Word: williams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Egan fought back by hiring William Shernoff, a Claremont, Calif., lawyer whose specialty is suing insurance companies for dealing in "bad faith" with their customers. In 1974 Shernoff not only persuaded a jury to award Egan $123,600 in damages for lost benefits and emotional distress, but he also won a whopping $5 million in punitive damages. That was a blow to Mutual's image as well as to its pocketbook: under California law, punitive damages are awarded to punish and deter "oppression, fraud or malice...
...argue that punitive damages are nothing but a windfall for the plaintiff and his attorney. Big awards, they say, make it easier for people with dubious claims to bargain companies into paying large settlements, which in turn are paid for by others in the form of increased premiums. Says William Adams, associate general counsel of Occidental Life: "People with unquestionable claims, and that's about 95%, are not benefited by ShernofF's activities. He should not be pounding the table claiming he's helping the consumer. He's hurting most of them...
Kean was the first superstar, an Olivier onstage and an Errol Flynn off, a rake, a wastrel and yet an actor, as Critic William Hazlitt said, who had "a gleam of genius." If he were at the end of his career today, he would be writing his memoirs in Malibu and growing rich off Polaroid commercials. In Sartre's play, however, he is dodging creditors, juggling mistresses and in his spare moments asking himself that old existential question: Who am I? Sartre's answer, given with stylish wit, is that Kean is like all of life...
Buoyed by price rebates that appear to be boosting car sales, Chrysler Corp. chiefs are expected this week to give Treasury Secretary G. William Miller their promised plan of sacrifice and salesmanship for the company's survival. As a gesture to a Government from which they are requesting aid and a union from which they want concessions, Chrysler's two top executives announced last week that they are becoming $1-a-year...
FICTION: A Bend in the River, V.S.Naipaul ∙Collected Stories, Paul Bowles ∙Living in the Maniototo, Janet Frame ∙Mirabell: Books of Number, James Merrill ∙Sophie's Choice, William Styron ∙The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth ∙The Living End, Stanley Elkin NONFICTION: Blood of Spain, Ronald Fraser ∙I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, Ann and Samuel Charters ∙The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff ∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Neoconservatives, Peter Steinfels ∙The White Album, Joan Didion ∙When Memory Comes, Saul Friedlander