Send us your tired, your injured & litigigious...or better yet just send their lawyers -Howard Bashman reports that:
"Banana Workers Get Day in Court" The New York Times contains this lengthy article about a case to be argued this upcoming Wednesday in the U.S. Supreme Court. Additional details can be found here in a post on the blog known as How Green Is My Country."
I'll be watching with interest. I don't understand why our country makes its court system available to redress wrongs committed (supposedly) by American companies abroad. If other countries want to pirate our copyrighted goods then I think our companies should have to use the court system over there to seek redress. But, conversely, we shouldn't make our system available to foreigners (who of course pay no taxes) unless there is a solid connection with this country that militates in favor of a suit here. Then again, our court system is so clogged with ridiculous suits why not open the circus up to everyone? Televise the proceedings, package it as a new reality TV series. Sell popcorn and T-shirts. Whatever.
Oh, and in case I forget, you know not all countries have legal systems that place a high premium on due process. In a lot of these countries people who offend the government powers-that-be just disappear. And if it's an American citizen who disappears or is confined to a life sentence for possession of a small amount of drugs, well you know what happens. Nothing. They don't have time to waste with us high-brow yanquis telling them how to run their legal system. But they don't seem to mind if their citizens hook up with some jet-setting plaintiffs' lawyers and take a turn at the legal slots over here. Come on lucky number seven...
"tapping out a text message on a cell phone can be like tossing a bottled message into the sea... According to a study by Keynote Systems of San Mateo, tens of millions of text messages are lost every month. Overall, Keynote found 1 in 20 text messages are never delivered. And a little over 1 percent took at least 10 minutes, if not far longer, to arrive. Worse, cell phone companies rarely warn users when their messages are lost. 'I wouldn't send anything important with a text message,' said Cody Kirkhart, a San Rafael student who has used the service for a year."
I have to agree with this. My wife and I have Treo phones and there is an SMS service built in to our PCS Vision plan. At first it seemed to work well, and I thought "great, a new way to sent Monique a quick text message that she could get without having to listen to voicemail." Well, guess what? Totally unreliable. I expected it to show weakness when people outside the Sprint system sent me messages (and I wasn't disappointed there), but I figured that within the Sprint network if sent my wiefe a message that it would arrive. Quickly. But not so. I've sent Monique messages that she didn't get for weeks. It seems like if it doesn't go through right away (for whatever reason) then it gets held in abeyance, and then it takes another message being sent to carry the previously "hung" one on. Kind of like toilet paper in the pipes...
Anyway, I'm still a big believer in text messaging. But it's got to be reliable before it gets used extensively. And, for now, I wouldn't rely on Sprint.
4:04:50 PM
The First Amendment still has some wind in its sails - Freedom To Tinker reports that a Court Throws Out No-Reviews Clause in EULA. A court has thrown out a software contract clause prohibiting customers from publishing reviews of a product...
1:30:32 PM
Sue your school - John Robb is looking for a legal team to sue high school sports teams for injuries to athletes. (Well, not yet. First, he's got to become extremely wealthy). His post got me thinking...
Even though it is not my bent to favor more litigation, I'm not against John's idea. I'm not necessarily for it because I'd need to know more of the underlying theory. But I will say that the educational system seems to have avoided being dragged into a lot of litigation that perhaps it should be dragged into. For instance, I believe that some law schools might be sued for admitting people that they know (or ought to know) are going to flunk out. Here's the thing that you might not know about law schools: they are cash cows. Unlike medical schools which require a lot of expensive equipment, and cadavers etc., law schools require only three things: (1) professors, (2) classroom space, and (3) a library. The library is the expensive part (because storing the by-product of dead trees is expensive, and you can figure out if this cost will be going up or down in the future). So having a law school is basically like having a huge ATM machine. More students = more money. What incentive does a law school have, then, to reduce its class size? None. And I can tell you that a bunch of them admit people that predictably get weeded out within one year (but not after paying hefty tuition).
Anyway, that's a major digression from John's point. The original point is people so far have been reluctant to sue educational instutitions for administrative decisions that harm people and yet which are driven by the desire to make money. Insulating educational instutitions from liability might make sense if they were truly above venality, but increasingly you see educational instutions hoarding patents and doing other things to maximize the profit flow (as opposed to the idea flow). And where you used to see that educational instutions were havens for the incubation of new ideas (which meant granting tenure to allow people to securely advance controversial ideas), the trend now is toward political correctness and marginalizing ideas that some group might find offensive because it challenges their (perhaps well-meant) assumptions about how the world should work.
I totally respect professors who dedicate their life to helping others, and I've known a lot of them. And still do. But, just as a Church shouldn't be insulated from liability when its priests misbehave, educational institutions shouldn't be absolved of blame (and liability) for their misdeeds. So if John's got a good theory then I hope he becomes extremely wealthy and uses his money to shake up the system.
