When several universities put out word that they were considering lightening the textbook load on their student body by moving to e-book formats, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division put them under investigation for possible violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The targets soon buckled: “The schools denied violating the ADA but agreed that until the Kindle was fully accessible, nobody would use it.” [Byron York, Examiner]
Archive for 2010
Life without elevators
Could they have been introduced successfully under today’s product liability law? [Ted at PoL]
Legal academia roundup
I suppose I’ll need to make this a regular feature as Schools for Misrule gets closer to publication:
- “The Wit, Wisdom, & Worthlessness of Law Reviews” [Gerald Uelmen, California Lawyer via Law School Innovation] Maybe courts aren’t ignoring them after all? [Yung, ConcurOp]
- History as advocacy: why one scholar would never sign onto a “Historians’ Brief,” even if he agreed with its contents [Gerard Magliocca, ConcurOp]
- Will new ABA accreditation standards require law schools to affirm a particular ideological line on diversity preferences? [Bernstein, Volokh]
- New Brian Tamanaha book on formalism/realism reviewed [Stanley Fish, NYT “Opinionator”]
- University of North Texas plans: “How To Sell a Law School to Texans” [Mystal, AtL]
- Survey of (some) law professors’ salaries: Michigan seems a little high, no? [Collegiate Times via Josh Blackman]
- Fights break out over Louisiana, Maryland law school clinics: profs call tune, state taxpayers pay piper. Something wrong with that picture? [Bill Araiza, Prawfs, NLJ, NYT, Legal Profession Blog, Adler/Volokh, Steele/Legal Ethics Forum]
- Not very up to date, but still worth a look: long (and left-leaning) list of law profs who’ve joined the Obama administration [Hunter via Barnett, Volokh]
Family overnights RV in Wal-Mart lot, sues over intruder
Wal-Mart stores in many parts of the country are famous for letting motor-home travelers park overnight in their lots for free. One wonders whether that policy will last: a Florida couple is now suing the retailer over an incident in the parking lot of its Cedar City, Utah store, in which the family shot and killed a man who intruded in their parked home. They say they have suffered emotional distress and medical problems and that “store officials knew the man was loitering in the lot” but failed to act. [Salt Lake Tribune via Consumerist, where commenters haven’t been conspicuously sympathetic to the plaintiffs]
Annals of rape allegations
“A Louisville police detective testified Monday that she was surprised to see television reporters outside the police station when Karen Sypher arrived to file a rape report last year against University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino.” [USA Today, more] A year ago Sypher’s lawyer wrote Pitino a letter demanding $10 million on threat of suit. Sypher is now on trial for alleged extortion and her then lawyer has given testimony for the prosecution. [ABA Journal]
NY Times editorial on free speech
The paper’s pretty good, really, when it comes to arguing for First Amendment protection of violent videogames and depictions of animal cruelty. So let’s be thankful for that. Now if we could only get it to take political speech seriously! [Stoll]
ADA at a South Carolina courthouse
Fixing the restrooms and other design problems is going to cost Oconee County $2 million, of which it will have recovered about half by suing a now-defunct architect. One big problem, per Spartanburg’s WSPA, is that “ADA requires toilets to measure 18 inches from the center of the bowl to the wall” and some of the courthouse toilets were mistakenly built at 19 inches instead.
“If they were mounted in the floor like the one at your house, you could just put in an offset flange and slide it over one inch to be in compliance,” says [county facilities director] Julian. “But since it’s mounted into the wall, all of the plumbing runs up through the wall.”
Which means the entire wall will have to be torn out and all of the plumbing shifted over — one inch.
More on courthouses and accessibility here.
August 2 roundup
- “Why Do Employers Use FICO Scores?” Maybe one reason is that government places off limits so many of the other ways they might evaluate job applicants [McArdle, Coyote]
- Michael Fumento on $671 million verdict against nursing home in California [Forbes]
- Ted Frank is looking for a pro bono economics expert [CCAF]
- Lester Brickman, “Anatomy of an Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph of Temptation Over Ethics” [Phillips Petroleum explosion; SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum]
- Ice cream trucks return to Niskayuna, N.Y. 34 years after a panic-occasioned ban [Free-Range Kids, Mangu-Ward]
- Galloping trend toward “whistleblower” enactments: this time lawmakers are rushing one on oil workers [Smith/ShopFloor, more, earlier]
- Class action lawsuit filed against Trident Xtra Care gum, marketed as good for one’s teeth [Hoffman/ConcurOp; compare Russell Jackson on Wrigley’s settlement of a class action over Eclipse chewing gum]
- EEOC officials urge employers to ban foul language and swearing in workplace [seven years ago at Overlawyered]
Left assails Fifth Circuit judges based on clients they repped decades ago
Hello? Guantanamo? It’s not as if you’d expect any sort of consistent policy on these matters from the imaginatively named Alliance for Justice. But it’s still strange that they’d open the door to future attacks on their own favored judicial nominees based on clients they represented long before reaching the bench. [Joel Cohen and Katherine Helm/Law.com, NLJ] More: John Steele at Legal Ethics Forum takes a different view, and I comment.
Shirley Sherrod to sue Andrew Breitbart
“What kind of journalist would cheer a defamation plaintiff?” [James Taranto, WSJ “Best of the Web”] Earlier here, here, and here.