Blog Roundup

  • The Oregon Attorney General is suing Johnson & Johnson for a secret recall of Motrin that left some bottles of defective product on the shelves. (Hat tip Consumerist). Instead of instructing retailers to pull the bottles from the shelves, hired contractors to go undercover, armed with credit cards that would bill J&J, and buy up all of the defective bottles that they could find. At the close of this secret recall operation, J&J execs sent around emails proclaiming the double-secret probation recall was a “great success” and a “win.”
  • As Tyler Cowen reports, the odds of dying in a horse accident in New York City in 1900 were 1 in 19,000. The odds of dying in a car accident today in New York City are 1 in 26,000. Of course, as law prof Eugene Volokh pointed out in this long-ago post, those numbers aren’t the only consideration. In the late nineteenth century, horses daily deposited an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure on New York City’s streets.
  • AbnormalUse reports on what is believed to be the first ever wrongful death lawsuit that a chewing tobacco company has settled. As AbnormalUse explains, the unique facts of this case might mean that this is the last chewing tobacco settlement that we are likely to see for a long time.
  • Eric Turkewitz on what AVVO ratings might not tell you about your lawyer – namely that he is a registered sex offender and was once disbarred.