- Legislature won’t pass dram shop liability, lawyers ask Maryland high court to do so instead [Frederick News-Post]
- In St. Mary’s County, new visitor rules for elementary schools ban hugging or giving homemade food to any but own kid [Southern Maryland News]
- Progress: Maryland Senate votes to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana [NBC Washington]
- If it’ll take $1 million for Somerset County (pop. 26,000) to cut stormwater nitrogen runoff by 145 pounds, how’s it going to manage to cut 37,000 pounds? [AP]
- “Fracking Moratorium Falls One Vote Short of Passing Key Senate Committee” [Chestertown Spy] “Bill was more about preventing fracking than studying it.” [@ToddEberly]
- Department of Truly Dreadful Ideas: Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery) continues to push bill to establish state-owned bank [Baltimore Business Journal]
- Website attacking Montgomery County’s Valerie Ervin has some union fingerprints [WaPo] Sen. Brinkley blasts union bill to make all Md. teachers pay agency fees [Maryland Reporter]
- Video interview with Hudson attorney George Ritchie on Waterkeeper v. Hudson Farm case [Center Maryland, earlier]
- Added: “Md. Senate votes to outlaw smoking in cars with young children as passengers” [WaPo just now]
Tagged as:
banks,
child protection,
dramshop statutes,
environment,
labor unions,
Maryland,
smoking bans
- “A new target for tech patent trolls: cash-strapped American cities” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Crowdsourcing troll control [Farhad Manjoo, Slate] “Why patent trolls don’t need valid patents” [Felix Salmon] “Why Hayek Would Have Hated Software Patents” [Timothy Lee, Cato] Et tu, Shoah Foundation? [Mike Masnick, TechDirt]
- Cory King case: “Not Everything Can Be a Federal Crime” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- “Ban on smoking in cars with young children clears Md. Senate” [WaPo]
- On religious exemption to birth control mandate, NYT wrestles with unwelcome poll numbers [Mickey Kaus]
- “Undocumented Law Grad Can’t Get Driver’s License, But Hopes for Fla. Supreme Court OK of Law License” [ABA Journal]
- Department of Justice launches campaign against racial disparities in school discipline [Jason Riley, WSJ via Amy Alkon]
- James Gattuso and Diane Katz, “Red Tape Rising: Obama-Era Regulation at the Three-Year Mark” [Heritage]
Tagged as:
immigration law,
patent trolls,
regulation and its reform,
school discipline,
smoking bans
- D.C. Circuit’s Janice Rogers Brown: three-decade-long case over Iran dairy expropriation raises “harshest caricature of the American litigation system” [BLT]
- Legal blogger Mark Bennett runs for Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as Libertarian [Defending People, Scott Greenfield] And Prof. Bill Childs, often linked in this space, is departing TortsProf (and legal academia) to join a private law practice in Texas;
- Ambitious damage claims, more modest settlements abound in Louisiana oil-rig cleanup suits [ATLA's Judicial Hellholes, more, more, earlier]
- Better no family at all: Lawprof Banzhaf jubilant over courts’ denial of adoption to smokers [his press release]
- “The worst discovery request I’ve ever gotten” [Patrick at Popehat] And yours?
- Concession to reality? Class action against theater over high cost of movie snacks seen as dud [Detroit Free Press]
- FCPA is for pikers, K Street shows how real corruption gets done [Bill Frezza, Forbes] Dems threatening tax-bill retribution against clients whose lobbyists who back GOP candidates [Politico]
Tagged as:
adoption,
D.C. Circuit,
discovery,
environment,
legal blogs,
lobbyists,
Louisiana,
movies film and videos,
oil industry,
smoking bans,
Texas
After much uncritical reportage of claims that heart attacks in this or that community fell immediately and precipitously after a smoking ban went into effect, a larger and more careful study finds no evidence for any such miraculous effect [Jacob Sullum, Reason] Earlier here, etc.
