Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2012

VP debate: the Tweets

A selection from my live-Tweets last night, as part of the Cato team, in reverse chronological order. For the entire team coverage, go here or here.

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Gallaudet U. diversity officer suspended for signing marriage petition

Get ready for the next round in the who’s-persecuting-whom culture wars, following Chick-Fil-A and Burns-vs.-Ayanbadejo. I’ve got a write-up at Maryland for All Families reacting to initial reports by Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed and Annie Linskey at the Baltimore Sun; David Bernstein also comments. Regarding the unique status of Gallaudet, the national university for the deaf, a commenter at NRO offers the following:

Gallaudet cannot sell or transfer any of its real property without Congressional approval.

All Gallaudet diplomas are signed by the President of the United States.

Three members of Congress are statutorily required to sit on the school’s Board of Trustees.

Gallaudet is required to submit an annual report on its operations to the Department of Education and has purchasing authority through the General Services Administration.

Gallaudet receives a direct, annual Congressional appropriation, rather than mere federal student loan funds, and that direct appropriation accounts for the overwhelming majority of the school’s income.

More: Ken at Popehat; Huffington Post D.C.

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Prosecution and police roundup

  • Forfeiture: “Defend the Right to Carry Cash and Travel Unmolested” [Eapen Thampy, Agitator]
  • Recent Japanese racketeering law, unlike our RICO, actually focuses on organized crime [Adelstein]
  • Sheriff’s flack to Fiona Apple: shut up and sing [Ken at Popehat]
  • Jimenez case: 99-year sentence, “substantial likelihood defendant was not guilty of this offense” [Jacob Sullum]
  • Conrad Black continues to speak out on barbarities of “prosecutocracy” [NY Sun]
  • “Are whistle-blowers the new IRS business model?” [Victor Fleischer, NYT DealBook]
  • “Minnesota Farmer Found ‘Not Guilty’ in Raw Milk Case” [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason]
  • Utah man shoots neighbor he thinks “telepathically raped” his wife, is ruled mentally fit for trial [CBS]

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Update: judge dismisses Oglala Sioux alcohol case

A federal judge has declined jurisdiction of the Oglala Sioux tribe’s lawsuit claiming that liquor sellers just over the Nebraska border are legally answerable for the harms of alcoholism on the reservation. The dismissal is without prejudice to possible refiling of the claims in state court; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had promoted the cause. [BBC]

P.S. Kristof vs. college sophomore, advantage sophomore [James Taranto, WSJ, fifth item; Robert James Bidinotto] And don’t get us started about his chemophobia.

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Schools roundup

  • “Background Checks for School Volunteers: Helpful or The Opposite?” [Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids] And Kennedy interviews anti-helicopter mom Skenazy at Reason.tv;
  • NAACP asks Department of Education to strike down entrance exam used by NYC for selective high schools [Roger Clegg, NRO]
  • Even as feds restrict school lunch calories, they pump up new breakfast program. Both ways their power grows [James Bovard/USA Today, Ira Stoll] And here comes an expanded federal program of afterschool, weekend and holiday meals, relieving parents even further of responsibility [FRAC]
  • If fiscal stringency is destroying U. Calif., you’d never guess from the diversity end of it [Heather Mac Donald, City Journal] Ilya Shapiro op-ed on Fisher v. University of Texas [Jurist, background] Why not let universities run themselves? [Richard Epstein]
  • NYC: “Interesting that this all happened at the High School for *Legal Studies*.” [Ann Althouse]
  • Bill vetoed by California Gov. Brown would require state university professors seeking tenure to engage in “service.” Research, teaching don’t count? [John Leo, Minding the Campus; history]
  • After Tucson’s ethnic “solidarity” curriculum [New York Times via @NealMcCluskey]

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Must avoid offense (on penalty of …)

Yet another law professor, this time Harvard’s Noah Feldman, suggests suspending First Amendment protection to placate offense [Newsday, Volokh, Greenfield] As background, in Britain, “Channel 4 has cited concerns over security as the reason for cancelling a planned screening at its headquarters this week of a documentary film questioning the origins of Islam.” [Guardian via Volokh; Michael Totten, “The Terrorists’ Veto, City Journal] Notes Ken at Popehat: “The context is one in which the decision to take offense is a political act.”

Ken has also stayed on top of this issue in other posts, noting, for example, that the Holocaust-denial laws already accepted in many Western countries pave the way for further restrictions on speech; that Greece has lately moved against mild religious satire; and that Great Britain is electing to unleash criminal-law enforcement against a broader range of Internet comment trollery.

Earlier on Eric Posner here and here; on Jeremy Waldron here, here, and here; on Peter Spiro here; Volokh on Spiro and Harold Koh here.

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Varieties of “you lack jurisdiction” eccentricity

Durable as a matter of folk law though carrying no weight at all within most courts as actually constituted, various widely circulated theories (“free man,” “sovereign citizen,” etc.) purport to establish a right of litigants to escape courts’ ordinary jurisdiction; sometimes it’s also alleged that tax laws and other longstanding enactments are flawed and of no binding effect. Last month a Canadian jurist by the name of J.D. Rooke handed down an opinion anatomizing different varieties of “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument” [“OPCA”] seized on as a basis for vexatious litigation [Meads vs. Meads, Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta, Sept. 18]

P.S. A glimpse of the “sovereign citizen” scene in the U.S., h/t Lowering the Bar.

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Banking and finance roundup

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