“In the last few days of December, Kamran Ghalchi sent more than 3,000 California businesses an unwelcome holiday greeting — legal notices claiming they were in violation of Proposition 65, a one-of-a-kind California law requiring warnings on products that contain potentially dangerous chemicals,” Law.com reports.

[…] The 3,000 notices filed by Ghalchi in December is about twice as many as the total filed by all lawyers in every other year the law has been in effect, except 1999. (A flood of notices targeting second-hand tobacco smoke raised that year’s total to 6,000, the attorney general’s office says.)

More than half of Ghalchi’s December notices were filed against car dealers and other automotive businesses throughout the state. Warnings at gas stations are a familiar sight to Californians, but car dealers do not warn customers that buying a car could expose them to oil, gasoline and car exhaust.

In a letter offering to settle with one dealer, Ghalchi demands $7,500 to settle right away: $750 of it in fines to the attorney general, the rest split evenly between Ghalchi and Citizens for Responsible Business, a new Proposition 65 enforcement group that is the plaintiff in all of Ghalchi’s December filings [my emphasis]

This is nothing but extortion posing as “environmental protection,” and everyone in the loop in California seems to know it — particularly that cadre of unscrupulous lawyers who’ve made peace with their sleazy lot in legal life and have decided to proceed apace with trumped-up filings, hoping for quick settlement monies from irritated businesses that wish to avoid drawn-out legal battles.

Who doesn’t know that cars contain gasoline? Or oil? Or that, in the course of their operation, they produce exhaust? Were such actual idiots to exist, you can be damned sure these’d be people unable to read the frickin’ warning stickers, anyway…

If this spate of Proposition 65 violation filings is really part of some “environmental safety concern” and not a demand for tribute, why not make identifying gas and oil and exhaust a section on the driver’s licensing exam, and so obviate future litigation?

The answer is, “concern” for safety has very little to do with any of this. What’s particularly oily here is that this flood of filings seems “timed to beat a new law that would have made suing more difficult.” Ah, lawyers…

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