Bill Hobbs and Glenn Reynolds report the judicial “spanking” of a trial lawyer who took on a librarian and lost.

We first reported on this last April. The trial lawyer is one Clifford J. Shoemaker, who specializes in suits that blame autism on vaccine makers. When blogger and librarian Kathleen Seidel criticized Shoemaker’s legal tactics, the lawyer subpoened her, requesting Seidel provide a laundry list of “documents pertaining to the setup, financing, running, research and maintaining” of her blog.

Seidel responded by authoring her own legal brief that cited case law proving that a journalist’s right to protect her sources extends to a “citizen-journalist” blogger. The judge sided with Seidel and laced into Shoemaker for “abuse of the legal process.”

Here’s Hobbs’s description of how the judge’s ruling will haunt Shoemaker in Google eternity:

“For quite some time to come, all the many, many blog posts about the Shoemaker-Seidel legal tussle will appear near the top of the Google search result for ‘Clifford Shoemaker,” so future potential clients of his will be able to learn that he’s a malicious hack of low ethics who got beat in court by a librarian.”

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For many years, Mississippi was the pit, a dark and hopeless hellhole for physicians and defendants at the mercy of the trial bar.

Then Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove called a special session to bring down medical-malpractice premiums. In 2004, the next governor—Republican Haley Barbour—convened another special session to limit pain-and-suffering awards in medical cases, and to set limits on damages.

The result was a healthy, growing business sector in Mississippi that not even Katrina could knock down. Now, after years of supporting lawsuit reform, the venerable Clarion-Ledger of Jackson is asking if the “tort reform pendulum has swung too far.” They also call into question the state’s “broken judicial election system.”

The editorial was a response to an adjacent piece by a local attorney, Alex Alston, Jr., who claims that 88 percent of all jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs have been reversed by the state Supreme Court. Frankly, I’m skeptical of Mr. Alston’s factoid - can our readers in Mississippi scrub this factoid for accuracy and context?

In the meantime, let me note that not even Alston supports scrapping judicial elections in Mississippi. Instead, he asks voters to be aware of the issues, to check contributions to judicial candidates on their web sites, and to get involved in the election.

As far as tort reform is concerned, I would respectfully ask that The Clarion-Ledger take a fresh look at their front page. Zach Scruggs was just sentenced to prison in the footsteps of his father, Dickie. The Scruggs’ convictions, however, by no means signal the end of trial lawyer power. Trial Lawyers, Inc. continues circling Mississippi, looking for ways to invalidate these reforms and take us back to the palmy, balmy days of jackpot justice.

Perhaps the pendulum has a ways to go in the direction of reform.

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Before Sheldon Whitehouse was a Democrat U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, he was a public-nuisance lawyer . . . excuse me, I mean he was a public-spirited Attorney General who tried a novel legal theory in lead-paint lawsuits based on the “public nuisance” theory.

The idea here is simple—hold paint companies liable for gigantic damages whether or not there was actually an injured party. Lead, of course, has been stripped from paint for decades. Never mind. A Rhode Island verdict two years ago caused Sherwin-Williams to see its market cap drop by almost $2 billion, about one-third of its value. Seeing dollar signs, a South Carolina firm called Motley Rice made an agreement with the Rhode Island AG to go after the paint companies for a contingency worth almost 17 percent of any settlement. In other words, mega millions.

It was, alas, all for naught. The Wall Street Journal details how the Rhode Island Supreme Court slapped down this bit of litigious nonsense. Missouri and New Jersey have also rejected the “public nuisance” theory.

So tell me, who is the public nuisance now?

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Remember the old joke: Why does a man hit his head against a brick wall? Because it feels good when he stops.

By this standard, politicians in New York State and New Jersey make this guy look like a genius.

Lawrence J. McQuillan of the Pacific Research Institute and Gregg M. Edwards of the Center for Policy Research of New Jersey note in a strongly reasoned piece that monetary losses from New York and New Jersey are greater than virtually anywhere else. Both states are in the top five nationally for the number of civil suits per 100,000 residents, with the third- and the fourth-riskiest tort litigation systems in the country.

Large corporations, fearful of appeal bonds in the billions, are leaving New York. New Jersey’s economy grew half as fast as the nation’s. In Texas, where comprehensive lawsuit reform was passed, the economy is booming.

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For years, Northwestern University allowed youth baseball leagues in the community to use its fields for games. No more. Parents of a young baseball pitcher recently threatened a lawsuit against Northwestern because the sun was shining in his eyes. As a Northwestern official wrote in explaining the school’s decision:

Unfortunately, Northwestern University is not able to do anything to mitigate the sun’s effect on the vision of the pitcher, so we have made the unfortunate decision that we can no longer safely hold these games.

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Overlawyered.com – the invaluable reporter of trial lawyer abuse – has a post on a lawsuit filed against John Deere and Home Depot. It seems a father was cutting his grass one day with a John Deere riding lawn mower when he carelessly threw the machine into reverse and accidentally struck his three-year-old son, who tragically suffered serious injuries to his right leg.

