A new report in the WSJ quotes a retiring NHTSA official as saying higher-ups are refusing to release the results of the agency’s staff investigation into charges of Toyota sudden acceleration, because those findings are not unfavorable enough toward the automaker. I’ve got more detail in a new post at Cato at Liberty, and Ted covers the story at PoL.
Meanwhile, proponents of a sweeping expansion of federal auto safety law, one that would thrust Washington much more deeply into the operations of the automotive industry, are really in a hurry — a quick, urgent, must-do-now hurry — to pass it, even though many of its provisions have not had much airing in public debate. An editorial today in the New York Times — a newspaper that almost comically underplayed the revelations earlier this month about the NHTSA probe’s pro-Toyota results — flatly asserts that the Japanese automaker’s vehicles suffer “persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration,” and demands that the sweeping new legislation “be passed into law without delay.” It’s almost as if they are afraid of what might happen if lawmakers pause to take a closer look.
Among the many other things the new legislation would do is greatly enhance the legal leverage of automaker or dealership employees who adopt the mantle of “whistleblowers”. But if the new revelations from a responsible career employee of NHTSA are ignored, we will have another confirmation that some types of whistleblowing are more welcome in America’s governing class than others. (& welcome Coyote, Gabriel Malor, Death by 1000 Papercuts, Mark Hemingway/D.C. Examiner (”the indispensable Overlawyered blog”), Allen McDuffee/Think Tanked readers).
Tagged as:
accolades,
NHTSA,
Toyota,
whistleblowers
Michael Dupree, now serving a prison sentence for burglary and other charges, has filed a pro se suit against three men over what he says was excessive force in apprehending him. One of the three being sued is Anthony McKoy, whose bicycle Dupree stole after breaking into his car. [St. Petersburg Times, AP]
Tagged as:
criminals who sue,
Florida
Great way to get the employer sued, Mr. President [Volokh, with much interesting discussion in the comments section about the workings of "hostile-environment" law]
Tagged as:
hostile environment
Continuing the discussion from my Cato piece earlier this week [New York Times, citing Jonathan Cohn/New Republic; Foster's Daily Democrat (New Hampshire), Mark Perry]. Other links and reactions on the more recent Chipotle decision: Ann Coulter (right links column), George Leef/John Locke, Above the Law, Zincavage, Perry, Fisher/Atlantic Wire. Pat Cleary points out that the top source of ADA charges before the EEOC remains back injuries, followed by pain, stiffness or loss of movement in bones or joints, and depression. And at Richard Epstein’s piece at Ricochet, commenter Duane Oyen tells the story of ADA’s arguably perverse effects on a shuttle bus service in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Tagged as:
disabled rights
“Southern California coach Lane Kiffin says he was surprised by the lawsuit filed against him and USC by the Tennessee Titans after he hired away one of the NFL team’s assistant coaches.” [AP, more, via Miller]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
football
Michigan: “A Clinton Township attorney injured in a soccer match by an alleged ’slide tackle’ in violation of recreational game rules says a court decision erroneously gives weekend jocks carte blanche to play too rough.” [Macomb Daily, court of appeals decision in Hlywa v. Liberty Park and Pond (PDF)]
Tagged as:
recreation
- Hilton Head dispute over pet turkeys leads to $4.25 million verdict [Island Packet via Lowering the Bar]
- “Lucasfilm lightsaber legal threat letter sells for $3,850″ [BoingBoing, earlier]
- Raw milk: “If The Government Says That It’s Not About Freedom, Then It’s Just NOT” [Ken at Popehat vs. L.A. Times]
- Dell “failed to stress” accounting disclosure. SEC: that will be $100 million [TJIC]
- Dodd-Frank dubbed “Lawyers’ and Consultants’ Full Employment Act of 2010″ [Mark Perry, WSJ Law Blog]
- “Did liberal judges invent the standing doctrine? An Empirical Study of the Evolution of Standing, 1921-2006″ [Ho/Ross, Stanford Law Review]
- Office of Connecticut AG Blumenthal doesn’t emerge with glory from fertility doctor case [Pesci]
- Massachusetts high court tosses 125-year-old rule: owners now face wider liability for snow/ice hazards [Globe]
Tagged as:
food safety,
Massachusetts,
nastygrams,
Richard Blumenthal,
Securities and Exchange Commission,
