The Democrat Thread

[StrangeSox]

This rarely, if ever happens, and most laws are written to protect pro se plaintiffs and give them the benefit of the doubt, especially when construing things like complaints and charges of discrimination and the like. And attorneys fees and costs, at least in Illinois and Federal courts, aren't available except in frivolous cases, and I think only against attorneys who bring those cases, not pro se plaintiffs.

 

Fair enough. If you lose as a pro se plaintiff, can you still be responsible for defendants' filing fees?

[StrangeSox]

Just for reference, have you ever been involved in a case involving a Pro Se Plaintiff, or even witnessed a case involving a Pro Se Plaintiff?

 

Nope! What, if any, are the financial risks for a pro se plaintiff who brings a non-frivolous claim but loses?

[Jenksismyhero]

Nope! What, if any, are the financial risks for a pro se plaintiff who brings a non-frivolous claim but loses?

 

None, other than filing costs, which can be waived with an application for economic hardship.

[Jenksismyhero]

Fair enough. If you lose as a pro se plaintiff, can you still be responsible for defendants' filing fees?

 

Nope. Only in the rarest of cases (i.e., you do something frivolous wasting the court/defendants money....very, very rare)

[Soxbadger]

Almost 0, the worst would be reimbursing the filing fee (around $200), but I have never seen a Judge hit a Pro Se Plaintiff with anything like that.

[Jenksismyhero]

It's also worth noting this.

 

Did you think the lawyers were going to work for free for 10 years?

[Balta1701]

Did you think the lawyers were going to work for free for 10 years?

Well, they're going to be filing hundreds of thousands of cases now, so yeah, I think you've convinced me of that.

[StrangeSox]

Ok, so there's not financial risk, but there's still significant time investment and a prerequisite ability to understand that you've been defrauded, interpret the law correctly and prove your claim for what could be a pretty small dollar amount. Again, not sure how that doesn't result in a whole lot less people bringing legitimate claims.

[Soxbadger]

I guess its just a difference in philosophy.

 

The Court isnt there to help those who are unwilling to help themselves, in the grand scheme most Plaintiff's will forgo suing for $10. But how is that any different from the various other things that we just let go of in life because its not worth the time, money or effort?

 

Im not sure that the purpose of Class Action lawsuits is to help Plaintiff's, Im pretty sure the purpose is to help the Court. The Court is unbiased, a lot of this argument is taking the position that the Court should help Plaintiff's which goes against our fundamental ideas of fairness in Court.

[HuskyCaucasian]

This is just too perfect to be true: Sarah Palin Reportedly Quits Bus Tour Halfway Through

 

Real Clear Politics is reporting that Palin and her family have returned to Alaska from their "One Nation" bus tour, despite tentatively scheduled stops in Iowa and South Carolina.

[Balta1701]

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Antonio Vargas reveals that he's an illegal immigrant who first learned that he was illegal at age 16 and describes how he's been living in fear despite seemingly excelling at his career.

[StrangeSox]

Serious People refuse to discuss any form of revenue increase to close the budget gap.

[Balta1701]

New FDA Rules about to come in force requiring restaurants with more than 20 locations nationwide to display calorie information on menus. Note...just display...no requirements for changing ingredients, whatever. Just display.

 

In response, all sorts of restaurants are looking to find ways to produce lower calorie options and add them to their menus. Just because of information disclosure.

[StrangeSox]

On the heels of the fabulous, open and transparent McKinsey study that claimed 30% of employers (might) drop insurance within two years is another study that actually did release it's methodology. Shockingly, this one is in line with every other independent study, leaving McKinsey as the outlier again: 3% drop in two decades. Hey, what's a couple of orders of magnitude and a few decades between friends, right?

 

 

Oh, and the number of uninsured drops to nearly zero.

Edited June 22, 2011 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

Dorf (law professor) with some comments on the Walmart decision:

 

http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2011/06/some-obse...-mart-case.html

 

2) Turning to the merits of the case, I want to register a tiny bit of faint praise for the majority opinion--intended to damn it, but not entirely. As yesterday’s highly critical NY Times Op-Ed pointed out, "the majority requires that potential members of a class show that they are likely to prevail at trial when they seek initial certification. In this change, the court has made fact-finding a major part of certification, increasing the cost and the stakes of starting a class action."

 

 

 

I agree, and in that important respect, the ruling is reminiscent of the Roberts Court’s most damaging adventure in civil procedure--the pair of rulings in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (collectively called “Twiqbal” by civil procedure geeks like myself) that together imposed a “plausibility” requirement for a lawsuit to survive a motion to dismiss. Twiqbal took a procedural rule that had long been understood to impose a very low bar to getting a case off the ground, and interpreted it to require more than a mere peek at the merits. Wal-Mart does for--or perhaps we might better say Wal-Mart does to--Rule 23, what Twiqbal did for/to Rule 8.

