Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
Your home no longer your castle: “Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.” [NWI Times] James Joyner rounds up outraged blog reaction, and Scott Greenfield has some thoughts on the gradual erosion of the right to resist.
{ 18 comments }
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing: “The liability-phobic dilution of kids’ science has reached its apotheosis with ‘CHEMISTRY 60′: a chemistry kit that promises ‘60 fun activities with no chemicals.’ Kids are expected to supply the chemicals from their parents’ kitchen cupboards.” [linking to Sean Michael Ragan, MAKE; see also Chemical & Engineering News, RSC]
Several years ago Wired carried a report by Steve Silberman: “Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.” The CPSC carries out a war on chemicals that can be used to make illegal fireworks, while a Texas law makes it illegal “to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs.” The renowned 1940s and 1950s manufacturer of chemistry sets, Porter ChemCraft of Hagerstown, Md., “produced more than a million chemistry sets before going out of business in the 1980s amid increasing liability concerns.”
{ 8 comments }
Just out: one of the most serious and wide-ranging podcasts yet on my new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America. I’m interviewed by James Haynes of the Society’s Professional Responsibility & Legal Education Practice Group Executive Committee and Baltimore Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter. It’s 53:25 minutes in length and you can listen here. Thanks also to the 100+ Facebook users so far who’ve “liked” the podcast.
A would-be police officer sued the city of Bridgeport, Conn., contending that the police chief had described her behavior as “irrational, irate, and uncooperative as well as paranoid,” which she said should trigger the provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act protecting persons “regarded as” disabled, in this case psychologically disabled. She lost when a court — applying the law as it stood at the time of her termination in mid-2008, before Congress expanded it — deemed the chief’s alleged comments to be colloquial rather than an attempt at a clinical evaluation. As the court noted, however, since 2008 the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) has greatly liberalized the definition of what counts as being “regarded as” disabled — which means her case might have a better chance if it arose today. [Daniel Schwartz]
{ 4 comments }
The U.S. Department of Justice falls flat on its face in its unsuccessful prosecution of Lauren Stevens, an in-house lawyer and vice president at drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, on charges of lying to the government and obstructing justice during the company’s response to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigation of its marketing. [Main Justice]
{ 5 comments }
Some law firms set up a separate business to run their conference rooms, enabling them to charge the rooms out for client meetings rather than treat them as overhead. And watch out for hefty charges for the time spent preparing the client’s bill itself. [Dan Fisher, Forbes]
{ 1 comment }
Lawmakers in at least three states have proposed new laws criminalizing the taking of photos on farms without permission of the owner — and sometimes going much further than that, too. The idea is to stop animal-welfare activists from compiling unauthorized footage of allegedly inhumane conditions. I comment on that — and on some related photography and farm issues — at Cato at Liberty.
{ 3 comments }
{ 1 comment }
It has to do with RightHaven: “Why We Won’t Link To Denver Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, and Several Others” [Box Turtle Bulletin]
Kenneth Anderson at Instapundit notes the latest outbreak of “lawfare,” the use of litigation against diplomatic and military actors. “As with most of these advocacy campaigns, the point is not to win cases, but to create a public narrative that says the practice is unsavory and illegitimate, and leverage that into personal legal uncertainty for officials, whether in office or once they leave government.” I’ve got much more on the phenomenon — and its large base of support in present-day legal academia — in Schools for Misrule.
Separately, Gabriel Schoenfeld at National Affairs argues that “when it comes to the American government’s efforts to provide for the common defense, a far-reaching legalism has taken hold,” and Anderson has more on the legalities of last week’s Bin Laden raid.
{ 9 comments }
Keen to sic the feds on your boss? There’s an app for that, courtesy of the Department of Labor. [Michael Fox]
{ 2 comments }
Well-known serial ADA litigant George Louie has hit the California Gold Rush country [CJAC] Not that far away: “Serial ADA filer targets popular Davis burger joint” [same, Scott Johnson]
{ 1 comment }
Imagine how puzzling it must be to be an employee of the city of Montreal: the city “has set up a whistleblower hotline to encourage you to expose wrongdoings by colleagues but has also created an explicit policy forbidding you to blow the whistle and is threatening severe penalties if you do.” [Montreal Gazette]
{ 2 comments }
The New York Times’s “Room for Debate” feature has a round table up on the movement for more humane treatment of farm animals and invited me to participate. I argue that local variation in laws and the emergence of distinct markets for humanely raised meat are preferable to calls for federal government intervention. More: Tom Laskawy, Grist; and see my Cato follow-on post referenced here.
{ 4 comments }
More developments in “the case of the dangerously defective bra.” [Kevin Couch, Abnormal Use]
{ 2 comments }
The law school process compared to a cattle chute [AtL]
Get your copy today! My new book tackles the question of why so many bad ideas come from the law schools. "Cutting-edge commentary, hard-hitting, witty, astute." -- Publisher's Weekly. "Excellent... A fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions" -- Wall Street Journal.
Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.