As everyone knows, the rotating blades on any lawn mower can be hazardous, which is why the John Deere’s owner’s manual contained multiple, clear, explicit warnings about the potential dangers. Among the warnings ignored by the father:

DANGER: ROTATING BLADES CUT OFF ARMS AND LEGS
Do not mow when children or others are around.
Do not mow in reverse.
Look down and behind before and while backing.
CAUTION: Avoid injury! Rotating blades are dangerous. Children or bystanders may be injured by runover and rotating blades.
Before backing up, carefully check the area around the machine.
NOTE: Backing up while the mower is engaged is strongly discouraged.

Among the claims filed in the lawsuit was the incredible assertion that John Deere failed to warn owners about the potential dangers. Cases like this chip away at the notion that individuals are responsible for their actions – even careless actions that result in tragic injuries to loves ones. They also inspire manufacturers to guard against lawsuits by slapping warnings labels on every conceivable product covering every imaginable eventuality – a phenomenon chronicled by Bob Dorigo Jones of Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch (MLAW) in his best-selling book, “Remove Child Before Folding: The 101 Stupidest, Silliest and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever.”It’s easy to snicker at some of these warning labels – like the one found on an iron-on T shirt transfer that warns: “Do not iron while wearing shirt” – but Dorigo Jones has a serious point. The proliferation of useless warnings dulls people to the warnings that truly must be heeded – such as the real dangers of carelessly operating machines like riding lawn mowers. Lawyers like to argue that their cases make products safer, but the truth is that restoring the notion of personal responsibility to our legal system would go a lot farther in preventing tragic accidents like this one than yet another lawsuit.

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Tennessee’s “current judicial selection process is a perfect storm of special interest control, closed government and lack of accountability,” says Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey in a well-argued oped in the Tri-City News (TN). Ramsey clearly spells out the problems with judicial selection Star Chambers – not just in Tennessee, but in all states that have experimented with this undemocratic system for selecting powerful state judges.

• Special interests control who sits on the bench. As Lt. Gov., Ramsey can appoint eight members to the judicial selection commission, but “six of those – by law – must come from the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association … and the District Attorneys General Conference. This means that 75 percent of those who pick our judicial nominees are selected by special interests in the legal community.”
• The commission of special interests meets in secret and “refuses to open its meetings and deliberations to the public.”

Ramsey pushed a reform proposal that would have “removed special interest control of the nominations but still allowed legal groups to submit names, though neither I nor the speaker of the House would be bound by their list.” He also joined Governor Phil Bredesen in calling on the commission to come out from behind closed doors and meet in public.

While special interest groups managed to kill all reform attempts, the state legislature failed to reauthorize the judicial selection commission. As a result, the Star Chamber is now operating under a one-year sunset provision, and Ramsey has pledged to “continue the fight to reform the commission in 2009.”

Unelected, unaccountable judicial selection commissions which completely insulated from the people inevitably come to see their power to pick judges as a sacred right, not a public service. The people of Tennessee are lucky to have a champion of democratic reform like Lt. Gov. Ramsey.

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L. Gordon Crovitz has a good piece in today’s Wall Street Journal that navigates the thinking behind the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to reduce the $2.5 billion punitive damage award against Exxon for the Valdez spill nearly 20 years ago and establish some principle to guide future cases. “We should cheer,” Crovitz writes, “when the Supreme Court issues clear, transparent and common-sense rules, giving judges, jurors and citizens new understanding about how the legal system should work.”

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Dickie Scruggs, who gained fame and considerable fortune in the 1990s for his part in suing large corporations for billions, was sentenced today to five years in prison for conspiracy to bribe a judge. Scruggs’ son will be sentenced next week for his role in this family affair.

There are a lot of lessons one could draw from this sorry business, but one of the most important may be the moral hazards involved in putting our courts in the business of redistributing such large sums of money. Whatever else one might say about Scruggs, he knew his way around a courtroom, and he clearly thought $50,000 bribe was enough to gain a favorable ruling in a case with a pay-off of $26.5 million.

The FBI deserves kudos, not only enabling justice to be done in this case, but helping to protect our system of justice as a whole from people consumed by the kind of gargantuan greed we’ve been told only large American corporations can be guilty of. Mississippi’s Sun Herald has an article describing the sentencing here.

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An Arizona law requiring that expert witnesses in medical malpractice trials actually be experts in the field they’re testifying about has been struck down in appellate court.

The law had clearly sought to end the abuse of “professional witness” doctors who make a lucrative career testifying in medical malpractice trials at the behest of trial lawyer firms and practice little if any actual medicine. The law supplemented an existing, overly-vague rule that witnesses be qualified by “knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education.” The new law insisted that expert witnesses actually practice in the same medical specialty as the defendant and devote most of their professional time to either active clinical practice or instruction of students.

The appellate court’s rationale was that legislators shouldn’t be telling judges how to run their courtrooms. But apparently the on-going charade of bogus medical experts making a mockery of their courtrooms hasn’t been enough to get the judges themselves to clean up their act.

UPDATE: Carter Wood over at PointofLaw has more.

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