Threatening to expose someone’s embarrassing personal secrets unless they pay you money or agree to cooperate with you in other ways is ordinarily a legal offense, that of extortion. There’s a big exception, however: if you happen to be simultaneously pursuing a legal claim against your target, even a very weak one, such demands can magically become lawful after all, although they revert to being unlawful if the demands you levy are somehow excessive. Jim Lindgren and Eugene Volokh explain (both Feb. 1).
Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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Point of Law- House passes chemical facility security bill, welcomes litigationThe U.S. House of Representatives on Friday voted 230-193 to pass H.R. 2868, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act. (Roll call vote.) All but 21 Democrats voted in favor; Republicans all opposed. With the announcement yesterday of October's 10.2 percent unemployment,... […]Carter Wood
- "Spano's Suicide: Housing Plan Doomed County Exec"The New York Post has now picked up a slightly shortened version of my City Journal piece on the housing lawsuit that contributed to a voter revolt in Westchester. P.S. And the Weekly Standard "Scrapbook" feature discusses the piece.... […]Walter Olson
- "Chloroform for tort reform"The Washington Times assails as "dishonest" and a "poison pill" the House health bill's provisions bribing states not to enact limits on malpractice awards and attorneys' fees.... […]Walter Olson
- Federal paid sick leave mandate?The H1N1 virus could provide a foot in the door, observes Daniel Schwartz.... […]Walter Olson
- Small business Sarbanes-Oxley exemptionRahm Emanuel, for one, is said to be pressing for it [Bloomberg] The New York Times's Floyd Norris is predictably having a fit.... […]Walter Olson
- House passes chemical facility security bill, welcomes litigation
- Volokh
- Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes MattersIn my last post, I discussed the neglect of communist atrocities. Although communist governments murdered and repressed even more people than the Nazis, their crimes have gotten only a tiny fraction of the public awareness and recognition extend to the latter. But does that neglect matter? After all, the major communist regimes have either collapsed [...] […]Ilya Somin
- MarineTraffic.com Is Also Really CoolI’m sure many people saw this over at Instapundit, and maybe it’s not as cool as Sketch2 below, but I spent a while messing with this today and thought it was fascinating ... MarineTraffic.com, with a live GoogleEarth map of marine shipping worldwide. Copyright © 2008 This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The [...] […]Kenneth Anderson
- Sketch2PhotoLooks extremely cool, if it works. From Andrew Mager (ZDNet): What if you could draw some stick figures on a screen and somehow magically create a beautiful image montage? Well, it’s possible. A group of students in China have created [Sketch2Photo], a project that does exactly what I just described: it takes a rough, hand-drawn sketch, scours [...] […]Eugene Volokh
- California Withholding Tax Hike — Can Someone Explain the Legal Basis to Me?I started out legal life in California, clerking for the California Supreme Court and, already being a tax geek, was handed many of the state tax issues. So I have some familiarity with California’s tax law. It is complicated and in many policy aspects problematic, but also, to be clear as a lawyer, it is [...] […]Kenneth Anderson
- Much Better Than Being Cited for Our Substance — Being Cited as a Generic ExampleFrom the Chronicle of Higher Education: Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago — but that isn’t because they’re all huddled over their computers playing World of Warcraft or reading the Volokh Conspiracy. In fact, we like to think that reading the Volokh Conspiracy will give you more close confidants, [...] […]Eugene Volokh
- Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes Matters
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