Walter Olson describes some of the outrageous outcomes that HIPAA's obsessive treatment of "privacy" creates:

Under HIPAA, it would have been unlawful for the psychiatric hospital that treated student Cho Seung-Hui, who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech university this week, to compare notes on his therapeutic progress, or lack thereof, with his counselors or dean. So effectively did the various privacy laws bottle up information that even a Virginia Tech official tasked with the monitoring of problem students is said to have known little or nothing about Cho’s lurid history of psychotic symptoms until after the fact.

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Infringement of medical privacy is a lamentable thing, but experience soon suggested that other things can be even worse. After a Washington, D. C. pedestrian was fatally struck by a car, his family learned nothing of it for two weeks until a $17,000 hospital bill arrived in the mail. In rural Colorado, where ambulance dispatchers had been casually accustomed to naming the family whose home needed a run (get over to the Wilson ranch, Vern is having chest pains) it was thought advisable to rely on unfamiliar street addresses instead, leaving drivers to fumble.

Much social collaboration with the aim of better care has become legally hazardous. Doctors have been reported hesitant to draw relatives aside with advice that elderly parents need help with pill-taking or ought to stop driving. Opinions differ on whether a doctor can safely ring up other practitioners to check whether a new patient reporting unverifiable pain is known for a pattern of narcotic-seeking.

The psychologist and prolific novelist opines that the law makes it too difficult to have a person involuntarily committed: 

Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior--prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech--is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms.

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous "counseling"--an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to "treatment" for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn't given. The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.

If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would've been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might've even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it's possible confinement would've been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.

• reforms the rule of joint and several liability among joint tortfeasors;
• caps punitive damages in most cases (greater of two times compensatory damages or $500,000);
• requires opt-in class membership for most class actions;
• restricts the admission of expert testimony and provides standards for the qualification of expert witnesses; and
• creates a general immunity for volunteers and charitable organizations.

A business owner is suing an Anaheim man and his lawyer for filing at least 123 lawsuits that allege disabled-access law violations, saying the practice is "an effort to extort a quick and dirty settlement."

 

In a lawsuit filed last week in Orange County Superior Court, Huy Dinh accuses David Gunther and Morse Mehrban of filing "frivolous lawsuits" to extort money from small businesses. Dinh, is suing alleging malicious prosecution, fraud and abuse of process, and seeks punitive damages.

 

Dinh was sued last year by the pair, who alleged a work station at his business was too high for disabled persons. A jury sided with Dinh, according to the lawsuit.

The crucial importance of defense lawyers was illustrated in reverse by the Duke rape prosecution, mercifully ended last week by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper's highly unusual affirmation of the defendants' complete innocence. Others are rightly focusing on the "perfect storm," generated by a local prosecutor up for election peddling to his constituents a racially-charged narrative that so neatly fit the ideological template of those who dominate academia and the media. But perhaps we should stop for a moment to consider what saved these young men: defense attorneys, blogs and competing governments.

 

Our criminal justice system does not rely solely on the fairness of the police and prosecutors to get things right. In every criminal case, there is a professional whose only obligation is to scrutinize what the police and prosecutor have done. This "professional" is a lawyer. The next time you hear a lawyer joke, maybe you'll think of the lawyers who represented these three boys and it won't seem so funny. You probably can't picture their faces and don't know their names. (They include Joe Cheshire, Jim Cooney, Michael Cornacchia, Bill Cotter, Wade Smith and the late Kirk Osborn.) That's because they put their zealous representation of their clients ahead of their own egos and fame. Without their lawyering skills, we would not today be speaking so confidently of their clients' innocence.

 

These lawyers held the prosecutor's feet to the fire. Their skillful questioning at pre-trial hearings revealed the prosecutor's misconduct that eventually forced him to give up control of the case and now threatens his law license. They uncovered compelling exculpatory evidence and made it available to the press; they let their clients and their families air their story in the national media.

 

There is no rule book for what prosecutors call "heater" cases like this one. Navigating the law, politics and publicity in such case is an art not a science. These fine lawyers displayed all the skills and tenacity that made me want to be a criminal trial lawyer after watching the television series, "The Defenders," when I was 10 years old.

 

Do you suppose that lawyers like these gained their skills only representing the innocent? Criminal lawyers are constantly asked how they can live with themselves defending those guilty of serious crimes. The full and complete answer ought to be that, because we can never be sure who is guilty and who is innocent until the evidence is scrutinized, the only way to protect the innocent is by effectively defending everyone.

After news spread of the O'Reilly-Wales proposal, an (needless to say) angry battalion of bloggers counterattacked, crying "censorship." Now we're beyond the merely obnoxious culture of chin-dribble. Now we're talking politics and power. So the cry goes up: You can't tell us how to talk. That's "censorship."

 

The censorship claim is often made by political Web players who want to be "free" to use whatever means will achieve the end of driving their opponents over the cliff. Consider the Congressional Black Caucus. Its affiliation with Fox News to conduct presidential debates was fire-bombed recently on "progressive" Web sites. Example: "Guess it takes a whole lot of grease to fry CBC's chicken." Scared, the three major Democratic presidential candidates pulled out. Censorship? Try doublespeak. The strategy of deploying charged and hyper-aggressive language is now evident: First intimidate one's targets, then coerce them--into conformity or silence. And do it always under the banner of free speech and democracy.

 

There is no evident political coloration to the broader concern that's arisen about conduct on the Web. The anti-civility trolls are in restaurants, stadiums, theaters, planes, church, the airwaves, in dreams. This is merely a recognition that rules of the road can indeed enhance, not suppress, the flow of truly free expression and minimize the already ample frictions of daily life. Better late than never.

[M]ost plaintiffs are represented by lawyers who work on a contingent- fee basis. They often don't even expect to go to court; all they're looking for is a settlement.  . . . Under SB 117,  . . . lawsuits will multiply because there will be little downside to bringing relatively meritless cases. You still might get a settlement. Meanwhile, employers will have an incentive to settle even when they know they're in the right. That's because their legal bills, which they'll have to pay even if they win, could very well exceed the cost of settlement - and in some cases most certainly will.

On Dec. 14, 1999, American border guards intercepted Ahmed Ressam as he tried to cross the U.S.-Canada border. In a spare tire well of his rented car, they found nitroglycerin and four timing devices. The target of this would-be terrorist, who came to be known as the Millennium Bomber, was Los Angeles International Airport.

 

But just as important as his destination was his origin: the French-Canadian city of Montreal, which sits just six hours north of New York City by car on I-87.

 

The arrest revealed to the world the existence of an active Islamic jihadist cell, then baptized the Montreal cell. It was in this Quebec metropolis that Ressam had stirred up his plot against the United States. Montreal was where he had been recruited into a radical Salafist mosque to subsequently train in an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

 

Eight years later, New Yorkers must face a startling, sobering reality: The threat of Muslim fundamentalism in Montreal is only growing. If left to fester, it could put New York City in the crosshairs of another major attack.

[I]t is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.