“There are plenty of charities that do good work without including Weather Underground co-founders on their boards of directors and openly praising prison rioters on their websites.” [National Review's Robert VerBruggen on $400,000 in U.S. Department of Justice grants to the W. Haywood Burns Institute, its board adorned by Northwestern lawprof Bernardine Dohrn; more, Chicago Sun-Times] Speaking of gruesome austerity in public expenditure, there’s clearly no room left to cut the state of Connecticut’s budget either [Chris Powell on $300,000 for the New Haven People's Center]
Tagged as:
Bernardine Dohrn,
Connecticut
Greater Greater Washington covers a story we linked a while back:
Jones doesn’t actually develop or sell any technology relating to real-time vehicle tracking, but that hasn’t stopped him (and his two offshore firms, ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies) from punishing anyone who does. To date, he’s filed more than 100 lawsuits against anyone who uses such technology—everyone from Ford to Abercrombie & Fitch to American Airlines to FedEx. He’s now one of the top 25 filers of patent infringement suits, according to PriorSmart.com.
Prominent among ArrivalStar’s recent targets have been municipal transit agencies, at least ten of whom it has sued, with another eight getting demand letters. Several have settled, including the New York City, Boston, Chicago and Maryland authorities; critics say the settlements are typically for less than the cost of defending the suits and are accompanied by nondisclosure clauses in which the transit operators agree not to talk about their experience.
Tagged as:
patent trolls,
transit
- Thomas Cooley Law School in Michigan, facing class-action suit, subpoenas Colorado lawprof Paul Campos, vocal critic of schools’ disclosure policies [Campos, Scott Greenfield]
- “Maintenance of effort”: Yielding to special ed lobby, feds won’t let local school districts cut outlays [Nirvi Shah, Ed Week] “Havoc in classrooms” feared as NYC pushes least restrictive placement of disabled students [NY Post] Feds to universities: it’s an ADA violation to ask suicidal students to leave [WFAE, Popehat]
- Arizona lawmaker proposes ban on political viewpoint discrimination in faculty hiring [Inside Higher Ed]
- “University of Maryland Cuts Varsity Cheer Program” [Washington Post] Title IX competes with true gender equality
[Doug Robinson, Deseret News via Saving Sports]
- Due-process revolution in school discipline hasn’t worked out as intended [Richard Arum, The Atlantic] Heavy police presence in schools is something new [J.D. Tuccille, Reason] “Education Department Pushes Racial Quotas in School Discipline” [Hans Bader, CEI]
- “What Yale and the Times Did to Patrick Witt” [KC Johnson, Minding the Campus]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
disability & schools,
law schools,
New York Times,
school discipline,
schools,
suici,
Title IX,
Yale
A Montana federal court dismisses a class action against author Greg Mortenson demanding reader refunds over alleged fabrications in his memoir Three Cups of Tea. [Volokh, earlier here, here, etc.] More: Trask.
Tagged as:
class actions,
publishers
Patrick at Popehat, who lives in Durham, N.C., interviewed his neighbors Gale and Elizabeth, who are a same sex couple, “about how Amendment One would affect them. This is what they had to say.” Earlier here (conservatives who oppose Amendment One include John Locke Foundation president John Hood) and here (most North Carolinians don’t realize measure would ban legal recognition of civil unions and domestic partnerships).
P.S. More from Richard Painter. And Gene Nichol (UNC Law) writes about the other time North Carolina amended its constitution to restrict marriage, which was back in 1875 [News & Observer]
Tagged as:
North Carolina,
same-sex marriage
The Gazette (suburban Maryland) on a 4-3 Maryland Court of Appeals decision:
Animal shelters and rescue organizations across Maryland are bracing for an influx of surrendered pit bulls in the wake of a state high court ruling that declared the breed “inherently dangerous.”
The decision strengthened a 1998 ruling that landlords can be held liable for dog attacks.
The Maryland Court of Appeals ruling last week modified the state’s common law of liability, establishing a standard that when owners or landlords have knowledge a pit bull or pit-bull mix is living on their property, it is not necessary to prove they had knowledge the dog was dangerous to be held liable.
The Frederick News-Post:
As a result of the decision, the Frederick County Animal Control shelter has temporarily suspended adoptions of pit bulls and pit bull mixes, director Harold Domer said Tuesday.
Arin Greenwood writes at Huffington Post of her 14-year relationship with a “sweet, spoiled and beloved” family member “who perhaps never knew that she was a pit bull”. More: NBC Washington; opinion in Tracey v. Solesky (PDF).
More: Ron Miller’s view. And from Twitter, @radleybalko (“An opinion as useless as it is ignorant,”) @Popehat (“Mine wants to lick me to death,”) and @sbagen (“Breed bans lack scientific support, hurt persons with disabilities with service dogs.”)
Following some down time, Overlawyered has re-emerged on new servers and with upgraded software allowing for improved features. Thanks to Jason Vines of the Cato Institute for his assistance.
Unfortunately, during this process, my email accounts went dark for a while. If you sent me an email anytime over the weekend or on Monday through the late afternoon, I probably didn’t get it and you should send it again.
