Another infuriating extension of asset forfeiture law. [Radley Balko, Huffington Post]
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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s press spokesman describes as “inaccurate” Reuters’ report that his boss endorses a Congressionally enacted national across-the-board ban on cellphone use. (The Newspaper; our earlier posts here and here; Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg View).
More from The Newspaper:
At the same time that the US Department of Transportation is pushing laws to ban in-car cell phone use, it is promoting the “511″ government program that encourages drivers to dial 511 for information on traffic conditions instead of tuning in to a traffic reports on AM radio.
Related: “Communities start to fine for texting and walking” [USA Today]
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Kyle Graham kicked off the meme with examples that include “Guido Calabresi” = “Discourage Bail,” “Elizabeth Warren” = “Brazen Wealthier” and “Cass Sunstein” = “Insanest Cuss.” My contributions include “Randy Barnett” = “Nab Red Tyrant” and “Dale Carpenter” = “Parade Lectern.” If you’re wondering about rearrangements of my own name, by the way, the best one seems to be “Wastrel Loon.”
P.S. “Stephen Breyer” = “Hereby Repents” and more Supreme Court Justice anagram names.
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Columnist Debra Saunders quotes me on the Federal Trade Commission’s extraction of $40 million from a shoe maker for hyping its sneakers in its ads. As Saunders points out, we rely on Washington, D.C. for help on issues like this since if there’s anything the political class is earnestly opposed to, it’s overpromising. [San Francisco Chronicle]
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I’ve got a piece out at Reason today in which I de-foam the Times columnist’s highly aerated assertions about beer sales near the Pine Ridge, S.D. Oglala Sioux reservation. And a followup at Cato: Kristof has written about the failures of the Drug War, so why does he not apply those lessons here? See also: NYT “Room for Debate” discussion.
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Ed Whelan charges the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin with spinning the history of the First Amendment campaign regulation case [first, second, followup] Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog, while sympathetic to Toobin’s overall project, also takes issue with him at numerous points. More: Adam White, Weekly Standard; Sam Bagenstos (what is supposed to have been so devious about Roberts’ handling of the case?); Howard Wasserman (why does Citizens United get singled out for demonization from among the several Court opinions pointing the same way?).
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- Very silly Common Cause suit against Senate filibuster [Adler, Doug Mataconis, Jack Shafer (Filibuster unconstitutional? "Yes, but only when the GOP has the majority.")]
- More on football concussion lawsuits [Will Oremus, Slate; Gerard Magliocca, Concurring Opinions; earlier]
- Phrase I’ve heard before: Niall Ferguson says U.S. beset by the “rule of lawyers” [Business Insider]
- “I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand, it will cost you a lot of time and money[.]” One blogger’s prolonged legal ordeal ["Aaron Worthing," Allergic2Bull and summary version] Plus: Ken/Popehat;
- Louisiana land-taint suits: “maybe I’m just going to contend the oil companies did it, not the salt domes” [Lachlan Markay, Heritage, earlier]
- Kansas differs from SCOTUS on legality of resale price maintenance. Will it make policy for the other 49 states? [Ted Frank] New Federalist Society project on state courts and how they’re picked;
- A lot of lobbying went into that government-prescribed “flame-resistant” furniture [Chicago Tribune]
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Travails of French employers under the Code du Travail — though it’s not as if America doesn’t have plenty of firms that follow the same strategy of keeping head counts below a certain regulatory-trigger threshold. [Business Week]
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It’s presumably an intended effect of the recent court ruling that landlords will threaten families with eviction unless they stop keeping the dogs as pets, and that skittish insurers will hike rates on such households sharply or refuse to insure them entirely. But there is much uncertainty as to exactly which dogs count as “pit bulls”; will Maryland pet owners need to shell out for DNA testing, at $120 a pop? And is it also an intended effect of the ruling that unoffending, well-trained dogs end up being euthanized in droves? “Ohio recently repealed its statewide breed-specific legislation because it was ineffective and inequitable,” notes my Cato Institute colleague Nita Ghei. [Daily Caller, earlier]
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George Will gets to the essence of this grotesque assault on civil liberties, fed by demagoguery over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision:
McGovern [Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.] stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.
Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights.
Incredibly, versions of this radical rights-stripping measure has been endorsed through resolutions by the state legislatures of Vermont, Hawaii, and New Mexico, with backing from groups like Public Citizen. [Ilya Shapiro and Kathleen Hunker, Cato; Hans Bader, CEI; earlier] More: Professor Bainbridge (“utterly moronic”)] Among sponsors of this extraordinary measure: Reps. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), David Cicilline (R.I.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), John Conyers, Jr. (Mich.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Peter DeFazio (Ore.), Eliot Engel (N.Y.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Bob Filner (Calif.), Gene Green (Tex.), Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), Janice Hahn (Calif.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Maurice Hinchey (N.Y.), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (Ill.), Walter B. Jones, Jr. (N.C.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.), Christopher Murphy (Ct.), Richard Neal (Mass.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.), John Olver (Mass.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Louise McIntosh Slaughter (N.Y.), Adam Smith (Wash.), John Tierney (Mass.), and Peter Welch (Vt.). Murphy is running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut.
