Overlawyered » extraterritoriality http://overlawyered.com Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:11:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Dodd-Frank and conflict minerals: the law’s wide reach http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/dodd-frank-and-conflict-minerals-the-laws-wide-reach/ http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/dodd-frank-and-conflict-minerals-the-laws-wide-reach/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:07:30 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=26604 Some expected that the big new SEC regulations on industrial users of tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold would mostly affect electronics and jewelry makers, but the actual net being cast is far wider. Manufacturers in general must investigate the supply chains of their products in order to comply with the disclosure requirements, no small matter at a firm like Kraft with 40,000 products and 100,000 suppliers. (Kraft found that the minerals may turn up in pouch packaging of juice products.) No wonder the SEC’s absurd initial estimates of a mere $70 million economy-wide compliance cost have given way to estimates a hundred times higher or more. In an echo of the infamous CPSIA statute, “the rule provides no de minimis exemption for trace amounts.” [Melissa Maleske, Inside Counsel, earlier here, here, and here] (& Bainbridge)

More: the Dodd-Frank conflict minerals provision and the Democratic Republic of the Congo [Marcia Narine, Conglomerate via Bainbridge]

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/dodd-frank-and-conflict-minerals-the-laws-wide-reach/feed/ 2 The high cost of a feel-good measure http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/the-high-cost-of-a-feel-good-measure/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/the-high-cost-of-a-feel-good-measure/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:04:08 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=25414 “Tulane Study Says SEC Estimate of Cost of Conflict Mineral Rules is 100x Too Low” — headline at Business Law Prof (via Prof. Bainbridge), describing a new calculation that the implementation of the complication Dodd-Frank provision will in fact cost American business upwards of $7 billion, not the $70 million the Securities and Exchange Commission optimistically foresaw. (Typo fixed now.) Earlier here, here (”devastating” effect on Congolese).

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/the-high-cost-of-a-feel-good-measure/feed/ 16 Adventures in extraterritoriality, Drug War edition http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/adventures-in-extraterritoriality-drug-war-edition/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/adventures-in-extraterritoriality-drug-war-edition/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:25:04 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=25058 “The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out.” [Balko, Somin]

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/adventures-in-extraterritoriality-drug-war-edition/feed/ 1 “If every global bank in New York can be subpoenaed globally…” http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/if-every-global-bank-in-new-york-can-be-subpoenaed-globally/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/if-every-global-bank-in-new-york-can-be-subpoenaed-globally/#comments Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:08:00 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=25014 “…We’ll just do our business in London.”

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/if-every-global-bank-in-new-york-can-be-subpoenaed-globally/feed/ 0 Prison for unauthorized use of “Smokey Bear” image http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:17:20 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24019 Great WSJ article on the unending proliferation of federal crimes, with appearances by a family that ran into a law making it a felony to dig for arrowheads on federal land, Bobby Unser and his snowmobile-astray ordeal, and a man effectively ruined by the $860,000+ cost of successfully defending himself against a federal charge of violating Russian hunting regulations.

“Most people think criminal law is for bad people,” says Timothy Lynch of Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. People don’t realize “they’re one misstep away from the nightmare of a federal indictment.”

More: from Tim Lynch, and (via PoL) Josh Blackman, William Anderson/Regulation mag.

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/feed/ 13 Extraterritorial application of securities law http://overlawyered.com/2010/07/extraterritorial-application-of-securities-law/ http://overlawyered.com/2010/07/extraterritorial-application-of-securities-law/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:19:27 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=18084 Someone must think there’s a big emergency, because Capitol Hill lawmakers are moving remarkably quickly on a partial overturn of the Supreme Court’s new 8-0 Morrison ruling, which was handed down less than two weeks ago. [Julian Ku, Opinio Juris] (& welcome Daniel Fisher, Forbes readers).

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2010/07/extraterritorial-application-of-securities-law/feed/ 2 High court, 8-0: no “foreign-cubed” securities fraud suits http://overlawyered.com/2010/06/high-court-8-0-no-foreign-cubed-securities-fraud-suits/ http://overlawyered.com/2010/06/high-court-8-0-no-foreign-cubed-securities-fraud-suits/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:07:27 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=17956 “While there is no reason to believe that the United States has become the Barbary Coast for those perpetrating frauds on foreign securities markets,” wrote Justice Scalia for the Court, “some fear that it has become the Shangri-La of class-action litigators for lawyers representing those allegedly cheated in foreign securities markets.” [Mauro/NLJ] And hurray for the presumption against extraterritoriality [Ku/Opinio Juris]

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2010/06/high-court-8-0-no-foreign-cubed-securities-fraud-suits/feed/ 1 Australian government to U.S.-based website: remove that hate speech or face prosecution http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/australian-government-to-u-s-based-website-remove-that-hate-speech-or-face-prosecution/ http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/australian-government-to-u-s-based-website-remove-that-hate-speech-or-face-prosecution/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:36:34 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=16679 Not just anti-free-speech, but extraterritorial as well [Popehat]:

