This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 28th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ideas from the last generation of law professors find their way into the minds of today's

national leaders from Barack Obama to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, many of these ideas, when applied, represent a grave threat to liberty.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson in his new book

Schools for Miss Rule, which is available for sale at Cato.org.

A couple of years ago lawyers filed a class action lawsuit against Apple arguing that the iPod, which was just

at the flush of its popularity then, was capable of too high a value and as a result people who listened over long periods

might have damage to their hearing and they wanted money on behalf of not only

the client they had who did not allege that he had himself had his

hearing injury but just said that he wanted cash for the consumer fraud and also everyone else who had bought one of the devices,

none of whom had signed up with these lawyers.

And it sounds on the surface just like one of these wacky things that you can sue for in the United States and it is because you couldn't sue for that sort of thing in most countries.

You would be laughed out of quarter, thrown out of quite much more quickly.

But as I trace in this book, it is the result of the influence of legal

academia. American law is so different because America has absorbed so much influence from legal academia.

And that's true both on the personal injury side.

Why would you sue the maker of the musical device

over your loss of hearing over years? And it's true on the class action side, you know, why would

a million people, most of whom don't have the grievance at all, all we brought into sue.

In this particular example, where did this come from?

...