“A Michigan judge whose smartphone disrupted a hearing in his own courtroom has held himself in contempt and paid $25 for the infraction.” [AP]
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Posts tagged as:
cellphones
- Abuse of out-of-state motorists an issue: “The Perils of Policing for Profit: Why Tennessee should reform its civil asset forfeiture laws” [Beacon Center, earlier]
- Manhattan: “Lawyer takes plea in $279M no-fault auto insurance fraud case” [ABA Journal]
- “AAA Warns of ‘Dangerous’ Free Market in Parking Spaces” [Matt Yglesias, Slate via Tim Carney]
- Negotiated rates on auto loans at dealerships might violate Obama administration’s disparate-impact guidelines [Roger Clegg]
- Not great for Law dot com’s credibility: Corp Counsel mag throws in with “sudden acceleration” goofery; and here’s an effort to gear up acceleration claims against Ford too.
- Ethanol group menaces Phillips with antitrust charge unless it alters franchiser rule [Alexander Cohen, Atlas]
- “Two researchers call for installing technology to disable cellphones in moving cars” [L.A.Times via Fair Warning]
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- The term “space marine” dates way back in sci-fi writing, but Games Workshop says it’s now a trademark [Popehat] “Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals” [Ars Technica; related, Popehat]
- D.C. suburban school district: “Prince George’s considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students’ work” [WaPo]
- New book Copyright Unbalanced [Jerry Brito, ed.; Tom Palmer/Reason, David Post/Volokh] “Copyright, Property Rights, and the Free Market” [Adam Mossoff, TotM]
- Neither doll left standing: “After Long Fight, Bratz Case Ends in Zero Damages” [The Recorder]
- “Podcasting patent troll” [Gerard Magliocca, Concur Op]
- “The EU-funded plan to stick a ‘flag this as terrorism site’ button on your browser” [Ars Technica]
- “The Most Ridiculous Law of 2013 (So Far): It Is Now a Crime to Unlock Your Smartphone” [Derek Khanna, Atlantic]
My Cato post is here. I’d wish him bon voyage, but somehow it’s hard to associate him with happy travels.
Update: I’ve now expanded my thoughts into a Daily Caller op-ed.
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“…have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.” [Andrew Adams, KSL via Alex Tabarrok, on Insurance Institute for Highway Safety figures]
- Michigan Supreme Court race: three seats at stake, including Stephen Markman’s [Charles Crumm/Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun, Collin Levy, WSJ]
- Notable state attorney general races include West Virginia, Missouri, Montana [Ballotpedia, Governing; Carrie Severino, NRO] Battle of the sleazy ads in Washington race [Seattle Times]
- “Fixed-income retiree” in Kaine ad turns out to be well-connected Virginia trial lawyer [Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner ] “33% of settlements is a fixed income, in a way” [Chris DeRose]
- Federal free-cellphone scheme enriches some political influentials [Washington Free Beacon]
- History of judicial elections in the US: rethinking the received account [Stuart Banner, Jotwell, on Jed Shugerman]
- After election, expect renewed push for limits on campaign spending [Ira Stoll]
- John Roberts’ doing? “Supreme Court not top campaign issue,” didn’t come up at debates [USA Today] Do libertarians fare better with Republican presidents’ Supreme Court picks, or just libertarian lawprofs? [Bernstein, Radia, etc.]
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“Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L’Aquila. A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter. Prosecutors had said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake after studying tremors that had shaken the city.” [BBC, earlier] More: Orac.
Speaking of science and the Italian courts, Italy’s Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a litigant claiming cellphone use caused his brain tumor; most authorities have found no such link [Telegraph]
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Politico quotes me on the latest harebrained idea from the U.S. Department of Transportation, known for Secretary Ray LaHood’s crusade against “distracted driving”:
Olson called the idea that law enforcement would be focused on using spotters perched atop overpasses “creepy” and suggested it turns police officers into “peeping toms.”
“We drive under [overpasses], so it’s not a perfect expectation of privacy; but if we saw someone staring down and hoping to look into our laps, we’d think of them as creepy,” Olson said.
Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, which has been out front of the effort to curb distracted driving, scoffed at the notion that there is any expectation of privacy in a car.
Earlier here, etc.
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Thanks to the federal Lifeline Universal Service program — you helped pay via an extra line of charges on your own bill — freebie cellphones now abound in many American cities, with 231,000 having been given away in Maryland alone [Fox Baltimore via Amy Alkon]
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The federal government should keep its busy hands off local traffic laws — and that goes for bribing states to its will, as well as issuing direct orders. Today the House will debate a measure that would make that point by cutting off a fledgling program that would pay states for doing what “distracted driving” crusader and DoT secretary Ray LaHood lacks the constitutional authority or political capital to do directly. I explain in my new post at Cato at Liberty.
