I posted a few data points last week at Cato at Liberty (& welcome Glenn Reynolds, Ira Stoll readers).
From the monthly archives:
December 2010
After alarmist coverage about how the water supply of rural Hinkley, Calif. is laced with carcinogenic chromium 6, it may have surprised some L.A. Times readers to learn that the town’s cancer rate is actually a bit below average. One interviewed local family blames the pollution for a variety of ills ranging from stroke to cognitive deficits to miscarriage to tumors in a pet dog. When the movie “Erin Brockovich” came out, it was pointed out that workers at the utility plant where the contamination originated had a life expectancy exceeding the California average.
P.S. I see that Tim Cavanaugh of Reason is on the case too.
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Philip K. Howard’s latest, for the Washington Post:
Once enacted, most laws are ignored for generations, allowed to take on a life of their own without meaningful review. Decade after decade, they pile up like sediment in a harbor, bogging the country down – in dense regulation, unaffordable health care, and higher taxes and public debt.
Time, he says, to revisit the “sunset law” idea, under which laws would expire unless affirmatively reenacted, and radical simplification as well.
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As the Associated Press reported recently, the school nutrition bill to be signed by President Obama today includes provisions giving the federal government authority to regulate (among much else) the frequency of school bake sales. Following a public furor, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack now says he has no intention of using the authority to do that — which may or may not signify much over the long term, since cabinet secretaries depart regularly and his successors will be free to revisit the issue. [ABC/KBOI, Kyle Wingfield/Atlanta Journal-Constitution] Local governments in places like New York City and even Iowa have lately been regulating or abolishing bake sales on nutritionist grounds. I joined Ray Dunaway on Hartford’s WTIC NewsTalk 1080 this morning to discuss the update.
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Contrary to mythmaking in some quarters, CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) does push participating governments to regulate family life and private conduct, it goes far beyond the current state of U.S. law, it is no mere hortatory exercise unlikely to affect future decisions by judges and others, it is not merely a way of pressuring countries whose record on women’s rights is inferior to that of the United States, and its force will not be rendered meaningless by the inevitable Senate declarations, reservations and understandings. [Christina Hoff Sommers, NRO; Julian Ku/Opinio Juris ("[Sommers] is certainly right that most international law scholars think the reservations have no effect and that there will be a push after ratification to get courts to recognize CEDAW and ignore the reservations.”)] More: Rachel Ryan, FrumForum.
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- Minneapolis police arrest author-blogger-gun rights activist Joel Rosenberg [Popehat, Mark Bennett, Scott Greenfield]
- In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, Justice Ginsburg’s instincts as a proceduralist might come in tension with her instincts as a feminist [Alexandra Lahav, Mass Tort Lit]
- “Cease this shouting!” cried Grinch, “From all Yule din desist!” But he’d Moved To The Nuisance and so, case dismissed [Art Carden, Forbes]
- “San Francisco Sues to Close Down Immigration Law Firm, Claims ‘Exorbitant’ Fees” [ABA Journal]
- New ATRA report blasts overly cozy state attorneys general cooperation with plaintiff’s bar ["Beyond Reproach? Fostering Integrity and Public Trust in the Offices of State Attorneys General," PDF]
- Nathan Myrhvold’s patent aggregator Intellectual Ventures, which said it was disinclined to sue, begins suing [The Recorder, Salmon]
- Privacy = when I choose to conceal my life data, secrecy = when you conceal yours [Kelly Young via Dave Boaz, Cato at Liberty]
- One doc’s memoir: litigation crisis as morality crisis [seven years ago on Overlawyered]
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A New York law provides that new businesses cannot register names that employ words like “library”, “school” or “academy” without the prior approval of the state education department. The department declined to approve the application of a startup East Village confiserie that calls itself The Chocolate Library, so the owner has incorporated as Chocolate 101 while hoping for a change of heart on the registration issue. He called the dispute “ridiculous”: “No one is coming in here confusing us as a library.” [NYT "Diner's Journal"]
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Having defeated a Righthaven suit filed against the political site Democratic Underground, lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation now would like the court to award attorneys’ fees. [Kravets, Wired "Threat Level"] Among the claims advanced by EFF in that case were that Righthaven had engaged in barratry and champerty, concepts familiar to many Overlawyered readers if in desuetude in some sectors of the legal world these days. It had also pointed out that some of the newspapers facilitating the suits themselves, or websites they operate, appear to engage in or encourage practices that might be considered wrongful under Righthaven’s theories, such as “cutting and pasting” potentially copyrighted text.
Separately, Groklaw has analyzed what happened in one sample case. Of the furor aroused by the lawsuits, “I think the benefits are worth the negative publicity,” said one executive with the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s owner at a September panel.
The entrepreneurial copyright litigation firm has also now signed up the Denver Post as a new affiliate, and has made a splash by suing the owner of the Drudge Report over its use of a photo allegedly swiped from the Colorado newspaper, an offense (if proven) presumably not as readily defended under “fair use” doctrine as some others over which it has sued.
A case called Bond v. U.S., arising from an admittedly bizarre fact pattern involving a wife’s attempt to injure a romantic rival, provides an opportunity to test the limits of extension of federal criminal law into areas that would ordinarily serve as the occasion of state-level prosecution. The Cato Institute has filed an amicus brief urging a narrow view of the proper federal criminal role in the case, in pursuit of the view that the federal government is one of limited, enumerated powers. [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
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Jill Chuckas of the Handmade Toy Alliance testifies before the Senate about the Law That Stole Christmas.
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The Federalist Society has posted numerous videos from its recent National Lawyers’ Convention, including sessions on the aggressive regulatory stance of today’s Environmental Protection Agency, the constitutionality of Obamacare, anonymity and the First Amendment in media and campaign-regulation law, NYU’s Richard Epstein debating Yale’s Bill Eskridge on the court battle over California’s Prop 8, recusal and campaign rules for judges, Dodd-Frank, and the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez case on accreditation of student groups, among other topics. And civil procedure/Iqbal-Twombly buffs may be interested in a luncheon panel held just yesterday in D.C. (I was in the audience) in which four law professors (Don Elliott of Yale, Martin Redish and Ronald Allen of Northwestern, and Rick Esenberg of Marquette) outlined ideas for reforming the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to reduce discovery costs and improve screening of cases in the earliest stages of filing.
The video above is of the Society’s 10th annual Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture, in which Second Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs provocatively criticizes legal academia and other precincts of influential legal thinking for misunderstanding the role of the military and its relation to the law.
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It took eight years to get the wretched thing thrown out. [noted earlier; Wajert, Frank, Bader]
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They’re making money, even if their effect on actual road safety is ambiguous. [Radley Balko]
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Larry Ribstein is not persuaded by a ProPublica columnist’s demand for more banker scalps. [Truth on the Market]
“Third-party” harassment claims pose a legal headache for employers. [HR Capitalist]
The latest round in the continuing quarrel between Simple Justice blogger Scott Greenfield and academic enthusiast for greater speech liability Danielle Citron. [Simple Justice]
A decision tree (or flow chart) in which a rather large number of branches lead to referrals to a civil rights lawyer.
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Some trial lawyers have been crusading for a while on the theory that aluminum baseball bats are unreasonably dangerous because they allow balls to be hit with more force. A lawsuit over a 11-year-old Little Leaguer’s injury may be the next to test that theory. [Chicago Sun-Times]
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