Consumer Law

The Right Side of Civil Justice

Posted on May 22, 2013
In November 2009, some very brave medical malpractice victims decided to visit the district offices of Virginia?s two U.S. Senators in the hopes to showing them the importance of the civil justice system. When they arrived, the local Tea Party...

Lawsuit?s Hard Knock Life Gets a Break

Posted on May 17, 2013
Hi. My name is Annie Lawsuit and let me tell you, it?s not easy being me. Politicians constantly insult me. The media constantly misrepresent me. I?ve had Presidents of the United States attack me - by name! My ability to...

Leaked Memo from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!

Posted on May 14, 2013
Hey, look what just appeared in our inbox! Confidential Memo From: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce To: Our Unceasingly Persecuted Members Re: Those Unhinged State Attorneys General Date: May 14, 2013 ------------------------------- I don?t know about you, but when I...

Hockey?s Smash Hit

Posted on May 13, 2013
Admittedly, it?s not exactly like watching someone get thrown to the lions, but I think we all need to acknowledge that watching today?s most popular sports means witnessing the slow disintegration of athletes' brains. It was only a matter of...

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Safety Lessons from New York to Texas

Posted on May 10, 2013
What kept going through my mind this morning watching Matt Lauer anchoring the Today Show atop the new One World Trade Center building as the 758-ton spire was hoisted up there (making the tower a symbolic 1776 feet), wasn?t anything...

Class Actions, Yes; Forced Arbitration, No!

Posted on May 08, 2013
What do the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (with over 200 organizational members), Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports), the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the National Women?s Law Center, and the Center for Justice & Democracy, have in common? Many good...

The Right Way/Wrong Way on Caps

Posted on May 06, 2013
Three times in the last 35 years, the insurance industry has created liability insurance ?crises? for doctors (and other businesses and professions). Each time this has happened, the insurance industry has tried to cover up its own mismanaged underwriting by...

For Law Day, Honoring Those Fighting Forced Arbitration

Posted on May 01, 2013
It?s Law Day, everyone! Actually, it?s May Day. Law Day was a fairly recent Cold War-era creation by a very paranoid United States who thought the whole Maypole/flower basket thing had been taken over by communists. But whatever. We?ll take...

Health Care: Look Who?s Not Talking and Whose Job Is it Anyway?

Posted on April 29, 2013
So much focus of medical liability system ?reformers? these days is about ?communication.? Patients would be safer if doctors were more honest about their ?mistakes,? the theory goes. Hhmm. I?m not saying that couldn?t happen, but when you?re talking about...

Terrors? Incidental Insurance Victims

Posted on April 25, 2013
Mass casualties aren?t just for wars anymore. Let?s put aside ?terrorism? for the moment. Think about the carnage over the last week due to corporate negligence and recklessness. There was yesterday?s horrific building collapse in Bangladesh, killing hundreds and injuring...

Who?s Medicare Advantage?

Posted on April 23, 2013
In 1997 film ?As Good As it Gets,? there was a great exchange between Carol, the Helen Hunter character, and a doctor sent to properly diagnose and treat her sickly son following her HMO?s cheap incompetence: Carol Connelly: F#&king H.M.O....

An Unbelievable Week in Review

Posted on April 19, 2013
We haven?t posted much this week. That?s not because of the scarcity of civil justice news but rather the opposite - we were overwhelmed by the significance of it. Finally, here is a quick review. We?ll start by noting that...

Sporting Terror

Posted on April 16, 2013
There?s a great Mr. Rogers quote running around the Internet today: ?When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ?Look for the helpers. You will always find people...

The Twists and Turns of Gun Liability

Posted on April 12, 2013
In its infinite wisdom, Congress decided in 2005 that when protecting most of the gun industry from liability for gun violence, it shouldn?t actually protect gun dealers who break the law. So when an 18-year-old went on a shooting rampage...

It?s the Texas Insurance Industry, Stupid

Posted on April 10, 2013
Debunking myths about the impact of Texas ?tort reform? is clearly a favorite PopTort pastime. (Like here, here.) Admittedly, we?re a little obsessed by this, but what are we supposed to do when articles like this keep popping up? The...

