They’re accelerating: Teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland” should not expect their videos to stay up. (Fred von Lohmann, EFF, via Ron Coleman).
From the monthly archives:
February 2009
American legal concepts crossing the Atlantic yet again: “A council suing its former managing director for £1m for allegedly lying on her job application is at risk of being accused of disability discrimination, an expert has warned.” Cheltenham Borough Council claims its former executive gave false answers on a medical history to conceal a history of depression, but an employment lawyer says employers should not assume they have a right to discipline workers for lying about their medical history during the application process.
Readers of my book on employment law, The Excuse Factory, may recall the somewhat similar case with which I started off Chapter 1. Incidentally, those who are curious what became of the Boston police officer cited in that account may be interested in following this link.
Two senior judges in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, have taken a plea agreement under which they will serve seven years in prison. The judges are “alleged to have pocketed $2.6 million in payments from juvenile detention center operators”. After helping the center operators secure a county contract, according to their critics, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan then proceeded to railroad hundreds of kids to the centers on petty charges to provide the operators with a clientele to serve (Philadelphia Inquirer, Legal Intelligencer, Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader and more via Instapundit)
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Trask at Living Dice explains; more here and here. And in response to a comment:
The “it does not apply to hobby games because they are for older people” probably will not fly. I cannot imagine the government will let industry decide what game is for over 12 year old players. If they did that even “Chutes and Ladders” will become “for 12 and older” to save on the testing. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. No, I think the books and games that are playable by early teens will probably get scooped up in this definition as well. Sadly, that covers most hobby games.
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Unless they’re your copyrights, in which case Chicago’s personal injury firm of Hayman & Kirshenbaum doesn’t seem to be quite so particular (via Turkewitz).
More: Mister Thorne reports that H&K has now removed the cited material, and has a further update.
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You’d think with all the hot and cold running lawyers the former Senate Majority Leader has spent time with there’d have been at least one good tax-advisory lawyer.
P.S. Or, as Ray Lehmann suggests, this could be a brilliant Obama scheme to balance the federal budget by exposing major tax scofflaws through the nomination process.
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- Lawyer charged with particularly awful pattern of thefts from disabled/incapacitated persons [NYTimes, Steven Rondos]
- “Buy American” provisions in stimulus bill could start trade war [Postrel]. Parting blow to America’s taste buds: outgoing Bush admininstration slapped high tariffs on Roquefort cheese, Irish oatmeal [Cowen, MargRev]
- In widening scandal of U.K. miners’-claim lawyers, one law firm found to have funneled more than £6 million to Arthur Scargill’s union [Times Online]
- 1936 Clarence Darrow piece on how to pick a jury makes a sort of time capsule of wince-worthy stereotypes [Deliberations]
- Want to start up moving company in Oregon or liquor store in California? You might find your competitors can legally block you [Coyote]
- Maybe there’s hope for Dahlia Lithwick, she “shares concerns” about lame lawsuits and judgment-warping liability fears [Slate, on Philip Howard's Life Without Lawyers]
- Dear major banks: Regret to inform must impose high penalties for your unauthorized overdraft of our funds [Naked Capitalism]
- “Ethics laundering”: how lawyers can use Internet to evade NY rules against client solicitation [Turkewitz]
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“After more than eight years of litigation, lawyers for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will appear in federal court this week to square off against a handful of animal welfare organizations that have filed suit against the circus alleging that it routinely violates federal law by abusing its elephants. The case is a major test for the reach of the Endangered Species Act, which for the first time is being used by private citizens to try to influence the care of animals already in captivity.” If the complainants, led by the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), succeed in the creative effort to reshape the Endangered Species Act into a federal animal welfare statute, lawsuits in other areas are likely to follow [Legal Times]
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Because the government, unlike your parents, has your best interests at heart.
P.S. And now the North Dakota Senate.
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I was sitting down to write a more extended post about the press’s treatment of the CPSIA controversy when I found that Prof. Mark Obbie, whose LawBeat blog watches the world of legal journalism closely, had already said much of what I wanted to say (while generously citing my work along the way). So instead I will refer you to him, and just add a few further observations.
As do I, Prof. Obbie finds noteworthy the “weird blind spot” of the New York Times, which as I noted a week and a half ago (citing commenter Amy Hoffman)
still has not covered this debacle — a crucial point, since it’s hard to get an issue truly onto the news agenda at other highly ranked media outlets if the Times refuses to notice it…. There’s something truly crazy here, given that the Times plays a conscious role as a key trend-spotter in both the design world and the apparel trade, as well as the world of law and governance.
As of Monday, three days after the CPSC’s stay and weeks after the outcry over the law had surfaced in places like the Washington Post (Dec. 21), Wall Street Journal (Jan. 8), Detroit News (Jan. 10) and Los Angeles Times (Jan. 2), the only notice of the controversy to be found in the Times’s index was what Obbie rightly labels “this pathetic gesture, cribbed from the Bloomberg wire, published on Saturday’s page B2 in the Times”. The tiny 45-word piece commits the typical beginner’s mistake (which, I hasten to add, I committed myself on Jan. 2 before I’d begun to look at the issue carefully) of mentioning only toys as a target of the law, thus missing most of its actual sweep.