 

 

 

Yet the move in Wal-Mart is at least internally coherent in a way that the Twiqbal rule is not. Both rules require evaluation of the facts, but at least in the class action setting, a court will hear evidence before making the class certification decision. By contrast, under Twiqbal, a court is authorized to dismiss an implausible complaint without hearing any evidence whatsoever. I don’t intend this observation as a defense of the majority position in Wal-Mart, just as an observation that it’s not as crazy as Twiqbal. (I told you this would be faint praise.)

[Balta1701]

Dorf (law professor) with some comments on the Walmart decision:

 

http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2011/06/some-obse...-mart-case.html

Wasn't that discussion in the Dem thread?

[StrangeSox]

Maybe? Please move it if it was.

[Balta1701]

This morning's XKCD comic referenced Joe Biden so I'll stick this here.

By my count, it took the internet 16 hours to produce a website dedicated to finding 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich.

[Balta1701]

Researchers who actually do work on polling are comparing that McKinsey study that 2k5 cited to a Push Poll. Some of the setup questions are now available at this link.

One of the nation's foremost experts on survey writing compared McKinsey & Company's controversial health care study to a push poll, calling into further question whether its results can be trusted as even a snapshot of employer sentiment.

 

"There is no doubt that the answers one would get after priming respondents the way they did would be expected to include more expressed interest in the possibility of not insuring employees than a question asked in a nonprimed context," said Floyd Fowler, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Survey Research at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of the book Survey Research Methods.

[StrangeSox]

Researchers who actually do work on polling are comparing that McKinsey study that 2k5 cited to a Push Poll. Some of the setup questions are now available at this link.

 

They're weaseling out of it now. They say "well it's not predictive, just taking the 'temperature' right now!" but there's no plausible deniability that they didn't realize how some would try to take advantage of the results politically.

[Balta1701]

They're weaseling out of it now. They say "well it's not predictive, just taking the 'temperature' right now!" but there's no plausible deniability that they didn't realize how some would try to take advantage of the results politically.

I expect that when it was taken, the people doing it didn't expect it to be taken advantage of politically, they were probably legitimately trying to position themselves to profitably advise companies on the new law and see which messages had the most impact.

 

It just wasn't designed to be a predictive, public study, and someone in the company released it that way.

 

Whoever it was that released the original info publicly probably ought to be fired. They embarrassed the firm and dragged it into a political debate that it had no business being a party to.

[StrangeSox]

And now the "30%" figure is out there, will continue to be referenced and will become "fact" before long, if it isn't already.

[StrangeSox]

Making food affordable by giving money to poor people.

[Y2HH]

On the heels of the fabulous, open and transparent McKinsey study that claimed 30% of employers (might) drop insurance within two years is another study that actually did release it's methodology. Shockingly, this one is in line with every other independent study, leaving McKinsey as the outlier again: 3% drop in two decades. Hey, what's a couple of orders of magnitude and a few decades between friends, right?

 

 

Oh, and the number of uninsured drops to nearly zero.

 

All of these studies are BS, and none of them know for sure one way or the other, regardless of their "methodology".

 

Here is a non-scientific non-political study conducted by me, with no methodology other than logic. And it's probably the ONLY non-political study you will ever find on this particular subject.

 

If it turns out in a few years that companies can save themselves truckloads of money by dropping their insurance...they will.

 

If it turns out in a few years that companies cannot save themselves truckloads of money by dropping their insurance...they will not.

 

How's that for scientific?

 

If somehow, this reform gave companies a means to save a ton of money (by design or by accident), they will use it. Profits > People. Let's not pretend we don't know that already.

Edited June 24, 2011 by Y2HH

[Balta1701]

Here is a non-scientific non-political study conducted by me, with no methodology other than logic. And it's probably the ONLY non-political study you will ever find on this particular subject.

 

If it turns out in a few years that companies can save themselves truckloads of money by dropping their insurance...they will.

 

If it turns out in a few years that companies cannot save themselves truckloads of money by dropping their insurance...they will not.

 

How's that for scientific?

So wait, there are 2 possible options for a decision? And it's a decision people/companies might have to make in the future?

 

You know what would be really cool? If there was a way of evaluating what decision those companies might make. That would be a really useful guide. We could do things like look at past cases, or figure out intelligent ways to evaluate decision making, or even look at the bill and do the math ourselves.

 

We could even call it a study.