Graphic Warning: Keep Hands Out of Vendor?

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Pictorial or graphic warnings are designed to be interpretable by anyone, whatever language they speak and whatever their literacy level.  The problem is it can be darn difficult to convey a product warning in a single image.

This graphic warning sticker on a soda/water machine does a good job of getting one’s attention and clearly alerts people that they should not be sticking their hand in between grinding gears.  Where those gears are remains a mystery, but I suppose it must be the exit path for the soda or water bottle.

I have a bigger issue with the verbal warning: KEEP HANDS OUT OF VENDOR.  Vendor?  That sounds more like a sexual assault warning.  The dictionary definitions of “vendor” I’ve come across are limited to persons or companies that sell products, not machines that dispense them.  How about we substitute “vending machine”?

Here, here, here and here are a few other interesting graphic or pictorial warnings for your interpretative pain or pleasure.

Legal Trivia Question: Largest Arrest in U.S. History

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Just as doctors need patients, lawyers need clients.  One can surmise that local criminal defense lawyers got plenty of business during the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.  How many people were arrested and where did it occur?

  1. 140 in Peoria, Illinois
  2. 1500 in Boston, Massachusetts
  3. 12,000 in Washington, D.C.
  4. 17,500 in Los Angeles, California

ANSWER: In May 1971, more than 500,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters descended on Washington, D.C. with the intention of shutting down the federal government by blocking the streets.  As of that date, 45,000 American soldiers had died in Vietnam and more than 250,000 troops were still stationed there.  At least 12,000 protesters were arrested from May 3 through May 5, including Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, had helped compile a report on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945–68 for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  The study, which became known as the “Pentagon Papers,” exposed controversial, previously hidden truths about the scope and purpose of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War.  Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which began publishing them in installments.

The Nixon administration sued for an injunction, which resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), where the Court ruled in favor of the newspaper by a 6-3 vote, a major victory in troubled times for the First Amendment right to free speech and a free press.  Publication of the Pentagon Papers helped turn the tide of public opinion against the war.  It took until June 2011, forty years to the day from the original publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times, before the U.S. government officially declassified and released the papers.

The answer, therefore, is C.

Diabolical Slip and Fall Combo – Ice and Banana Peel

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Thanks to a former student at the Florida International University College of Law for spotting this particularly diabolical slip and fall risk.  As if ice or banana peels weren’t risk enough by themselves, here we get a combo.

Slip and falls are no laughing matter.  According to OSHA, they cause 15 percent of all workplace deaths.

Ice is a lot more dangerous than banana peels, but people do slip on banana peels, and not just in cartoons.  One of lawhaha.com’s most visited posts is this death certificate for a poor fellow in Tennessee, noting that shortly before his death, he slipped on a banana peel.

–Thanks to Armando Torres.

Truth About McDonald’s Coffee Spill Case in Five Minutes

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Several former students sent me this video of Adam Ruins Everything’s explanation of the infamous McDonald’s coffee spill case.  They thanked me for telling them the truth in Torts about the grossly distorted case.  I actually stopped talking about it a few years ago, but may need to bring it back because the distorted view still seems prevalent.  I guess we could call it an early form of “fake news.”  Unfortunately, it was all too real for poor Stella Liebeck.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWh6Kw3ejQ[/embedyt]

The video does a great job, in a humorous way, of summarizing key points, including: (1) Stella was a 79-year-old passenger in a parked car when she accidentally spilled the coffee on herself (not driving while trying to add cream and sugar); (2) She initially sought only a small amount from McDonald’s for her medical expenses (not a greedy, litigious person); (3) She suffered third-degree burns that her doctor said was the one of the worst cases he had ever seen; (4) The temperature of the coffee was around 190 degrees; (5) Evidence at trial showed 700 prior McDonald’s coffee burn instances; (6) McDonald’s own witness testified the coffee was a hazard at the temperature it was served; (7) The $2.7 million verdict was mostly punitive damages, which the jury calculated by awarding what testimony showed would equal two days worth of McDonald’s coffee sales; and (8) The damages award was reduced by the trial court so that, in the end, Stella only received about $600,000 (of which her lawyer probably received a third, plus expenses).

Only thing missing to drive the point home that this case was anything but frivolous is an image of Stella’s horrific injuries from a spilled cup of coffee, which we included in previous mentions of the case here and here.

1L of a Ride Video Course

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1L of a Ride Video Course Marketing Video

The 1L of a Ride Video Course is based on McClurg’s bestselling law school prep book of the same name.  In addition to McClurg, the 13-part series features award-winning law professors Christine Coughlin (Wake Forest), Meredith Duncan (University of Houston), and Nancy Levit (University of Missouri-Kansas City).