…Joseph Evers, one of the “owners” of Encyclopedia Dramatica, reveals that he got a threatening letter from the Australian Human Rights Commission, which based upon its logo may or may not be controlled by AT&T. The Human Rights Commission announces that it has gotten multiple complaints about Encyclopedia Dramatica’s Aborigine page, and that the page “constitutes racial hatred” and appears to Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 in that it constitutes an act “likely to offend, insult, intimidate or humiliate” another person based on their race. The Human Rights Commission also announces — rather triumphantly, I think — that it does not matter that Encyclopedia Dramatica is hosted and written in the United States, because Australian law, as reflected in Dow Jones v. Gutnik, treats web pages written and hosted elsewhere as if they were published in Australia, subjecting their authors and/or hosts to jurisdiction there.

Australian authorities have compiled a blacklist of sites that internet providers must filter from Australian users’ access, and many sites apparently make the list on the grounds of forbidden opinion content. More on “hate speech” here; also note our recent post on Canada and Ann Coulter, where an anonymous visitor is defending Canada’s speech-penalizing laws.

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/australian-government-to-u-s-based-website-remove-that-hate-speech-or-face-prosecution/feed/ 24 “The U.S. Can’t Be the World’s Court” http://overlawyered.com/2009/06/the-us-cant-be-the-worlds-court/ http://overlawyered.com/2009/06/the-us-cant-be-the-worlds-court/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:22:19 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=11464 So argued former State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III in the WSJ last week, with special reference to the overreaching, extraterritorial Alien Tort Statute. But it’s not as if the efforts to turn the U.S. into the courtroom for the world are slackening at all:
  • As Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith note in the Washington Post, a federal court recently allowed to proceed a lawsuit seeking to blame the evils of South African apartheid on Western multinationals, even despite strong opposition to the suit from both the U.S. government’s executive branch and today’s duly elected multiracial South African government. Unfortunately, the State Department’s up-to-now-staunch opposition to this and similar lawsuits is imperiled by the installment of Harold Koh as legal adviser at Foggy Bottom: “Koh is an intellectual architect and champion of the post-1980 human rights litigation explosion. He joined a brief in the South Africa litigation arguing for broad aiding-and-abetting liability.”
  • If asked what should happen to frozen Cuban-government assets under U.S. control, reasonable possibility #1 might be “hold them against the eventual day when a non-tyrannical regime emerges there, it will need help.” Reasonable possibility #2 might be “divide the assets among Castro’s many victims in some deliberate and step-by-step way, knowing that their injuries are so numerous and severe that even very deserving victims will get only small payments”. The answer you’d think makes no sense at all is “encourage first-come-first-served tort lawsuits, so that the first couple of cases to maneuver their way through the legal process get handsome compensation, while no money is left for either #1 or #2″. So naturally, the latter is what our legal system is doing, previously in $188 million and $253 million verdicts involving single incidents or families, and now in a new case in which the family of Gustavo Villoldo has been awarded $1.179 billion. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers in the case actually boasts that the new award may obstruct a warming of relations between the U.S. and a post-Castro successor regime: “with the opening of relations between the U.S. and Cuba to come, there are debts to society to be paid before that happens” (more on Che Guevara, via).
  • On the brighter side, the Obama administration has joined its Bush predecessors in correctly drawing a line against litigation by some September 11 victims and insurance companies: under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, the courts are no place to pursue theories trying to link the rulers of Saudi Arabia to the terrorist attacks.

(cross-posted from Point of Law)

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2009/06/the-us-cant-be-the-worlds-court/feed/ 0 April 9 roundup http://overlawyered.com/2009/04/april-9-roundup/ http://overlawyered.com/2009/04/april-9-roundup/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:13:05 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=10406
  • Teacher’s aide in Queens, N.Y., sues 11 year old, saying he was dashing for ice cream and ran into her (this happened when he was eight) [WPIX; Rosanna Tomack, Joseph Cicak]
  • Extraterritoriality, or exit fees? Stiff taxes these days on Americans who renounce their citizenship [Coyote Blog]
  • Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell hires Bailey, Perrin & Bailey, big campaign-donor law firm for anti-drugmaker suit [WSJ, Point of Law, ShopFloor, Adler @ Volokh]
  • Injured in wrestling fall, will get $15 million from school district [Seattle Times]
  • Feds seized Petri dishes at Buffalo professor’s home and word spread of major bioterror bust. Oops [Andrew Grossman, Heritage]
  • Toward “public control over the media”: Creepy ideological origins of Nichols/McChesney scheme to subsidize newspapers [Adam Thierer, City Journal]
  • Thanks to expensive modern medicine Virginia Postrel has been doing well in her fight against breast cancer, story might not have been so happy in some countries [The Atlantic, second essay responding to letters]
  • Jury awards $22.5 million against vaccine maker to man who says he caught polio from daughter’s shot [Staten Island Advance]
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