December 3rd, 2007
Blawg Review #137 is up, and by up I mean it has ascended from Purgatory to Paradise. Colin Samuels @ Infamy and Praise has based Blawg Review — a review of the legal blogosphere hosted at a different site each week — on the third part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This Review follows in the award–winning footsteps he took with Dante in #35 (Inferno) and #86 (Purgatory). This is not one to be missed.
Samuels proves once again that literacy and the law may be happily married.
December 2nd, 2007
Nine years is a long time to go without a raise. And that’s how long New York’s judges have gone without. And when I say no raise, I mean they haven’t even received a cost of living increase to their $135,900 salary.
So Staten Island’s Acting Supreme Court Justice Philip Straniere is letting his whiskers go as his way of protesting.
The story comes out of the Staten Island Advance (hat tip: How Appealing), and here is they money quote on his four-month old beard:
[T]the way things are going, my beard should be long enough by Christmas for me to get work as a sidewalk Santa for some charity.”
Since first year associates at big firms blow the judiciary out of the water with the money they make, we can expect a decline in our state’s judiciary if this continues.
And if the beard idea gets traction in the courthouses, things could get interesting.
Previously covered:
Links to this post:
judge grows beard in protest of judicial salaries
eric turkewitz’s new york personal injury law blog has a post on staten island’s acting supreme court justice philip straniere growing a pretty much out of control beard in protest of new york judges failure to get a raise in nine years …posted by Ronald V. Miller, Jr. @ December 08, 2007 11:53 AM
November 30th, 2007
Personal Injury Law Round-Up #38 is up at Perlmutter & Schuelke. So while the ABA chooses to ignore the field of personal injury law, Brooks Schuelke shows that it’s blawgosphere is as vibrant as any other, with an ever-expanding array of law, policy and links.
November 29th, 2007
Random notes will be for subjects that I want to blog about or things that need a bit more broadcast, but I just don’t have the time for a separate post. They will appear on a, you guessed it, random basis:
felony? (TalkLeft)And as a follow-up to the marathon Blawg Review, one last video:
November 29th, 2007
Out on Long Island, the name Harvey Finkelstein is now widely known. The anesthesiologist has been the subject of several articles this past week concerning a three-year investigation that revealed he had potentially exposed hundreds of patients to blood-borne diseases by routinely reusing syringes in multi-dose vials. This exposed patients to Hepatitis and HIV/AIDS.
While Finkelstein used only one syringe per person, he would stick the syringe into a multi-dose vial that would also be used by others, thereby contaminating the remainder of the vial.
Aside from the conduct of the doctor, this story has a kicker: The state’s investigators waited three years to let patients know, sending out 628 letter just this past week. Why is that significant? Two reasons, one medical and one legal.
First, and clearly of paramount importance, if someone was infected they didn’t get prompt treatment. Second, because the statute of limitations in medical malpractice in New York is 2 1/2 years, those that may have been infected not only didn’t learn about it in a timely manner, but may not be able to institute legal action to redress their grievances. In New York, the statute of limitations is not governed by when the negligence was discovered, but by when it happened or by end of the continuing treatment by that physician.
In today’s news, Newsday writes of the secret procedures in New York that keep disciplinary issues as far from the public eye as possible. New York, it seems is one of only five states out of 42 that were surveyd last year in which no parts of the proceedings were public. From the article:
It is among a handful of states that conducts the entire probe in private and withholds a doctor’s name unless the complaint is upheld. And even after an investigation is concluded, doctors are not required to notify patients if they are practicing under sanction. What information is available is found on a state Web site that critics argue few people know about.
…The entry on the Office of Professional Medical Conduct Web site about Finkelstein is this: “Nondisciplinary order of conditions issued pursuant to New York State Public Health Law Section 230. for three years including conditions relating to infection control.”
Well, that description tells you a lot, doesn’t it?
Finkelstein, by the way, has had 10 malpractice settlements. That makes him one of 127 of New York’s 70,000 physicians with a similar history.
See also: