And that’s just so unfair, according to Lester Tate, president of the State Bar of Georgia. After all, it’s not as if lawyers have a lot of power or behave aggressively or hurtfully toward anyone else, right? “Particularly abhorrent are the attacks that come from candidates who are lawyers themselves.” Where’s their professional solidarity? [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
From the monthly archives:
October 2010
In a 23-page opinion (PDF), federal judge William Alsup in California has scathingly rebuked a frequent litigant who is in the habit of asserting broad trademark claims over the use of the word “edge” in videogames and related items. [BoingBoing; earlier here and here]
{ 1 comment }
Author Philip K. Howard’s latest op-ed tells of the “legal quicksand” faced by small business owners, who
face legal challenges at every step. Municipalities requires multiple and often nonsensical forms to do business. Labor laws expose them to legal threats by any disgruntled employee. Mandates to provide costly employment benefits impose high hurdles to hiring new employees. Well-meaning but impossibly complex laws impose requirements to prevent consumer fraud, provide disability access, prevent hiring illegal immigrants, display warnings and notices and prevent scores of other potential evils. The tax code is incomprehensible.
All of this requires legal and other overhead – costing 50% more per employee for small businesses than big businesses.
Prosecutors say the evidence does not support convicting prominent Dutch politician Geert Wilders of violating hate speech laws. [Dutch News] On the other hand, Andy McCarthy points out that the Dutch legal system — which obviously differs on this point from our own — allows judges to force the case to continue notwithstanding the prosecutors’ view that it should be dropped. [NRO "Corner"]
And it’s not just the big role he played in the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac debacle: my new post at Cato-at-Liberty (& thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and Frum Forum for the links).
{ 7 comments }
John Berlau recalls Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago strikes accompanied by arson, sabotage, and loss of both life and property:
If the IAFF [International Association of Fire Fighters] and its allies get their way with federal legislation to mandate collective bargaining for public-safety officers in every American community, the deadly fire-fighter strikes of the recent past will almost certainly be a part of our “progressive” future. …The biggest congressional priority of the IAFF over the past few years has been the so-called Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which would force unionization and collective bargaining on every one of the nation’s local fire departments. … According to the watchdog Public Service Research Council, public-employee strikes quadruple, on average, in the years after state laws mandating public-sector collective bargaining take effect.
{ 5 comments }
Using a patent acquired from the much-criticized Intellectual Ventures, a company called Webvention claims to control broad rights over many common website features such as mouse rollover previews. It has begun suing many well-known companies (in East Texas, naturally) for alleged infringement; its licensing come-on letter to one target warned that if the $80,000 fee was not forthcoming the sum would rise after 60 days to $160,000 and after 90 days to $300,000. [Ars Technica; Joe Mullin, Patent Litigation Weekly] More: Coyote (”I am just waiting for the patent on breathing or metabolizing food.”)
{ 2 comments }
The New York Times brings word of a study with arresting findings published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine:
Researchers examined the records of 595 children nationwide, all at similar high risk for maltreatment, tracking them from ages 4 to 8. During those years, Child Protective Services investigated the families of 164 of these children for suspected abuse or neglect. The scientists then interviewed all the families four years later, comparing the investigated families with the 431 families that had not been investigated.
The scientists looked at several factors: social support, family functioning, poverty, caregiver education and depressive symptoms, and child anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior — all known to increase the risk for abuse or neglect. But they were unable to find any differences in the investigated families compared with the uninvestigated in any of these dimensions, except that maternal depressive symptoms were worse in households that had been visited. … They concluded that Child Protective Services investigations had little or no effect.
The researchers considered but rejected the possibility that the investigated households were inherently more dysfunctional than the comparison households but were improved enough by the investigations to achieve similar outcomes. Surprisingly or otherwise, though unable to find a positive effect, the researchers defend the continued existence of the investigation bureaus, contending that they must be doing some good. On the other hand, the pediatric journal, under the editorial headline of “Child Protective Services Has Outlived Its Usefulness,” suggests a shift toward greater reliance on nurses as opposed to investigators in cases where neglect is the issue, backed up by police in cases where treatment of children is actually criminal.
There is a possible money waste involved here, of course: Child Protective Services is a costly program, shaped by federal mandates. But any reckoning must include a less tangible cost: the devastating effects when parents are not in fact abusive or dangerous yet are put through investigations, or worse yet see their children taken away. Indeed, while it’s hard to deny that individual investigations can sometimes identify and help children in trouble, the difficulty of finding any overall effect suggests (if the study’s results are valid) that those successes may be canceled out by the instances in which investigation does harm — perhaps a bit more than canceled out, given that suggestive increase in “maternal depressive symptoms.”
