism in mind: the Supreme Court has held that if a statute is “silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue,” and if “the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute,” a court must defer to the agency’s interpretation.” Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837, 843 (1984). Judicial deference to agencies is one of the key components of our federal system today, and it is regularly used to dismiss challenges to federal agency actions.
Scientific American’s “Literally Psyched” blog had a post recently on “The Great American Novel and the search for group cohesion.” I don’t quite agree with the thesis — that the concept of the ‘Great American Novel’ was a means by which America unconsciously mended the wounds of the Civil War — but the post does have a number of important reminders about human psychology. The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment proved long ago how the actions of ordinary people can be contorted and distorted into doing terrible things by mere circumstance.
Take something known as the minimal group paradigm, a concept that basically says exactly what it is: a way of creating groups, and cohesive groups at that, by using something as minimal as possible to tie them together.
One of the most famous approaches is known as the Dot Estimation Task. The setup is simple. You show a bunch of people some dots, be it on a computer screen or a piece of paper, and ask them to estimate how many dots they’re seeing. You then tell them—completely arbitrarily—that they have either under- or over-estimated the actual number. And then comes the kicker: you tell them that under- and over-estimation is a trait, and that they belong to a group of other understimators or overestimators, respectively. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
What’s funny is how easily people will start bonding with others they believe share similar characteristics. The people chosen by the researchers to be arbitrarily told that they were “underestimators” or “overestimators” started behaving as if the division were real and meaningful, even though the “division” not only involves a meaningless trait, but is in fact wholly invented by the researchers, who make up the results at random.
A 2006 experiment told participants that overestimators were actually more accurate than underestimators on the task—and that this accuracy seemed to relate to other tasks as well. Participants then rated both their own and the other estimator group on 24 unrelated traits and finally, completed measures of social esteem and social identity.
Not only did people evaluate their newly acquired in-group more favorably than their newly-minted competitors, but those who thought themselves to be of higher status (the overestimators) exhibited a larger bias than their underestimating counterparts. What’s more, the more positively the in-group was evaluated, the higher was the social esteem of its individual members—and the higher their subsequent social identity.
That is to say, if you create an arbitrary group, and tell them that trait makes them superior, their own group dynamics will further reinforce the superiority of that trait.

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