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“A woman who texted her boyfriend while he was driving cannot be held liable for a car crash he caused while responding, seriously injuring a motorcycling couple, a judge ruled Friday in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.” [AP/USA Today, earlier]
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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s press spokesman describes as “inaccurate” Reuters’ report that his boss endorses a Congressionally enacted national across-the-board ban on cellphone use. (The Newspaper; our earlier posts here and here; Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg View).
More from The Newspaper:
At the same time that the US Department of Transportation is pushing laws to ban in-car cell phone use, it is promoting the “511″ government program that encourages drivers to dial 511 for information on traffic conditions instead of tuning in to a traffic reports on AM radio.
Related: “Communities start to fine for texting and walking” [USA Today]
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A judge in Morris County, N.J. is expected to rule soon whether to dismiss Shannon Colonna as a defendant in a lawsuit over a car crash. Colonna was far from the scene at the time, but plaintiffs said she had sent a text message to the driver whose inattention caused the accident, and thus aided and abetted his negligence. [The Record; AP; NJLRA] Update: judge dismisses claims against Colonna.
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I’ve got an op-ed in Saturday’s Orange County Register taking exception to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s call for Congressional legislation to ban “talking on a cellphone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.” Something you might not have known: the feds blame a crash on distraction if a cellphone is so much as “in the presence of the driver at the time of the crash.” (Distracted Driving Summit Press kit (PDF), “Traffic Safety Facts” p. 2, h/t Investor’s Business Daily; earlier here, here, etc.) More: Rob Port, SayAnythingBlog. Update: LaHood spokesman says Reuters overstated his boss’s position.
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- Salute to Bill Childs, who blogged with distinction at TortsProf, on departing academia for private practice [Sheila Scheuerman and Chris Robinette]
- North Carolina voters who know that Amendment One would ban civil unions oppose the measure by 22 points; unfortunately, most don’t know that [Greg Sargent, WaPo; earlier] Patrick at Popehat proposes 5 things Tar Heels can do to help defeat it;
- Cellphone app to hail nearby taxi? DC government searches for a way to keep that illegal [Julian Sanchez, Cato at Liberty]
- Can’t the left-wing Alliance for Justice be at least minimally consistent on Supreme Court ethics? [Freedman, Legal Ethics Forum]
- On lawyer jokes [David Conway and commenters, Law and Liberty]
- “2,000 patents have been granted for shaped pasta” [Doctorow; see also Martin Weiss ("It pays to noodle around in the lab")]
- Texas barratry law trips up state rep [Southeast Texas Record, ABA Journal]
- Because Washington knows best: “U.S. ban sought on cell phone use while driving” [Reuters, earlier here, here, here, etc.] More here; and LaHood spokesman says Reuters overstated his boss’s position.
- Janice Brown’s Hettinga opinion: Lithwick can’t abide “starkly ideological” judging of this sort, except of course when she favors it [Root, earlier] At Yale law conclave, legal establishment works itself into hysterical froth over individual mandate case [Michael Greve] And David Bernstein again corrects some Left commentators regarding the standing of child labor under the pre-New Deal Constitution;
- Latest antiquities battle: Feds, Sotheby’s fight over 1,000-year-old Khmer statue probably removed from Cambodia circa 1960s [VOA, Kent Davis]
- Sebelius surprised by firestorm over religious (non-) exemption, hadn’t sought written opinions as to whether it was constitutional [Becket, Maguire] Obamanauts misread the views of many Catholics on health care mandate [Potemra, NRO]
- “20 Years for Standing Her Ground Against a Violent Husband” [Jacob Sullum] How Trayvon Martin story moved through the press [Poynter] And Reuters’ profile of George Zimmerman is full of details one wishes reporters had brought out weeks ago;
- Coaching accident fraud is bad enough, making off with client funds lends that extra squalid touch [NYLJ]
- Kip Viscusi, “Does Product Liability Make Us Safer?” [Cato's Regulation magazine, PDF]
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I’m quoted in this Carolina Journal article by Karen McMahan. “Chapel Hill became the first municipality in the nation to issue such a far-reaching ban when the town council enacted the measure March 26 by a 5-4 vote. The law goes into effect June 1.” Earlier on distracted driving here, etc.
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The class action firm of Robbins Geller, representing some client or other, is demanding damages from Apple on behalf of a class of people disappointed by the iPhone 4S voice-activated assistant, Siri. Reviewers have complained that the program often fails to comprehend users’ speech, returns illogical answers, and when asked “Play some Coltrane,” has been known to respond that it doesn’t know any “coal train.” [Mat Honan, Gizmodo; Jason Gilbert/Huffington Post] “When asked her whether her makers exaggerated her worth, Siri told Law Blog, ‘We were talking about you, not me.’” [Joe Palazzolo/WSJ Law Blog]
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