Let non-citizens serve on juries? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

A shocking change in American labor relations is brewing at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is expected sometime soon to alter a major regulation. The change involves a new interpretation of the “advice exemption” of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Specifically, businesses would have to disclose the names of, and fees paid to, attorneys and consultants who advise them on union-organizing activities. In turn, attorneys and consultants providing such advice would be required to disclose their client lists and the fees they receive.

If that sounds like a road map for retaliation and strong-arming, with dangers for traditional attorney-client confidentiality, well, you’re getting the idea. Furchtgott-Roth says the department has evaded regulatory review by low-balling the proposal’s billions of dollars in costs. “The change has no basis in existing law or precedent.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth on the “Persuader Rule” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Most importantly, would the private enforcer bar support Assembly Member Gatto’s AB 227, allowing a company receiving a 60 day notice to avoid prosecution by curing the violation within 14 days? Or better still, Cal Biz Lit’s proposal to allow sixty days to cure violations?

Those measures would be real reform.

More: Amanda Robert, Legal NewsLine.

Prop 65: how serious are Gov. Brown’s reforms? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Ethics roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Personality Quiz: Which Supreme Court Justice Are You? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

…why should courts defer to agency determinations regarding their own authority? … Whether a government body uses its power wisely or not, it cannot possibly be the judge of whether it has that power to begin with. Yet Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, essentially says that there’s no such thing as a dispute over whether an agency has power to regulate in a given area, just clear congressional lines of authority and ambiguous ones, with agencies having free rein in the latter circumstance unless their actions are “arbitrary and capricious” (what lawyers call Chevron deference, after a foundational 1984 case involving the oil company).

That makes no sense. As Cato explained in our brief, since the theory of deference is based on Congress’s affirmative grant of power to an agency over a defined jurisdiction, it’s incoherent to say that the failure to provide such power is an equal justification for deference. Furthermore, granting an agency deference over its own jurisdiction is an open invitation for agencies to aggrandize power that Congress never intended them to have. One doesn’t need a doctorate in public choice economics to recognize that we need checks on those who wield power because it’s in their nature to husband and grow that power.

Read the whole thing here.

City of Arlington v. FCC is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

P.S. “Maryland would have disbarred these clowns.” [@BruceGodfrey]

N.Y.: “P.I. Lawyers Are Suspended for Encouraging Client to Lie” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Canada: man who killed cellmate sues jail staff is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Free speech roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

The CBP letter is here (& Sailing Scuttlebutt).

33 boxes of cigars on board, cont’d is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system