In addition, several reader comments approved on Friday and Saturday were inadvertently lost in the upgrade. I may be able to go back to my files to reconstruct what these were, but if the comments were important to you, you should consider re-posting them.
Tagged as:
about the site
Numerous lawsuits have been filed lately against football teams over players’ brain injuries. If the legal system handles these lawsuits in line with the principles it applies to other mass torts, organized football could either go away or be transformed into a very different game. The Chicago Tribune editorializes on the subject and quotes me.
Tagged as:
football
- NY lawyer sanctioned $10K for behavior at deposition [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
- Obvious dangers and the W.V. frat-house rear-launched bottle rocket case [Popehat, earlier here, here]
- Review of Liberty’s Refuge, new book on freedom of assembly by Washington U. lawprof John Inazu [Anthony Deardurff, Liberty Law]
- If forfeiture and asset freeze can be deployed in a copyright enforcement case, where will they strike next? [Timothy Lee, Cato]
- Hard-hitting Kim Strassel column on Al “Crucify Them” Armendariz [WSJ, earlier] Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson: “If you want to live by the precautionary principle, then crawl up in a ball and live in a cave.” [Coyote] Washington Post on the case for the Keystone pipeline [Adler]
- Losing two looks like carelessness: second Durham County D.A. removed from office for misconduct [Volokh, KC Johnson]
- Why won’t the Eighth Circuit recognize fraudulent misjoinder? [Beck]
Tagged as:
discovery,
Eighth Circuit,
Exxon,
forfeiture,
prosecutorial abuse,
sanctions
We’ve already mentioned this in the context of the Chrysler bankruptcy (criticized in some quarters for having divested the reorganized company of punitive damage exposure over pre-bankruptcy conduct) but here’s Drug and Device Law gathering up decisions from various states to confirm that, no, there is no vested or constitutional right to punitive damages:
Constitutional challenges have been rejected under due process, taking, jury trial, open courts and various other state constitutional provisions. It makes sense. While compensatory damages might present a closer question (depending on issues such as retroactivity), there’s simply no constitutional right for one private party to demand that another private party be punished.
Especially not when the putative purpose of the damages, to inflict financial distress on the target, has been obviated by an intervening bankruptcy.
Tagged as:
bankruptcy,
Chrysler,
punitive damages
Rob McKenna, attorney general of the state of Washington, is among many state AGs who has joined in courtroom challenges to ObamaCare. Now a local “public interest” law firm, Smith & Lowney, has sued McKenna on behalf of a group of residents who disagree with that decision, saying he is breaching his duty to represent the state’s citizenry by taking a view contrary to theirs. [KOMO]
Tagged as:
attorneys general,
politics,
Washington state
- Failure to accommodate employee’s religious belief forbidding hair-cutting results in $27K payout by Taco Bell operator [EEOC, North Carolina]
- There’s a reason they call it Government Motors: nonunion GM assembly workers get shaft [Fountain]
- Mayor Bloomberg refreshingly sane on “living wage,” though not alas rent control [Heather Mac Donald, Secular Right]
- “The cost of labor isn’t the main problem, it’s the rigidities,” says French CEO [Bloomberg]
- Maryland governor signs bill softening “workplace fraud” law that bedevils firms that use independent contractors [H.B. 1364, earlier]
- Watch out for ghastly, mislabeled “Paycheck Fairness Act,” they’re trying to bring it back [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Examiner, earlier]
- “The most infuriating part of this is that it takes five years of litigation to fire a badly behaved police officer” [Josh Barro, Masnick/TechDirt, on cop's harassment of skateboarder; Baltimore Sun (police union calls officer's firing "outrageous.")]
Tagged as:
Baltimore,
France,
General Motors,
labor unions,
Maryland,
Michael Bloomberg,
police,
religious discrimination
As I relate in a post at Cato at Liberty, the Obama Labor Department has withdrawn a far-reaching proposal that would have banned much or most work done by kids on farms, even work for their own family members (a narrow exemption would have remained in cases where parents were the sole owners of a farmstead). The proposals drew a huge outcry from rural America (earlier here and here).
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation (PDF),
For approximately a decade, activists have attempted to pass legislation amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to restrict the ability of youth under the age of 16 to work in agriculture. The legislation has never been scheduled for a vote or even a hearing, and the DOL-proposed rule change is [was] apparently an effort to restrict youth employment in agriculture through regulation.
If it seems impossibly extreme to forbid 15-year-olds from feeding chickens at a neighboring farm owned by their aunt, be aware that many groups organized around the fine-sounding mission of ending “child labor” would like to institute bans that go even further. For example, an NGO by the name of Global March Against Child Labor (represented in Washington, D.C. here) supported the DoL rules and declares itself “of the view that child labour in agriculture should not be allowed in any part of the world and in any form- whether as family labour or as hired labour.”
P.S. For more pro-ban sentiment, see this piece by AP labor correspondent Sam Hananel stenographizing the views of groups like Human Rights Watch.
Tagged as:
agriculture and farming,
Barack Obama,
international human rights,
workplace