slip and fall,
South Carolina
The lad won 7,500 euros for being wrongly accused of stealing a bag of snacks in a store. The settlement also covered his claim of having been falsely imprisoned and assaulted when a shop worker grabbed his arm. [Irish Times]
Tagged as:
Ireland,
libel slander and defamation
Much reaction in the comments at the San Francisco Chronicle to the Ninth Circuit’s “Chipotle Experience discriminates against the disabled” ruling. Earlier here. And Ted at PoL notes this significant passage rejected by the appeals court:
The [district] court found that Antoninetti had failed to show irreparable injury because he had not revisited either restaurant after Chipotle adopted its written policy and because his “purported desire to return to the [r]estaurants is neither concrete nor sincere or supported by the facts.” It also stated that Antoninetti’s “history as a plaintiff in accessibility litigation supports this Court’s finding that his purported desire to return to the [r]estaurants is not sincere. Since immigrating to the United States in 1991, Plaintiff has sued over twenty business entities for alleged accessibility violations, and, in all (but one) of those cases, he never returned to the establishment he sued after settling the case and obtaining a cash payment.”
More on ADA filing mills here. And I’ve now got a longer post up at Cato at Liberty comparing the policy problem of serial ADA complaints to that of patent trollery, mass filing of “citizen suits”, and the business model of recently formed copyright-holder RightHaven. More: Carl Horowitz, NLPC.
Tagged as:
ADA filing mills,
disabled rights,
Ninth Circuit,
restaurants
Just out from Encounter Books, the cover art for my forthcoming book:
Apropos of which, one theme the book treats at length — the consequences and possible origins of today’s overwhelming liberal/Left ideological dominance in academic law — is the subject of Above the Law’s latest odd-trio matchup of Richard Epstein (at Ricochet), John Yoo (in comments there) and Elizabeth Wurtzel (on Twitter). Epstein:
…on average I would say that there are more left-wing democrats than center-left democrats [in legal academia]. I define the difference as follows. The former are those who have sympathy for programs of redistribution on such key areas as education and health care, but are by and large supportive of market institutions on the production side of the line. There is an effort to make good on the earlier social democratic tradition. The left democrats are in favor of a larger public sector and are deeply suspicious of markets more or less across the board. To put the point most vividly, the center left group is uncomfortable that Obama is too far to the left. The left liberal group is uncomfortable that he is too far to the right. There is a lot of difference there.
Yoo:
…conservatives, for good reason, tend to hide their political beliefs when they are on the job market and when they are untenured. They suspect, perhaps reasonably in light of this study, that there is a bias against them. I know conservatives at other schools who try to avoid writing on anything remotely controversial — this is bad for scholarship and teaching, because it discourages our best minds and fullest debates on the most important subjects.
Wurtzel:
Re liberal bias in academia: Shouldn’t the fact that intellectuals tend to be drawn to liberal ideas tell us that liberal ideas are smarter?
Well, no, as Hayek and many others have noted, it might just be that liberal/Left ideas unlike conservative ideas flatter intellectuals with the assurance that they deserve to run the world. Certainly — as I argue at more length in the new book — many of the liberal/Left ideas in circulation today promise to make legal academics a much more powerful and influential bunch.
Tagged as:
law schools,
Schools for Misrule
What, no dustjacket? The suit claims that the way the iPad turns off to avoid overheating, which can happen outdoors in direct sunlight, makes its user experience not “just like a book”. [Chris Walters, Consumerist]
Tagged as:
Apple,
class actions
If Attorney General Jim Hood wanted to avoid the impression that he was thick with the Scruggs crowd, he probably shouldn’t have had them vet his response to the Wall Street Journal before he sent it off. [David Rossmiller, earlier]
Tagged as:
Jim Hood
At Cato today at noon, with John Fund, Armand Thieblot, John Samples, and moderator Chris Edwards, and watchable online. Wish I could attend, but I’m not in Washington at the moment.
Tagged as:
Cato Institute,
labor unions