The Times was hardly alone in being stone deaf. If any serious reporting on the law went out over the national Associated Press or Reuters wires, or on any of the three old-line TV networks or PBS over the past two months, I missed it, though of course I am happy to be corrected if a reader calls it to my attention.
It will be noted that good coverage of CPSIA frequently emanated from “Style”, local-beat, or feature/human interest reporters, and much less often from Washington or government bureaus. I observed in my second Forbes piece that in some quarters of the elite press
it’s usual to turn for guidance on consumer issues to groups like Public Citizen or U.S. PIRG — the very groups who gave us CPSIA in the first place.
I think Washington-based reporting is particularly prone to a version of this problem. The reporter and editor will ordinarily want to be fair and not just run with whatever line Public Citizen or PIRG are putting out, so they know they need to track down the other side of the story. The problem of course is buried in that phrase “the other”. The temptation (which, of course, the consumer group will often encourage) is to designate as “the other” side some big industry or household-name business with a lobbyist, trade association, or P.R. firm conveniently present on the Washington scene to be dialed up — in this case, someone like the Big Two giant toymakers known for their mass-merchandised Chinese imports, or maybe a retailer like Wal-Mart or Target.
We now realize in retrospect something that may not have been quite as apparent earlier when CPSIA was being pushed to approval amid near-unanimous cheering in the press: that the interests of these mass merchandisers may diverge quite drastically from that of small toy, garment, or school-supply makers or retailers not present at the Washington negotiation table, and that laws mass producers can “live with” and are willing to sign off on are not necessarily compatible with the survival of the small makers and sellers. So the story told from inside Washington will be quite different from the story told later outside. That’s my theory, anyway, to account for the selective deafness of some sectors of the national press, and perhaps in particular some editors and publishers who self-consciously concern themselves with questions of high national policy.
More: Welcome NRO “Corner” readers (Iain Murray); our CPSIA coverage is here. And Prof. Obbie has more.
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Honda has informed dealers that their inventories of new and used youth motorcycles and ATVs will become worthless and legally unsalable on Feb. 10:
Even more concerning is that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the agency charged with enforcing the Act, recently ruled that Congress intended the lead content regulations to be retroactive. This means that, regardless of its date of manufacture or the fact that it complied with all applicable laws and regulations at the date of manufacture, any children’s product manufactured with even a single component part containing lead in excess of the limits will no longer be legal for sale as of February 10, 2009.
Earlier here. Friday’s CPSC stay of enforcement on some testing/certification rules in no way provides an exemption from the law for items that do contain significant quantities of lead, which Honda says are unavoidable as a part of the alloys used in the products. More: Hell for Leather.
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Good sleuthing by Carter at Point of Law and ShopFloor: President Obama the other day issued a much-noted new executive order expanding the legal powers of labor unions. When you check the metadata on the PDF, who do you think turns up as the document’s original author?
They might prove to be a weak link in the chain of online free speech [Electronic Frontier Foundation via Ardia/Citizen Media Law]
Ultralitigious inmate Jonathan Lee Riches has filed a motion attempting to insert himself into the Bernard Madoff legal quagmire, but a federal court has rebuffed his efforts. That may make Riches the only person in the country not to have a legitimate legal grievance against Madoff [NYT DealBook via Christopher Fountain]
You might think Doris Sexton’s main problem is the chronic lung condition she’s got from smoking a pack a day for 43 years. The smell of the co-worker’s perfume, however, she argues, exacerbated that ailment. A New Jersey court has allowed her workers’ compensation lawsuit to go forward. [Insurance Journal] For ADA lawsuits involving perfume, follow links from here.
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The tedium of legal process can provide the occasion (and sometimes also the inspiration) for creative efforts that transcend the doodle form. (Techotic, gallery at Anne Reed’s Deliberations).
The attorney (Bowman & Brooke, Products Liability Prof Blog) has written a three-page summary memo (PDF) on the CPSC enforcement stay announced Friday. Earlier in the week, he notes, the National Association of Manufacturers had petitioned (PDF) for a stay; more on that here.
Some blog reactions to the stay: What Do I Sell, Domestic Diva with many links, Common Room. And a couple of comments from Twitter: the stay “bought time to get reform” (@PersonallyYours); it “looks like our fight has changed from a sprint to a marathon” (@bitofwhimsy).
More reactions: Handmade Toy Alliance/Little Ida, CPSIA blog 600ppm. And in the Washington Post, a longtime trial lawyer ally says the stay “does not seem consistent with the intent of the law.” Well, as they say, duh.
(Public domain image: Grandma’s Graphics, Ruth Mary Hallock).
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