Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2012

From the Globe and Mail

The Toronto Globe and Mail prints my letter to the editor correcting some misrepresentations of U.S. labor law by Canadian Auto Workers union economist Jim Stanford. The text of the letter as it ran, slightly abridged, in the paper:

Jim Stanford says that in the 23 states with “right to work” laws, unions are “effectively prohibited; indeed, in right-to-work states, private-sector unionism is virtually non-existent” (Wisconsin’s Disease Crosses The Border – July 3).

This would come as a surprise to millions of employees in those 23 states who join and are represented at their workplace by unions. In Alabama, for example, which has had a right-to-work law since 1953, 183,000 workers (about 11 per cent of the labour force) are represented by unions, including 84,000 workers in the private sector. (source)

Emboldened or otherwise, Republicans in the states have no authority to alter the 1935 Wagner Act or other federal laws. In states like Wisconsin, they have sought to alter laws prevailing in about two-thirds of states that prescribe collective bargaining by public employees; these laws are of much more recent vintage than the New Deal, often dating to the 1960-85 period. Given Franklin Roosevelt’s well-documented skepticism toward collective bargaining by government employees, it is no surprise that he did not see fit to build any such element into his New Deal.

Walter Olson, senior fellow, the Cato Institute, Washington

Filed under: , , ,

July 5 roundup

  • “After drunken driver kills son, mother billed for cleanup” [Greenville News, S.C.]
  • Cities, states and school districts in California will be among losers if Sacramento lawmakers pass bill authorizing phantom damages [Capitol Weekly; more on phantom damages]
  • New from Treasury Dept.: steep exit fees for many corporations departing U.S. domicile [Future of Capitalism, TaxProf]
  • Jonathan Lee Riches is back filing his hallucinatory lawsuits again, and courts don’t care to stop him [Above the Law] More: Lowering the Bar.
  • Funny 1988 letter from Wyoming lawyer to California lawyer about fees [Letters of Note via Abnormal Use]
  • L.A. family is considering adding another valedictorian lawsuit to our annals [L.A. Times, earlier]
  • Effort to compensate Japanese nuclear accident victims is proceeding without much litigation [WaPo]

Filed under: , , , , , ,

A Fourth of July thought

There are a great many reasons to be grateful that the United States declared its independence on this date in 1776, but one reason is that we, unlike Great Britain, managed soon thereafter to secure a First Amendment in our Constitution to protect the freedom of speech. That means we, unlike Lincolnshire pensioner John Richards, are unlikely to be threatened with arrest should we choose to put up a small sign in our window promoting atheism, on the grounds that it might cause distress to passersby [Boston Standard via Popehat] Relatedly, we need not worry that NYU law prof Jeremy Waldron, advocate of “hate speech” bans, will see his views enacted into U.S. policy anytime soon [Erica Goldberg, ConcurOp], despite repeated signals from places like Harvard Law School and the New York Times that he is a Very Serious Person whose views we need to engage.

And while not all the differences between British libel law and ours can be traced to our First Amendment, we are also fortunate that it is a fair bit harder for public figures and organizations here to use defamation charges to ruin critics and authors [Guardian; novelist Amanda Craig, Telegraph] We have likewise been spared the activities of any exact equivalent of Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority, recently reported as banning a “fathers’ rights” ad [BoingBoing]. And so forth.

Enjoy the Fourth, and our freedoms.

Filed under: , ,

Did Maryland farmer pay a price for criticizing federal prosecutors?

Readers will remember from this series of posts in April and May how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland brought and then settled charges against Randy and Karen Sowers of Middletown, Md., over “structuring” of bank deposits, that is, the conscious holding of transactions under $10,000 to avoid triggering paperwork and federal scrutiny. Now Van Jones of the Baltimore City Paper, who has led the coverage of the story, has some unsettling new allegations:

Randy Sowers is not the only Maryland farmer recently targeted by federal money-laundering investigators for illegally depositing cash his business earns in increments of $10,000 or less, in order to avoid triggering bank-reporting requirements. But Sowers, whose South Mountain Creamery (SMC) dairy farm in Middletown, near Frederick, is a popular fixture at Baltimore-area farmers markets, is the only one to exercise his First Amendment rights and talk to the press about it.

For that, Sowers’ lawyers say, the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO-MD) has made him pay—an assertion that U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein denies, despite an e-mail sent to Sowers’ attorney by the chief of Rosenstein’s asset forfeiture and money laundering section, Stefan Cassella, that appears to state exactly that.

David Watt and Paul Kamenar, attorneys for Sowers, say during negotiations over a deal to settle the charges, Watt asked Cassella why the government was insisting on particular concessionary language it had not obtained in the settlement of similar charges against a farmer named Taylor on the Eastern Shore. Cassella sent back a one-line email that read: “Mr. Taylor did not give an interview to the press.” In an e-mail to U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, Cassella has stated that the Sowers settlement was “not a punishment for exercising his First Amendment rights.”

Filed under: ,

American lawyers: a disintegrating guild?

Yes, lawyers are organized as a guild, but I’m not convinced that arrangement is disintegrating or on the way to doing so. I explain why in a new piece at Liberty and Law that’s a response to an essay-in-chief by Jim Chen of Louisville Law School arguing that competition and technological advance are fast eroding lawyers’ guild privileges. The other response-essay is by Brian Tamanaha of Washington U. in St. Louis, whose new book Failing Law Schools has been getting widespread acclaim [NLJ, Garnett]
and whose recent essays in the NYT and Daily Beast have stirred widespread discussion. (& Instapundit, Paul Caron/TaxProf, Scott Greenfield).

Filed under: , , ,

Food roundup

  • Why eating local isn’t necessarily good for the environment [Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, The Locavore’s Dilemma via David Boaz/Cato, BoingBoing]
  • “Can Behavioral Economics Combat Obesity?” [Michael Marlow and Sherzod Abdukadirov, Cato Regulation mag, PDF] Get cranberry juice out of the schools. Must we? [Scott Shackford]
  • Portland might deem you a subsidy-worthy “food desert” even if you’re six blocks from a Safeway [City Journal]
  • “Policemen eying giant iced-coffee I bought near 96th and Broadway. I’m imagining a future of ‘stop and sip.’ ‘Is that sweetened, sir?'” [Conor Friedersdorf]
  • Crise de foie: California’s ban on livers of overfed fowl results in evasion, coinage of word “duckeasy” [Nancy Friedman]
  • In defense of policy entrepreneur Rick Berman [David Henderson]
  • The federal definition of macaroni [Ryan Young, CEI]
  • How food safety regulation can kill [Baylen Linneken, Reason] We’ve got a nice little town here, don’t try to grow food in it [same] And the prolific Linnekin is guest-blogging at Radley Balko’s along with Ken and Patrick from Popehat, Maggie McNeill, and Chattanooga libertarian editorialist Drew Johnson.

Filed under: , , , , , ,