Each video is a concise ten minutes, followed by a short self-assessment quiz. The videos include:

1. Introduction to the Video Course
2. Planning Ahead and Biggest Fears
3. Structure and Role of U.S. Courts
4. Socratic and Case Methods
5. Overview of First-Year Curriculum
6. First-Year Sample Course: Torts
7. How to Read and Brief a Case
8. The C.R.E.D.O.—Top Five Habits of Successful Law Students
9. Essential Study Techniques
10. Legal Research Basics
11. Legal Writing Basics
12. Managing Stress and Maintaining Well-Being
13. Professionalism

Research shows students gain not only from reading, but seeing and hearing, in part because video helps accommodate diverse learning styles. Use the videos to enhance comprehension and retention. Studies also show students prefer and benefit from one-on-one facetime with professors, which the videos, while no match for the real thing, can help simulate.

The video course is available as a standalone product or bundled with a print or e-copy of the book (recommended) at the West Academic Publishing Store.

The Second Amendment Right to Be Negligent

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Florida Law Review Right to be NegligentAndrew Jay McClurg, The Second Amendment Right to be Negligent, 68 Florida Law Review 1 (2016).

Only two constitutional rights — the First and Second Amendments — have the capacity, through judicial interpretation or legislative action or inaction, to confer a “right to be negligent” on private citizens; that is, a right to engage in objectively unreasonable risk-creating conduct without legal consequences. In the First Amendment context, for example, the Supreme Court, in New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny, expressly embraced a right to be negligent in defaming public officials and public figures to protect speech. This Article asserts that through both common and statutory law the United States has enshrined a de facto Second Amendment right to be negligent in many aspects of making, distributing, and possessing firearms, the only legal product designed to inflict what the tort system is designed to prevent.

Explaining that it is a microcosm of a much larger issue, the Article focuses on one area: allowing access to guns by criminals through theft. Hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year from individuals and commercial sellers. By definition, they all go directly to criminals. A substantial percentage of guns used in crime were previously stolen. Nevertheless, the common law has conferred near complete immunity on gun owners and sellers who fail to secure guns from theft when they are subsequently used to cause harm. This occurs despite frequent judicial pronouncements that the risk of firearms demands the highest degree of care in their use and keeping. To accomplish this result, courts ignore or mischaracterize fundamental scope of liability principles, rarely even reaching the question of whether reasonable care was exercised.

On the statutory front, not only have Congress and most states failed to mandate firearms security measures, Congress has — in the name of the Second Amendment — given express protection of the right to be negligent, most prominently in the form of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The Act immunizes manufacturers and sellers of guns from most tort claims, including claims against commercial firearms licensees for negligent security leading to theft.

The Article argues that this government-endorsed lack of responsibility results in the under-deterrence of risky conduct that, with reasonable alterations, could avoid substantial intentional and accidental injury costs.

New Guns and the Law Casebook

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Gun Book CoverMy new casebook–Guns and the Law: Cases, Problems, and Explanation–composed with Professor Brannon Denning, just came out.  Featuring cases, problems, and explanation, it offers a balanced treatment of gun law and policy in the United States, which is hard to find in this highly charged area.

Here’s the catalog description from Carolina Academic Press:

McClurg (pro-reasonable regulation) and Denning (pro-gun-rights) apply their decades of experience studying firearms policy and gun violence in this balanced, reader-friendly casebook addressing the contentious issues of guns in America. Through cases, problems, and provocative notes and questions, the book explores current federal and state gun laws, major constitutional cases, post-Heller Second Amendment litigation, modern self-defense rules such as Stand Your Ground laws, civil liability, gun laws in other countries, legal solutions to gun violence, and issues of guns and race, alienage, culture, and gender.

We designed the book to be accessible not only to law professors and law students, but to undergraduate and other graduate school professors.  Professors interested in teaching a course in the area can obtain a complimentary copy from the publisher.

“Grit and Grind” Your Way to Law School Success

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The Grindfather
The Grindfather

If you’re getting ready to start law school and are worried because you have a below-average LSAT score, you need to read my new ABA blog post.  In it, I explain data about the correlation between LSAT scores and first-year grades, which is weaker than most people realize.

While LSAT scores correlate with success for some students, they do not reliably predict success or lack of it for any individual student because the LSAT does not take into consideration many key ingredients to success, including “grit.”

Look at the Memphis Grizzlies. They’ve made the NBA playoffs for six straight years without any superstars. Their motto, coined by Grindfather Tony Allen, is “grit and grind.” Now, Professor Angela Duckworth has authored a bestselling explaining her research that shows “grit”–perseverance and single-minded determination–is at least as important as native intelligence in predicting success.

Check out over at ABAforLawStudents.com.

You Are About to Enter the Sex Worker Zone

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Prostitution Sign in ZurichA Zurich friend sent along this sign in Kleinbasler in Basel, intended to alert sex workers of new “tolerance zones,” designed to impose more control over prostitution, which is legal in Switzerland.

According an article (link no longer available), “there has been a high turnover of prostitutes recently, mainly from EU countries in Eastern Europe, who are increasing competition, creating price falls and making it hard to convey the rules.”

The competition led to demands by locals for more restrictions. There are currently 800 sex workers in Basel. Police made 120 arrests last year for working outside of designated zones.

Thanks to Pat Crowell.