• The folks over at Abnormal Use have a fascinating interview with University of Maine law professor Jennifer Wriggins, who has just published a book, “The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and Tort Law,” which deals with how plaintiffs of different races and genders are compensated under personal injury law. Consider a wrongful death action involving a child who has no history of earnings.
  Under most wrongful death statutes, the child’s estate is entitled to recover her lost lifetime earnings. Normally, the value of these earnings is determined by economist expert witnesses, who rely on tables of data relating to incomes of adults. Because of the income gap between men and women, the lifetime earnings of a woman will be assumed to be less than a man. And so the a girl victim of a wrongful death may be under-compensated.
  Coincidently, over at The Volokh Conspiracy the other day, Eugene Volokh blogged his criticism of a Texas wrongful death case where the judge excluded evidence that the wrongful death victim was an immigrant with a forged green card. The defendant corporation in that case tried to use the fact that the worker was subject to deportation to argue that the the victim’s lifetime earnings should be discounted. (If deported to his native country, his income would be substantially less than what it was in the United States).
  It seems to me that the Texas courts (for once) made the right call. The phenomenon of disparities in compensation partially based on race and gender is one I hope to get a chance to blog about in the near future.

• There’s so much great legal information on the web now, that often I miss some of the best sources for a topic I’m blogging about. In blogging about the Feres doctrine last week, I missed some of the great posts that Professor Bernabe has done on the topic. For an in-depth treatment of Feres, you can click here.

• The PopTort calls out an anonymous Boston doctor.

• Of course the story that dominated this week’s news was the death of Osama Bin Laden. I just got done talking about all the great information that’s available for free on the web nowadays, including legal information, but not everyone takes advantage of it, such as these people who have no idea who Osama Bin Laden is. If you know how to Twitter, how can you not know how to Google?

This blog in maintained by the Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Alan H. Crede, P.C.