Hot Pop Topics

Posted on April 08, 2013
If you?ve ever watched The View, you know that every show starts off with Hot Topics, where the hosts (whoever's left of them) discuss the latest hot news items. No doubt today?s show will address Margaret Thatcher and while they?re...

Caught in the Insurance Industry Shuffle

Posted on April 03, 2013
The insurance industry spends about $6 billion a year trying ? largely unsuccessfully - to get drivers to switch their car insurance policies. (This is a $160 billion market and the big carriers control half of it.) Never-ending expensive TV...

Civil Justice - Unattainable Pipedream?

Posted on April 02, 2013
You may have heard that ginger blowhard Donald Trump has voluntarily withdrawn his lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher, which he says he filed because Maher did not follow through on a bet (part of a Tonight Show bit) by paying...

Forced Arbitration and the Supreme Court?s Stealth Annihilation of Civil Rights

Posted on March 27, 2013
I do hate taking any focus off Prop 8 and DOMA today. To quote that famous legal scholar George Clooney, ?At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right...

Doing Violence to the Legal System

Posted on March 25, 2013
Lots of talk over the weekend about guns. On Saturday night, 3,000 house parties and a national town hall discussion took place, hosted by MoveOn.org with Michael Moore and a panel of experts following the screening of the Oscar-winning documentary,....

Attack of the Caffeinated Monster

Posted on March 20, 2013
Monster Beverage, which is ?among scores? of caffeine-laden energy drinks ?like Red Bull and Rock Star ? that companies are aggressively marketing to teenagers and young people,? has been in the news recently. In fact today, Monster made the front...

The Exorbitant Cost of Generic Drugs

Posted on March 19, 2013
Imagine you wake up with shoulder pain and go to your doctor who prescribes you an anti-inflammatory drug called Clinoril. Your pharmacist then gives you a generic version of this medication (sulindac), perhaps for insurance reasons. (We?ve all been there,...

Gideon, Legal Aid, and Contingency Fees

Posted on March 18, 2013
It?s quite a week for 50th Anniversaries! On March 22, it will be 50 years since The Beatles released their first album. But even more importantly than that (!), today marks the 50th Anniversary of one of the most important...

The Two Faces of Asbestos Transparency

Posted on March 15, 2013
Just catching up today on our earlier post about the series of hearings held this week by various subcommittees of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. So let?s discuss Wednesday. In the morning, the Center for Justice & Democracy participated in...

White Shoe Firms Feeding at the Government Pig Trough

Posted on March 11, 2013
It must be hard to keep white shoes clean while slurping at a pig trough, no? (Wild boar troughs included.) The National Law Journal today released an investigation exposing how much money the U.S. government spends contracting legal work from...

A Virtual Coal Mine of New Information

Posted on March 07, 2013
The DC corporate law firm Crowell & Moring has been involved in some nasty stuff over the years. For example, the Tobacco Archives contain numerous ?Tort Reform Project? budgets from tobacco companies, showing fees to Crowell & Moring (among other...

The Cross-Eyed Litigation Focus of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee

Posted on March 06, 2013
When it comes to litigation and the civil justice system, there are two kinds of people in this world. There are people who are actually familiar with it. And there?s the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Consider March. This week, the...

Huff Post Repost: Cookbook Medicine Is a Recipe for Disaster

Posted on March 04, 2013
An astonishing new article from JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that at least 150,000 people per year may be needlessly killed, rendered disabled, or otherwise harmed due to misdiagnoses in doctors' offices. Johns Hopkins, whose researchers authored this study, have been...

The Feres Doctrine?s Military Injustice

Posted on February 28, 2013
The nation, it seems, has suddenly woken up to the problem of military sexual assaults against women. Today, on its front page, the New York Times ran part two of a series about the disproportionate trauma faced by female military...

Get Out of our Bodies, Johnson & Johnson

Posted on February 26, 2013
Yesterday, a New Jersey jury ruled in the first of about 1,800 vaginal mesh cases pending in that state against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Ethicon. The jury could not have been more clear: $3.35 to a South Dakota...

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