I'm You've all seen those billboards as you drive down the highway.

Injured, call this number.

We will fight for you.

Or some such.

Sometimes there's mention of how much money the clients have gotten.

Often there's a guy wearing an ugly suit and trying to look tough. Typically, the implication is that the way you win a lawsuit is by being really loud and really hostile. I'm talking, of course, about plaintiff's lawyers.

Given my own experiences, the stuff I did before I joined Tech Freedom,

plaintiffs' lawyers probably get more flack on this show than any other group.

I think only EU officials compete with them on that front.

The plaintiff's lawyers are demanding their pound of flesh from social media platforms.

This year, school districts across the country, all, I suspect, represented by the plaintiff's bar on a contingency fee,

have sued Facebook, Snap, TikTok, and the like,

alleging that these services are addictive and harmful to their students.

The schools are seeking to have the platforms declared a public nuisance,

the concept of public nuisance being, as we will see, one of the wildest concepts in the wild world of big bucks tort law.

This is the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

I'm so honored to be joined today by Walter Olson.

A legend in the field of law will be discussing today.

Walter is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

He was for many years the author of the blog OverlawLoyered, and he is the author of The Litigation

Explosion, What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit?

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