Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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The College Sports Council has recent reports from New York City, where both boys’ and girls’ squads have been sidelined following a New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) suit over fall vs. spring scheduling (related earlier here, here, and here), and Kentucky, where quotas have prevented formation of a boys’ team.
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It’s figured in our columns before, and now it’s in the news again: “The American Civil Liberties Union has sued a school board in North Carolina over its suspension of a teenage student for having a peridot stud in a nose-piercing.” [ABA Journal]
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That’s a more controversial proposition than you might think; the Connecticut Supreme Court was split 5-2 in agreeing that a hearing was necessary to confirm the validity of a protective order against a defendant who has been accused but not convicted. The case pitted the state ACLU against the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. [Connecticut Law Tribune via Amy Alkon]
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The lead plaintiff in Alli v. Decker, an ACLU-led class action lawsuit aimed at preventing the deportation of various aliens who commit crimes, turns out to be a conman who played a role in a huge Nigerian-led identity theft scam. Reports the Times:
The news media campaign was all set to go. There was even a Web site ready with a sympathetic profile of Alexander Alli, 49, the man the American Civil Liberties Union had chosen as the lead plaintiff …Court documents tell the story of Mr. Alli’s life before his fall as a familiar tale of immigrant pluck, luck and hard work.
Well, yes, court documents prepared by his lawyers would tend to do that, while tending to downplay or omit the massive identity theft operation in which Mr. Alli was a participant, which extracted more than $50 million by impersonating and victimizing some 30,000 credit card holders: he “admitted to being personally responsible for $70,000 to $120,000 of the multimillion-dollar losses to banks and credit card companies”. Start deporting people like that, and where is our next generation of scam artists supposed to come from? [New York Times, Patrick at Popehat]
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A long-running controversy pits some elected officials and townspeople of Framingham, Mass., west of Boston, against a social service agency that has proposed the town as a site for halfway houses and other residential facilities for recovering addicts, the homeless and others. Two years ago things turned particularly unpleasant:
…[South Middlesex Opportunity Council] filed suit in federal court this week demanding damages not just from town officials, but from citizens who have dared criticize the agency and challenge its plans.
SMOC’s 99-page complaint [which alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act, federal Rehabilitation Act, Americans With Disabilities Act and Civil Rights Act -- ed.] piles up charges against selectmen and planning board members not just in their official capacity, but as individuals. It targets town employees, both named and unnamed. It calls for damages against four Framingham Town Meeting members and two citizens for comments made on a private Web site and e-mails distributed on a privately-operated mailing list.
The ACLU of Massachusetts expressed unease at the naming of private citizens as defendants over their advocacy efforts. While the lawsuit has been narrowed somewhat in the two years since then, it continues to engender much acrimony as it drags on:
Aggravating the ill will is a recent revelation that a man charged with shooting a local police officer had lived in a home run by the agency, the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, or SMOC.
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Hans Bader points out that a very important motivation for the pending expansion of federal hate-crimes law is to exploit a loophole the Supreme Court has created in its application of the important Constitutional principle, by exposing defendants to jeopardy a second time despite acquittal or dropping of charges in state courts.
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Or what passes by that name: lawyers for the ACLU say the design of a Milwaukee highway project is unfair to minorities (Rick Esenberg, Prawfsblawg; complaint, PDF, at WisPolitics.com).
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After much discussion in the blogosphere this story would seem more than ready to cross over into mainstream-press coverage; here’s a local columnist who says he left three messages with attorney Clifford Shoemaker but got no response (Dave Brooks, “What a Web of actional links we can weave”, Nashua Telegraph, Apr. 9)(via Liz Ditz/I Speak of Dreams’ ongoing list monitoring coverage).
Update 5:30 p.m.: Here’s James Taranto at WSJ Best of the Web, giving just the shove the story may need:
It might behoove the ACLU, or some organization devoted to civil liberties, to devote some resources to figuring out how to defend speech that is inconvenient to plaintiffs lawyers.
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Controversy continues over the extent to which litigation has tended to obstruct brush and understory removal as well as post-blaze recovery efforts in the fire zones: Damien Schiff (Pacific Legal Foundation), “Misguided litigation magnifies wildfires”, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 5); John Berlau, “The Environmentalist Fires”, American Thinker, Oct. 29; BioStock blog, Oct. 5. The Sierra Club defends environmental litigation in this Oct. 23 statement. Last year the Society of American Foresters last year released a study entitled “Forest Service Land Management Litigation 1989-2002″, which is available at the Society site. Earlier: Oct. 24, etc.
This Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine had a long feature piece which addressed the burning question, “Do We Really Need A Law To Protect Fat Workers?” The “law” in question would be a law which forbid “discrimination against overweight and unusually short people.” While I resemble that remark, you won’t be surprised to find me answering the question, “No,” in contrast to the politicians and activists who think it’s a great idea. The problem they face? Too many people inconveniently think that being overweight is a choice; they need to convince these skeptics that weight and race are really the same thing.
Although some people worry that the law would lead to a flood of lawsuits, the supporters of the bill pooh-pooh that notion, based on implausible statistics about disability discrimination lawsuits. Besides, their goal (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) isn’t really lawsuits at all:
Like the race laws, then, the weight-discrimination bill has a goal that extends beyond the legal system: to change the way we think. The idea is not to clog up the courts. Instead, it’s to create a society where hundreds of lawsuits aren’t needed, because there’s not as much to sue over – a society of people who have the legal right to say hurtful things and the compassion to know better than to act on them.
But if it does clog up the courts — the ADA only applies to those so obese that they can call themselves disabled, while the proposed Massachusetts law would apply to anybody who is overweight, which seems to be most of the population — it won’t be the author of the bill who suffers, but employees and business owners.
Of course, even if Massachusetts does pass this law, it wouldn’t be the worst; California already has far wackier anti-discrimination laws with its full-employment-for-lawyers Unruh Act. Unruh, despite listing the usual categories found in anti-discrimination laws (sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, and sexual orientation) actually has been interpreted by state courts to prohibit all “arbitrary” discrimination. As Cal Biz Lit explains:
In earlier cases, the courts have held the act to prohibit business discrimination based on :
• A customer’s association with a male with long hair and “unconventional” dress;
• Having children; and
• Status as a police officer (when the ACLU tried to kick a cop out of a meeting).
If a creative lawyer hasn’t shoehorned obesity in there already, he will soon enough.
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“Three homeless men mistakenly arrested last year on charges of sleeping too close to a pile of feces have settled a lawsuit against the city of Las Vegas for $45,000.” Police made the arrest although a sleeping-too-close-to-feces provision in one of the city’s ordinances had in fact recently been repealed. The ACLU of Nevada proceeded to sue:
The men sought $2 million each in compensatory and punitive damages. Their attorney E. Brent Bryson said Wednesday the $45,000 settlement was reasonable.“The realities are that these individuals are not capable of maintaining and sustaining an ongoing litigation,” he said. “This quick money to them represents an ability for them to get back on their feet.”
Bryson collected a $15,000 fee from the settlement.
Two of the three men say they haven’t decided yet what to do with their $10,000 windfalls, a sum that will equally well pay for a fair bit of not-getting-back-on-their-feet should they choose to spend it that way. (”Vegas homeless men win $45,000 in suit over sleeping near feces”, AP/Las Vegas Sun, Mar. 29; “Homeless men win $45,000 settlement with City of Las Vegas”, KVBC, Mar. 29).
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Richmond, Va.: “A high school art teacher has hired the ACLU to challenge his firing after a video of him moonlighting as a ‘butt-printing artist’ was widely circulated among his high school students.” Stephen Murmer was fired from his job at Monacan High School. (Matt Reed, “Backside artist to challenge firing”, AP/ABCNews.com, Jan. 24).
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I have perused the decision by a federal district judge in Michigan declaring the NSA warrantless wiretapping program to be in violation of both FISA and the Fourth Amendment and have some thoughts.
While the decision contains a wealth of flowery language reminiscent of, say, a post by a libertarian blawger, it is rather weak on actual analysis. On the other hand, what little analysis it contains is spot-on accurate.
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Not according to the ACLU of Southern California, at least. That’s the apparent lesson of a 1986 incident which drew little publicity at the time, but which David Bernstein recently investigated. The proprietors of the Alpine Village Inn in Torrance, Calif. were understandably outraged when a group of four customers came in wearing swastika pins and other Nazi regalia. It asked them to leave, but they refused and so it called the cops; its reward was to be sued by the ACLU under California’s Unruh Act for its failure to provide public accommodation to the Hitler fans. According to Bernstein’s informant, the restaurant’s insurer paid a settlement. (Feb. 24)
…because he doesn’t like the message printed on them, as Reason “Hit and Run” reports:
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has ordered the city to seize T-shirts that say “Stop Snitchin.” “‘It’s wrong,’ Menino said. ‘We are going into every retail store that sells the shirts and remove them.’”
(Boston Herald; Boston Globe; KipEsquire; Eugene Volokh; ACLU of Mass. press release, PDF). More: Gunner at No Quarters Blog has an update.
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Greg Skidmore at Sports Law Blog (who has guest-blogged on this site) analyzes the ACLU-aided suit against the Tampa Sports Authority challenging the National Football League’s anti-terror measures.
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