For another angle on the harm investigative mistakes or zealotry can cause, here’s a Des Moines Register editorial:
Iowans are placed on the state’s child abuse registry because social workers determined they were a threat to children. Not a judge. Not a jury. Social workers who conduct abuse investigations. The accused abusers have limited time and opportunity to appeal the decision, and may wait more than a year to get their names removed if they can prove themselves innocent. If not, people remain on the registry for 10 years.
{ 4 comments }
Just a reminder for those in the area: on Monday afternoon at 5:30 I’ll be speaking at Tulane Law School, debating Prof. George Strickler on the role of the legal profession with Prof. Michael Pappas moderating, and a reception to follow. The next day, Tues. Oct. 19, I’ll give a lunchtime talk at Loyola-New Orleans on employment law and the ADA, with Prof. Craig Senn commenting (update: video). Both events are sponsored by student chapters of the Federalist Society and are open to the public.
Fact-checking a Maine Congresswoman: my latest at Cato-at-Liberty.
The Wall Street Journal had a report Tuesday on newly mobilized sentiment among businesspeople intent on challenging the rapid ongoing expansion of federal governance and regulation. It profiles Rick Woldenberg, well known to readers of this site as a tireless agitator against the insanities of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act 
(CPSIA) of 2008. Woldenberg had been an Obama voter and basically apathetic about politics until the CPSIA debacle unfolded, putting at risk his medium-sized educational products company and many other makers and sellers of basically harmless products for kids. The indifference of the federal establishment to the resulting distress in the business community — and in particular the deaf ear turned by such lawmakers as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — propelled Woldenberg into legislative activism (AmendTheCPSIA.com) and then politics, where he has backed Joel Pollak in an unusually strong challenge to Rep. Schakowsky in her Chicago-area district.
On CPSIA’s tendency to ban rocks used for study in Earth Science classes, see our earlier post. More: ShopFloor.
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Elise Bake, Der Ball Der Tiere (”The Animals’ Ball”, German, 1891), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
{ 5 comments }
Prof. Mark Osler, who specializes in criminal law at University of St. Thomas Law School in the Twin Cities, interviewed at Abnormal Use:
The pairing of civil and criminal RICO was one of the worst ideas a law professor ever had (yes, one of us dreamed that one up). The extensive rule-making by courts in civil RICO cases has made interpretation and use of the statute so confusing and inefficient that prosecutors avoid it if they can, preferring to charge money laundering or something under the fraud statutes. Given the current state of the law, in which civil RICO is used to tie people up in endless litigation, we would be better off without RICO in the federal code.
In general, if a mortgage servicer engages in improper corner-cutting in assembling the documents for foreclosure, it doesn’t lose the right to recover the property from the delinquent borrower: it just has to go back and do the steps properly (assuming the borrower insists on that in a timely way). Even negligent loss of key documents is not enough to alter the underlying property rights, for reasons well expressed by the late “Tanta” at Calculated Risk two years ago (via John Carney and Business Insider):
A financial institution in the business of making mortgage loans has no business routinely losing or damaging original promissory notes, and any institution that does so should be shut down by the federal regulators and I mean that.
But if consumer attorneys want to create a situation in which the simple fact of loss of or irreparable damage to an original note vacates the debt, I can promise you you will not like the consequences of that. If it turns into Total War here, don’t ever lose an original cancelled check. You should know that there is actually one fairly respectable reason for doing [foreclosure] filings with note copies, besides servicer laziness or loan sale screw-ups: taking your original note out of the custodian’s vault to send to some local attorney to attach to a court filing creates several more opportunities for it to get lost. If it becomes a requirement that [foreclosure] can proceed only with the original note in the courtroom, and the presence of an LNA [lost note affidavit] always means dismissal, then the things are going to have to be handled and shipped and received with the same level of security as a million-dollar bearer bond. Like, a Brink’s truck and a bonded courier carrying a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. You want to pay the cost of that? No. You don’t. But you will.
More: Ted at PoL, quoting Arnold Kling and more John Carney.
{ 12 comments }
In case you didn’t know. [California Civil Justice]
Looks like the winner of a Taiwanese competition for a poster on the theme “Protect Copyright” will have to give back the medal and prize money [Lowering the Bar]