Tagged as:
smoking bans,
tobacco
- New court allegations that disgraced Luzerne County, Pa. judges fixed civil cases as well [Legal Intelligencer; earlier here and here]
- Half-hopeful, half-sad story of Florida town’s efforts to live down “Nub City” insurance-fraud notoriety [St. Petersburg Times a while back, but new to me; Errol Morris film; my review of Ken Dornstein's book]
- Evidence continues to roll in against once-touted theory that bans on smoking in public places result in dramatic overnight drop in heart attack rates [Sullum, Reason "Hit and Run", earlier here and here]
- Maybe everyone’s too used to such things by now to get riled up by that pic of garishly painted “1-800-LAWYERS” van [Ron Miller; earlier]
- Magazines often found on scene at law enforcement raids = guilty magazines that should be banned from mails? [McClatchy "Suits and Sentences" blog; earlier on cockfighting periodicals Apr. 24, etc.]
- Lawprofs: Let’s carve bigger religious-conscience exemptions into antibias laws [Robin Wilson, L.A. Times; Dale Carpenter series at Volokh; Ira Lupu, ConcurOp via Orin Kerr]
- UK: “Parents sue NHS over ‘wrongful birth’ of disabled son” [Times Online, our earlier coverage of concept]
- Throw bloggers in prison because their posts cause emotional distress? Have fifteen members of Congress gone completely mad? [David Kravets, Wired "Threat Level", earlier]
Tagged as:
animal rights,
bloggers and the law,
discrimination law,
Florida,
free speech,
insurance fraud,
Luzerne County judicial scandal,
same-sex marriage,
smoking bans,
wrongful birth and wrongful life
- “You’ve got to be alive to be inconvenienced”: some thoughts on the withdrawal of an emergency battlefield therapy [GruntDoc]
- Yes, let’s all have a nice scare over “third-hand” tobacco smoke, or actually let’s not [Sullum, Siegel, Greenfield] And you knew they were coming: “smokeasies” [Tuccille, Examiner]
- “We are fully cooperating with the government in its investigations” (Hey, I never said “we” included my client) [WSJ Law Blog on Madoff case]
- Speech so precious it must be rationed: Yale Law Journal author proposes “Tort Liability on Websites for Cyber-Harassment” [via TortsProf]
- Rick Hills on Richardson probe: federally criminalizing state-level pay-to-play is a bad idea [Prawfs]
- Paul Alan Levy: Martin Luther King Jr. estate, much criticized for its aggressive trademark assertions in the past, deserves due credit for its handling of a case where free speech was implicated [CL&P]
- Lawyers on Craigslist: “If you practice as well as you spell, we’re golden” [Nicole Black, Legal Antics]
- Yes, I’m overhauling Overlawyered’s look and feel with the aid of Thesis, a powerful “theme” (way of changing presentation) for WordPress. Expect my tinkering to go on for a while.
Tagged as:
chasing clients,
Craigslist,
Martin Luther King,
medical,
military,
online speech,
safety,
smoking bans,
tobacco,
trademarks
- Nastygrams fly at Christmas time over display and festival use of “Jingle Bells”, Grinch, etc. [Elefant]
- Claims that smoking ban led to instantaneous plunge in cardiac deaths in Scotland turns out to be as fishy as similar claims elsewhere [Siegel on tobacco via Sullum, Reason "Hit and Run"]
- Myths about the costs and consequences of an automaker Chapter 11 filing [Andrew Grossman, Heritage; Boudreaux, WSJ] Drowning in mandates and Congress throws them an anchor [Jenkins, WSJ]
- Mikal Watts may be the most generous of the trial lawyers bankrolling the Texas Democratic Party’s recent comeback [Texas Watchdog via Pero]
- Disney settles ADA suit demanding Segway access at Florida theme parks “by agreeing to provide disabled guests with at least 15 newly-designed four-wheeled vehicles.” [OnPoint News, earlier]
- Update on Scientology efforts to prevent resale of its “e-meter” devices on eBay [Coleman]
- Scary: business-bashing lawprof Frank Pasquale wants the federal government to regulate Google’s search algorithm [Concurring Opinions, SSRN]
- Kind of an endowment all by itself: “Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family” (after charges of endowment misuse) [MindingTheCampus]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
disabled rights,
Disney,
eBay,
feeing frenzy,
Google,
Mikal Watts,
nastygrams,
Scientology,
smoking bans,
Texas
You have to get down to paragraph 8 in the New York Times account before you begin to learn about the effect of a nationally legislated smoking ban. “So, there it is. Your café culture is inconsistent with the safety world you have chosen.” (Althouse, Nov. 23; Steven Erlanger, “Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering”, New York Times, Nov. 22).
Tagged as:
France,
safety,
smoking bans
