September 5, 2008

• Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, president-elect of NAAG, says he's not sure he's ever hired outside counsel on contingency and says colleagues should be "very, very careful" of doing so [Legal NewsLine]
• More Bruning, discussing absence in Nebraska civil law of punitive damages as conventionally known elsewhere [same]
• FDA's coil of conflict-of-interest rules are a good way to starve the agency of qualified outside advice [Henderson/Hooper, MI's Medical Progress Today]
• Appropriations? Must be a job for judges: court-appointed receiver asks judge to seize $8 billion from California treasury for prison health programs [NY Times]
• Premise of $11 million Philly verdict: ER docs should have ordered a CAT scan on 20-year-old woman complaining of headaches and numbness, then they'd have caught her rare brain cancer [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Oh, great, another call to sic trial lawyers on National Labor Relations Act infractions (but not the ones committed by unions) [Sirota, SF Chronicle]