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Nice $22,000 you’re carrying, Mister Motorist, but I think it would look nicer in the police department’s bank account [News Channel 5 Nashville via Radley Balko]. Driver George Reby, a professional insurance adjuster from New Jersey, was then permitted to go on his way since he “hadn’t committed a criminal law [violation],” as the police officer later explained to a reporter. It happened in Monterey, Tenn., not Monterrey, Mexico.
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At a Wal-Mart store in Turnersville, N.J. in 2010, a 16-year-old visitor got hold of the store’s public address system momentarily and announced to shoppers, “Attention Walmart customers: All black people must leave the store.” “A manager quickly made his own announcement, apologizing for the message. … The teenager was charged with harassment and bias intimidation, but now Donnell Battie, who is black, is suing Walmart claiming the store was negligent and reckless and showed deliberate indifference by not keeping the P.A. system safe from abuse.” [Gloucester County Times]
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- Yale lawprof Peter Schuck reviews Schools for Misrule [American Lawyer last November, alas behind subscription paywall]
- Look at bright side: Prof. Warren “did not list herself with the AALS as the rightful Empress of France” [Popehat; Seth Mandel, Commentary]
- Jeffrey O’Connell, greatly admired and influential torts scholar at the University of Virginia, retires from teaching [via Robinette]
- New Brian Tamanaha book on law schools stirs wide interest [Orin Kerr, Scott Greenfield, Chron of Higher Ed via TaxProf, Bill Henderson]
- In recent criminal law and procedure cases, high-level academic opinion did sway Supreme Court [Jack Chin, Prawfs]
- “75 Years of Law Professors as Pundits” [Kyle Graham; and thanks for Schools For Misrule reference)
- Kindle version of Charles Reich's "Greening of America" omits super-embarrassing stuff. It's 80% shorter [Ann Althouse]
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Canine custody, that is: Craig Dershowitz says he’s spent $60,000 suing his ex-girlfriend over who will get their dog. “It’s worth it,” he says. [NY Post via Elie Mystal, Above the Law]
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A judge in Morris County, N.J. is expected to rule soon whether to dismiss Shannon Colonna as a defendant in a lawsuit over a car crash. Colonna was far from the scene at the time, but plaintiffs said she had sent a text message to the driver whose inattention caused the accident, and thus aided and abetted his negligence. [The Record; AP; NJLRA]
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- “Fan sues Insane Clown Posse after injury at Illinois concert” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch] “As Insanity is not a defense to the claim, the Clowns are now adding litigation counsel to their Posse.” [@colinsamuels]
- Suit on behalf of school-cheat son “wouldn’t have been much of a story” if dad had left argument to hired gun [Mark Bennett, earlier]
- If you can’t buy a Coke with your debit card any more, this may be why [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason] Related: “a ‘do-nothing Congress’ is sort of like a ‘do-nothing arsonist.’” [IowaHawk]
- L.A. judge reverses much-publicized Honda small claims award [CBS Local, earlier]
- Harris County judge deems pig “common, traditional” pet in homeowner association suit [Houston Chronicle]
- Plaintiffs, not just defendants, can use Daubert to exclude opponents’ scientific theories that fall short of general acceptance by the relevant scientific community. Why is this news when it was clearly part of the intended and expected effect of Daubert from day one? [guestposter Mark Bower at Turkewitz]
- “The unfair attack on ALEC” [Ted Frank and Jim Copland at PoL] More: Wendy Gramm and Brooke Rollins, WSJ.
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Kevin Funnell at Bank Lawyers Blog is a bit cynical about the Department of Justice’s headline-ready threats of enforcement action:
[The DOJ claims] appear to be based upon consumer advocates’ claims that the bank takes better care of foreclosed-upon real estate it owns in neighborhoods where white people live than it does in areas where minorities live. I suspect that the bank will assert that (a) any rational real estate owner is only going to invest money in a piece of real estate where the owner has a realistic chance of recouping that investment through a higher sales price, (b) that such recoupment decisions are made on a property-by-property basis based upon objective data like recent comparable sales prices and fair market valuations, (c) that the economic reality-driven facts of life are that many more such properties are located in majority-white neighborhoods than in minority neighborhoods, and (d) there has been no intent to discriminate, merely to minimize losses…. As we’ve previously noted, the DOJ is on a jihad against lenders based upon “disparate impact” theories that the DOJ knows, in its heart-of-hearts, are highly fragile when exposed to the light of logic, the kind of logic applied by the US Supreme Court. Justice will likely pursue Wells Fargo and try to squeeze some dough out of it before the highest court eventually shuts down this racket.
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Quoth Warren Burger to Harry Blackmun, following Blackmun’s nomination to the Supreme Court [April 27, 1970 letter via Kyle Graham]
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