But that hasn’t stood in the way of a push to sign up clients for law firms in the vicinity of the Frederick, Md. armed forces base. [WJZ, Army Times]
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From the monthly archives:
April 2011
Canada’s TV establishment may call on Ottawa to prevent escape-via-Netflix [Michael Moynihan]
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The fast-food chain, which had fought back against the large Alabama law firm with spirited ads defending its product, “said no money was exchanged and it is not changing any of its products or advertising.” [WAVY, earlier]
P.S. Cheeky new ad from Taco Bell aimed at the law firm: “Would it kill you to say you’re sorry?” [AP] More of this, please!
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Under the banner of combating discrimination against the disabled, Congress and the EEOC may together have quietly instituted a fairly momentous extension of the regime of federally mandated workplace benefits — in particular, imposing on even very small employers a new obligation to hold the jobs of employees taking some kinds of leave. [Hyman]
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That could be the result of the new institution of elaborate compliance system mandates that could prove to be beyond the capacity of fledgling start-ups, per Marc Hodak:
So, the government decided it had to increase regulations [on] the one part of the financial services sector -– hedge funds –- that had nothing to do with the financial crisis. And because the government felt compelled to spend gobs of taxpayer cash to bail out financial institution[s] that were too big to fail, Congress created a raft of regulations whose main effect will be to crush entrepreneurship and compel waves of consolidation. And the people who pushed for this regulation, who inadvertently insisted that the fixed costs of doing business in America are not yet high enough, will be shocked to find that only the big survive.
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“The Electronic Frontier Foundation joined civil liberties and privacy groups in criticizing a proposal from the San Francisco Entertainment Commission that would require all venues with an occupancy of over 100 people to record the faces of all patrons and employees and scan their ID’s for storage in a database which they must hand over to law enforcement on request. … Events with strong cultural, ideological, and political components are frequently held at venues that would be affected by these rules.” [EFF]
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I’ve got a new post up at Cato at Liberty noting (after Iain Murray) that the lack of an annual “Regulation Day,” along the lines of tax-filing day, makes the cost of regulation even less apparent to the citizenry. I cite examples from the realms of medical devices, credit cards, and power plants (& Ivan Osorio, American Spectator).
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Would you want to play in it? [Kaboom via Free-Range Kids]
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Attorney Ray Hartwell of Hunton & Williams reviews a certain “excellent,” “wide-ranging” and “richly informative” volume. It’s one of my 
favorite reviews so far; among its other virtues, it gets into the conflicting institutional pressures on law schools that underlie some of the ideological drift. For other reviews, see our posts here, here, and here. Why not order your copy — or a gift copy for a graduate or favored relative — today?
More: Today’s Yale Daily News is out with a story by reporter Nikita Lalwani on the cycle of inbreeding in high-end legal academia: top law schools draw heavily on a few elite undergraduate colleges for their student body, and in turn supply most of the future law faculty for law schools around the country. I’m quoted:
“Harvard and Yale graduates like complicated law more than the general public,” [Olson] said. “Legal academics like these complications because they are intellectually stimulating, but most lawyers just want to be able to advise their clients to either do or avoid doing something.”
And Chicago’s Brian Leiter is quoted saying something with which I’d fully agree:
In an email to the News Apr. 13, Leiter said he finds it troubling that just six schools control so much of the legal academic world.
“It is not a healthy situation, and no doubt accounts for a lot of what ails legal scholarship and explains the legal academy’s susceptibility to intellectual fads,” he said. “As long as the fad takes hold at a couple of feeder schools to legal academia, it’s guaranteed to spread.”
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“Despite claims that she couldn’t work, rarely left home and rarely socialized because of injuries from a 1996 car accident, Dorothy McGurk, 43, was belly-dancing at home and in Manhattan for hours a day — and then spending several more hours a day blogging about [it].” Asked by a Facebook acquaintance why she wasn’t posting pictures of her dance adventures, McGurk said her ex, from whom she was demanding lifetime maintenance, “would love to fry me with that.” Her words sufficed, and Justice Catherine DiDomenico denied most of her maintenance claim as well as awarding the husband “60 percent from the sale of their house and thousands in legal fees for her ‘dilatory tactics.’” [Dareh Gregorian, New York Post]
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Amid the general hail of dead cats that commentators have aimed at the class action suit claiming to speak for unpaid Huffington Post bloggers, Jack Shafer’s contribution stands out (action “proves that we’re becoming a nation of Winklevosses who file legal motion after legal motion every time a pot of money is spotted….the proper time to negotiate payment for an article is before publication”).
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If you’re suing over the collapse of a chair under your client at a local Kmart, try to sue the correct manufacturer, devote some thought to what your theory of liability is going to be, vet your client carefully, and other tips. [Abnormal Use]
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A fraternity has already apologized for its role in loutish public expressions, but that isn’t nearly enough for some complainants who’ve initiated an investigation by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights that puts Yale at risk of losing its $500 million in federal funding if it isn’t sufficiently cooperative. Peter Berkowitz in the Wall Street Journal:
That Yale finds itself under pressure from the government, in the face of stupid frat-boy initiation rituals obviously designed to humiliate the pledges themselves, dramatizes how far government and higher education have drifted from the principles of freedom. … What is really at stake in the current investigation of Yale is the proper mission of the university. The complainants, not a few university administrators and faculty, and powerful forces at work in the Department of Education seem to think that one of a university’s top priorities is policing students’ opinions and utterances to ensure that they adopt government-approved ideas about sexual relations. That priority can’t be reconciled with the imperatives of a liberal education.
If a letter just sent to alumni by Yale President Richard Levin is any indication, the university may not intend to put up much of a public stand on behalf of its autonomy of governance, the toleration granted even some offensive utterances in a community of unbridled expression, or the importance of due process for students accused of wrongdoing. Indeed, Levin’s letter does not make even the tamest and most tentative attempt to argue that anything about the OCR complaint is legally erroneous or worth resisting. The full text of the letter follows: [click to continue…]
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In the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, cycle shop owner Mike Larson explains how CPSIA’s irrationality actually increases risk: “Kids aren’t licking or eating their ATVs, but they just might ride adult-sized ATVs thanks to this ban. Congress is putting kids in danger by refusing to address this problem.”
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“…And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.” And now there’s even empirical evidence. (h/t Sam S.)
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The state bar of California is described as being the main proponent of the idea. [ABA Journal] Ann Althouse regards the measure of “diversity” as something “freakishly manipulable.”
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