Archive for 2010

Health bill requires vending, restaurant-chain calorie counts

Why, wonders Joe Weisenthal, are we only finding out about this now? The National Restaurant Association sought the measure — which constricts the freedom of its own membership — in hopes of gaining uniformity instead of “a potential patchwork of conflicting requirements adopted by states and cities,” to quote the Times. It can be reliably predicted, though, that the ever-growing battalions of “food policy advocates” will home-made cherry pie white backgroundnot feel constrained by any supposed national deal to refrain from pushing for further piecemeal extension of state and local requirements, thus rendering any seeming uniformity but temporary.

The requirement kicks in when a restaurant chain reaches ten units, and will foreseeably make it harder for 15-unit local chains to compete with the 1,500-unit behemoths who can spread the nontrivial costs of compliance over a much larger base. Like earlier calorie-labeling laws, it will also encourage standardization by making it hazardous for owners not to prescribe and control, e.g., precisely how much topping local employees are to spread on each sandwich or pizza. Earlier here. More: Richard Goldfarb at Food Liability Law Blog has more details, and reports that the threshold for number of outlets is 20 rather than 15. There also some pre-emption of state and local regulation, although localities can still impose added requirements in the name of food safety.

“Goodwin Liu’s America”

I have an op-ed about the pending Ninth Circuit nomination, which the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider tomorrow. If some of the language sounds vaguely familiar, it stems from an earlier Ted, and it especially amused me how much more appropriate Senator Kennedy’s words were for Professor Liu than for Judge Bork.

See also The Heritage Foundation’s discussion.

Update: and Ed Whelan’s NRO piece. And Ilya Shapiro and Evan Turgeon in the Daily Caller.

New at Point of Law

Things you’re missing if you’re not following my other site:

One too many causes of death?

A woman’s lawsuit charges that the death of her 77-year-old husband was the “direct and proximate result” of his slip and fall 21 months earlier on an “unnatural accumulation of ice” in front of a Trader Joe’s supermarket. A newspaper article last year describes the man as having fought a “courageous battle with cancer” before his death. [Josh Stockinger, Batavia (Ill.) Daily Herald]