January 24 roundup
Longtime Overlawyered favorite Judy Cates, of columnist-suing fame, is using large sums of her own money to outspend incumbent James Wexstten in hard-fought race for Illinois state judgeship;...
View ArticleMarch 1 roundup
Oregon Supreme Court plays chicken with SCOTUS over $79.5 million punitive damages award in Williams v. Philip Morris case. [Sebok @ Findlaw; Krauss @ IBD; POL Feb. 1] Speaking of punitive damages, I...
View ArticleLetter to the editor
In today’s Washington Post: Dana Milbank’s Feb. 28 column on Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker operates on the premise that the winner of any Supreme Court argument should be whoever can best appeal to the...
View ArticleApril 24 roundup
Telemarketers working for lawyers and chiropractors “line up every day” at police and public records offices to buy car-crash records [Dallas Morning News] Nice work if you can get it: Bernardine...
View Article“U.S. Companies May Be on Hook for Libyan Terrorism”
It’s like magic, we’ll just make Big Business pay: Washington, D.C., lawyer Thomas Fay has spent years hounding the Libyan government for money on behalf of victims of terrorist attacks. Now he’s...
View ArticleInside the Eskimo global-warming suit
Looks like we’ll be hearing a lot more about the “Kivalina” (Alaskan Inupiat village) climate-change suit: Over time, the two trial lawyers [Stephen Susman of Texas and Steve Berman of Seattle, both...
View ArticleExxon Shipping v. Baker podcast
I’ve done a podcast for the Federalist Society on the Supreme Court punitive damages decision in Exxon Shipping v. Baker. Tweet Tags: Exxon, Exxon Shipping v. Baker, judges, punitive damages, Supreme...
View Article“The Era of Big Punitive Damage Awards Is Not Over”
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a short version of my take on the Exxon Shipping v. Baker decision. Cf. also my Federalist Society podcast. Tweet Tags: Exxon, Exxon Shipping v. Baker, punitive damages,...
View Article“Exxon’s Endless Lawsuit”
Dirk Olin at Portfolio magazine on the Valdez spill litigation. Tweet Tags: Alaska, environment, Exxon “Exxon’s Endless Lawsuit” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
View ArticleMay 7 roundup
NY lawyer sanctioned $10K for behavior at deposition [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal] Obvious dangers and the W.V. frat-house rear-launched bottle rocket case [Popehat, earlier here, here] Review of...
View ArticleFree speech roundup
Those who want to protect American university life from mob intimidation, speak now or forever hold your peace [Conor Friedersdorf on Yale and Missouri incidents, Greg Lukianoff on Yale, Thom Lambert...
View ArticleFree speech roundup
Uh-oh: “40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities” [Pew Research, Cathy Young on Twitter (“OK, NOW can we stop the ‘naww, political correctness isn’t a threat to free speech,...
View ArticleClimate speech: “One assumes that there is something illegal about that, but,...
Environmentalist writer Bill McKibben, often cited as a key intellectual influence behind the push to have some climate advocacy by business declared illegal, concedes to a friendly interviewer that...
View Article“The most dangerous law for New York businesses”
Jim Copland in Crain’s New York: the notorious Martin Act, wielded by New York’s attorney general, “creates a risky climate for companies by putting too much power in the hands of a single politician.”...
View ArticleClimate deniers as “enemy of the state”
Secretary of State John Kerry says he’ll “leave it to other people” whether ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers should be considered “an enemy of the state,” as urged by a Rolling Stone interviewer [James...
View ArticleAre the climate-speech subpoenas constitutional?
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pursuing an investigation of the Exxon Corporation in part for making donations to think tanks and associations like the American Enterprise Institute and...
View ArticleCEI subpoenaed over climate wrongthink
The campaign to attach legal consequences to supposed “climate denial” has now crossed a fateful line: The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude...
View ArticleMore on the CEI subpoena
As we noted on Friday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, more recently joined by several other state attorneys general, has pursued an investigation of the ExxonMobil corporation and its...
View ArticleClimate advocacy subpoenas, III
“…the open, naked promise to use prosecutorial powers as a political weapon is a prima facie abuse of office. In a self-respecting society, every one of those state attorneys general would have been...
View ArticlePeggy Little on the climate advocacy subpoenas
At the Federalist Society blog, Margaret (Peggy) Little, practicing attorney and director of The Federalist Society’s Pro Bono Center, has published a summary and analysis (parts one, two) of the...
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