In Nashville, Tenn., Ibrahim Barzinji has sued his former employer, Arkansas-based J.B. Hunt Transport Inc., on the grounds that asking him to transport alcoholic beverages violated his religious beliefs. Barzinji, who is representing himself in the case, “said he had just trucked a load of auto parts from Clarksville to St. Louis on June 26 last year when he was asked to pick up a return load at the Anheuser-Busch plant.” He informed his supervisor that he was refusing to handle the cargo, and was dismissed. “A local labor and employment attorney said that, to prove his case, Barzinji would have to convince a judge or jury that asking to be assigned a different load was reasonable and would not cause undue hardship on the company.” The issue has come up before in a somewhat different context: “Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport several years ago began refusing to pick up passengers who carried duty-free alcohol, said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.” (Anita Wadhwani, “Fired Muslim truck driver sues employer”, The Tennessean, Jun. 23).
Archive for June, 2004
ABA study of criminal punishment released
The American Bar Association today released the report of the so-called “Justice Kennedy Commission.” Its bottom line: “America’s criminal justice systems rely too heavily on incarceration and need to consider more effective alternatives.” The report’s long list of recommendations — including the repeal of mandatory minimum sentences — will be taken up by the ABA House of Delegates at the annual meeting in Atlanta in August. (The full text of the report can be downloaded here.)
Texas lawyers fall victim to scam
In Texas, to name one state, it’s perfectly legal for lawyers pursuing personal injury claims to advance money to their clients to cover living expenses. (At common law, the practice was banned under the rubric of “maintenance”.) So when Kelvin Johnson came around with a story about how he and a friend had been injured on an oil rig and how the friend was lying in a coma and had been offered a hefty settlement, it seemed like pretty much a sure thing to slip him some money. Trouble is, Johnson was pulling the scam with numerous lawyers under various names. A Corpus Christi practitioner explained why he was suspicious of what seemed the “perfect case”: “I didn’t think it likely that his friend could be in a coma 10 months without some lawyer signing him up.” Johnson has been sentenced to 20 years. (Rick Casey, “Selling lawyers a lucrative tale”, Houston Chronicle, Jun. 22) (via Texas Law Blog).
Avoiding a Florida-type controversy this November
The American Enterprise Institute held a conference on this subject yesterday:
“For better or worse, the battle over the 2000 Florida election still remains with us. Billions of dollars are being spent by states to change their voting-machine systems in order to correct the perceived problems experienced in Florida. Yet much debate still exists over exactly what went wrong in Florida and whether the changes in voting machines will solve the problems or ensure an even worse disaster this November. The conference will feature experts in charge of instituting the new voting machines, academics that have studied these issues, and those responsible for the media recounts.”
Copies of the papers presented and a video of the event are available online, here.
Cuyahoga River fire revisited
On NRO today, Jonathan Adler debunks one of the key events in the history of environmental regulation — the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. Says Adler: “Oil and debris on the river’s surface did burn in 1969, and federal environmental statutes were the result, but so much else of what we ‘know’ about the 1969 fire simply is not so. It was not evidence of rapidly declining environmental quality, nor was it clear evidence of the need for federal action.”
Update: This post at the Volokh Conspiracy includes a link to Adler’s article-length treatment of the subject.
Ten Thousand Commandments
The 2004 edition of Clyde Crews’s “annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state” for Cato is available as a PDF file, here.
Alabama has a new chief justice
Alabama governor Bob Riley this morning appointed Drayton Nabers to serve the two years remaining in the term of Roy Moore. (Moore, you may recall, was removed from the bench by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for failing to comply with a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building.)
Nabers, a graduate of Princeton and the Yale Law School, clerked for Justice Hugo Black (1965-66) and practiced law in Birmingham for a number of years before joining Protective Life Corporation in 1979. He retired as chairman of the firm’s board of directors in 2003 and then joined the Riley administration as the state budget director. Nabers’s stature is such that a former president of the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association is quoted in the story linked above as saying, “”I believe he’s such a man of integrity that he will not put his personal background in the way of fairly dealing with each issue before him.”
Nabers has not decided whether he will run for re-election in 2006.
Guest blogger of the week
My name is Mike DeBow, and I teach property and corporate law at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama. I am also interested in state law reform and issues surrounding state judicial selection. During 2000-2004 I served part-time as a special assistant to Alabama attorney general Bill Pryor.
Readers who, unaccountably, want more info about me can click here or here. What doesn’t show up on either of those webpages is the fact that I’ve been a guest blogger at Southern Appeal for almost a year.
I am a long-time fan of Walter’s, and a diligent reader of Overlawyered. My thanks to Walter for the invitation to join him this week.
Batch of reader letters
Fresh on our letters page, we’ve managed to post another four reader letters from our backlog. Among topics this time: the bizarre prison death of a serial killer in Missouri; a generous assessment of what we do here from a plaintiff’s trial lawyer in Chicago; we get called disingenuous, cynical, and other bad things because of our comment on a lawsuit demanding that school bus windows be redesigned; and a reader wonders whether accounting crimes which destroy life savings ought not to be seen as comparable to violent crimes which destroy lives themselves.
Marshmallow roust
Good news! Florida federal agents have apparently done such a good job clearing the shores of criminals and terrorists that they’ve moved to tackling the perversely trivial.
Wyoming teacher’s aide Hope Clarke stayed in Yellowstone last year, and was fined $50 for failing to put away her marshmallows in violation of the park’s food storage requirements, a fine she was required to pay before leaving the park. But, somehow, she ended up on a bench warrant list; when her cruise ship returned from Mexico, she was rousted and handcuffed by federal agents at 6:30 am, and haled before a court in “shackles and short shorts” hours later–even though the copy of the citation showed the fine had been paid. Magistrate Judge John O’Sullivan apologized, and ordered her released over the prosecutor’s suggestion that the case be transferred to Wyoming. (Catherine Wilson, AP, Jun. 19) (via Weinstein)(& letter to the editor, Sept. 10).