I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm. Founded in 1958, we have recovered over $2 billion for our clients through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, [...]
Stolidly Productive Humility: Instilling Discipline By Finding Fun
Yesterday Letters of Note, one of the essential reads of the Internet, posted a letter from David Foster Wallace, who had just completed but not yet published Infinite Jest, to Don DeLillo, asking for advice: Your note of 9/19 was heartening and inspiring and also made me curious about several things. I would love to know what changes in yourself account for "And discipline is never an issue (as it was in earlier years)." I would love to know how this education of the will took place -- would that you could assure that it was nothing but a matter of ... Continue Reading
Thoughts On Liability For The Chesterfield, NJ School Bus Accident
Readers of this blog anywhere near New Jersey undoubtedly know the story; for readers elsewhere, here's NBC Philadelphia's coverage. Thursday morning, a dump truck hit a elementary school bus at the intersection of Bordentown-Chesterfield Road and Old York in Chesterfield, NJ, killing 11-year-old Isabelle Tezsla, seriously injuring two other students including one of her triplet sisters, and leaving 17 more students with minor injuries. I have written about some of the unique issues that arise in school bus accidents before — an issue that’s often on my mind now since my four-year-old twins rode a yellow school bus for the first time ... Continue Reading
PA Legislators Finally Develop Sympathy… For Illegal Gun Sales
The Republican Party controls both the Governorship and the General Assembly in Harrisburg, and they have made it one of their top priorities to prevent injured workers, consumers, and patients from receiving fair compensation for their preventable injuries. Back in September, I wrote about this attack on Pennsylvanians’ rights, discussing a legislative alert put out by the Pennsylvania Association for Justice which described some of the bills that Republican legislators had proposed as a means of further eroding Pennsylvania's civil justice system. Those bills included, for example, HB 304, which would impose a 15 year statute of repose in all ... Continue Reading
Brain Injuries, Not Lawyers, May Spell The End Of Football
Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has made a name for himself explaining how important it is that things stay just the way they are. (Cf. David Hume) Earlier this week, for example, he was in the New York Times opining that our banking oligarchy can't be broken up because smaller banks "could make mistakes or take on bad risks without being punished very much in terms of capitalization revenue," as if we didn't just loan $1.2 trillion and directly pay $182 billion to bail out these same big banks precisely because they "made mistakes or took on bad risks." As Paul ... Continue Reading
The Real Risks Of Writing A Legal Blog
Over at the North Carolina Law Blog, Jim Dedman, proprietor of Abnormal Use (and friend of this blog) writes about a perceived risk of writing a law blog: that your opponents may take the things you write and use them against you in court. I agree with Jim entirely that there isn’t much reason to worry about that, not least because of the low odds that you will actually say something your opponent could really use against you in court. I believe in what I do as a lawyer and so my thoughts expressed on this blog are usually consistent with ... Continue Reading
Do Lawyers Defending The Catholic Church Live On Another Planet?
As I've mentioned before, I think the motivations that compel lawyers to deny reality while defending some clients are varied and complex, but it cannot be denied that, in many cases, the defense is premised not on providing explanations or raising genuine doubts, but on burying the truth. Lest we forget what brought us to the ongoing criminal trial of Monsignor William Lynn, here is how the grand jury report against him begins: In September 2003, a grand jury of local citizens released a report detailing a sad history of sexual abuse by priests of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. That ... Continue Reading
The Reality Of Punitive Damages In Elder Neglect Lawsuits
In 1987 Congress passed the Nursing Home Reform Act, but the NHRA only said that a "nursing facility must provide services and activities to attain or maintain the highest practicable physical, mental, and psychosocial well-being of each resident," without providing specific numbers on the minimum staffing levels for registered nurses and nurse's aides required per resident. The situation is a perfect storm for elderly abuse and neglect: more residents and fewer nursing assistants translates directly into profits for the owners of the facility, sending the whole industry into a 'race to the bottom.' The states have filled in the gap in some ways with regulations ... Continue Reading
The Patent Troll Lawyer Business Model
It’s no secret that patent infringement is one of the hottest areas in which to practice law these days. The inventor-friendly principles that governed the original United States Patent Office back when Thomas Jefferson ran it (though he personally wasn't too much a fan of patents) are still the law today, even though the scope of prior art in most industries has expanded far beyond the point where any patent examiner could reasonably review it, much less ensure an inventor in an ex parte proceeding fairly describes it. These days, if an inventor has enough determination, or enough funds to ... Continue Reading
Susan G. Komen, March of Dimes, and Corruption by Branding
[Update, February 3, 2012: The Komen Foundation reversed its decision. That's of course the right decision; the question now is if they will publicly explain how they came to make such an obvious mistake, and why they dishonestly denied the influence of politics in making the decision.] If by chance you read this blog but live under a rock, earlier this week the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc., cut all grant funding for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. For some reason the Susan G. Komen Foundation claims the decision wasn't political even though, of course, it was. This isn't ... Continue Reading
Pregnancy Is (Legally) Like A Disability If Employers Accommodate Temporarily Disabled Workers
Via Eric B. Mayer's Twitter feed, I saw that a few days ago the Wall Street Journal's blog for working parents, The Juggle, posted on a hot legal issue these days, "Should Pregnancy Be Treated as a Disability?" A recent study by a University of Dayton law professor, Jeannette Cox, asserts that pregnant women should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, to protect them from being fired or forced to perform labor that could be harmful to mother or child. (The paper is forthcoming in March in the Boston College Law Review.) The ADA doesn’t recognize pregnancy as a disability, leaving pregnant women physically ... Continue Reading
