An old, old story, as sudden riches furnish grounds for competing stories about what happened. The two aren’t speaking now. [Toronto Sun; many stories about disputes over lottery tickets are found at our lottery tag]
Archive for 2013
Fortune on the EEOC’s legal war against employers
For the fourth time in two months a judge has chastised the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for its high-handed ways, reports Claire Zillman at Fortune:
According to court filings, EEOC personnel arrived with subpoenas in hand, intimidated the small office’s staff, rifled through its confidential personnel and patient files, and illegally took company documents. The EEOC acted “as if it were the FBI executing a criminal search warrant,” HNI said in a court filing.
On September 30, a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta ruled that the commission’s tactics constituted a “highly inappropriate search and seizure operation.” The agency’s “failure to follow its own regulations, its foot-dragging, its errors in communication which caused unnecessary expense for HNI” constituted a “misuse of its authority as an administrative agency.”
Last month federal judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan whacked the agency in a discrimination suit against Bloomberg LP, dismissing most charges and ruling that the agency had failed to shoulder its responsibility to investigate before litigation. [Reuters, NY Post, NY Daily News]
Much more on the agency’s waywardness: Hans Bader; DeGroff and Maatman on 10th Circuit TriCore case.
Crime and punishment roundup
- Is there mens rea in the tainted-cantaloupe prosecution? [Politico, Marler-backed Food Safety News]
- “Some unanswered questions about private prison quotas” [Paul Gowder, Concurring Opinions]
- “Smoke A Joint, Lose Your Kids” [Radley Balko]
- Senate “Stand Your Ground” hearing postponed [earlier, and check out our new stand your ground tag];
- “From Streaking to Possible Sex Offender to Tragedy” [Free-Range Kids, Reason; related on sex offender registries, Jacob Sullum, ABA Journal]
- Also related: New app for anonymous denunciation, courtesy of the feds: sure, what could go wrong? [Free-Range Kids, FireDogLake]
- Florida prosecutors consider seeking death penalty for pain doctor whose customers overdosed [Sentencing Law, Broward Palm Beach New Times]
The Roberts Court’s supposed activism
It’s debunked by Adam Liptak’s sources in a good piece this weekend: “If judicial activism is defined as the tendency to strike down laws, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is less activist than any court in the last 60 years.” [New York Times; Jonathan Adler] More: Watch author Clark Neily, cited in Liptak’s article, speak recently at Cato about his new book Terms of Engagement.
Richard Epstein on Carnegie Hall’s $419,000 stagehands
Yes, the New York City arts scene has a lot of money sloshing around in it, that of Minneapolis-St. Paul much less, but in neither instance are performing-arts labor unions doing well at reaching a livable accommodation with the needs of high culture. [Hoover “Defining Ideas”]
“DA’s Office in Georgia Used Asset Forfeiture Funds on Booze, Steak, Galas…”
This isn’t the first time Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, has come under suspicion of turning forfeiture proceeds into what one might call seizure slush funds. “According to guidelines published by the U.S. Department of Justice, agencies that participate in the federal equitable sharing program (like the Fulton County DA), must ‘avoid any appearance of extravagance, waste, or impropriety’ when spending forfeiture funds.” [Nick Sibilla, Institute for Justice]
P.S. In other forfeiture news, the U.S. Department of Justice has dropped efforts to seize/forfeit the property of landlords renting to California legal medical marijuana dispensaries [Nick Schou/OC Weekly, Reason] And [h/t commenter Gitarcarver] South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel has an expose of forfeiture doings in Sunrise, Fla. Yet more: Baltimore judge aims stinging criticisms at assistant U.S. attorney Stefan Cassella in seized-Mercedes case [Van Smith, City Paper]
October 14 roundup
- “Kerr received a 37-page temporary restraining order last Friday which seeks to shut down her [too-popular] haunted house.” [Silver Spring, MD; ABC News]
- Blockbuster “60 Minutes” on the federal Social Security disability program, if you haven’t seen it yet [CBS; Chris Edwards, Tad DeHaven at Cato; ABA Journal on Kentucky lawyer and more]
- Chevron complaint against attorney Donziger over Ecuador shenanigans reaches trial Tuesday [Daniel Fisher] More: Michael Goldhaber, American Lawyer (“A Dickensian Cheat Sheet”);
- Ombudsman on South Dakota Indian foster care case: NPR “reporters and producers tried to push the story beyond the proof that they had. I don’t know why.” [NPR ombudsman]
- In America we use lawyers for that: “Rabbis Arrested in Plot to Kidnap, Torture Husbands to Force Divorce” [WSJ, CNN] From 1845, a British judge’s exquisitely arch observations on the then state of divorce law [Sasha Volokh]
- “Salvage company that lost $600M sunken ship case must pay $1M to Spain for ‘abusive litigation'” [ABA Journal]
- How Canada lost gun freedom [Pierre Lemieux, Liberty and Law]
Jury clears Toyota in Uno case
“A jury cleared Toyota Motor Corp. of liability Thursday in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a Southern California woman killed in a 2009 crash that occurred amid widespread reports of unintended acceleration involving Toyota vehicles.” Despite regular hints in places like the Los Angeles Times that undetected electronic defects might be to blame for sudden acceleration, lawyers for Uno’s family went to trial on the more prosaic theory that Toyota was wrong not to have included a brake override system in the car as an added help to drivers who might be unable to correct a depressed gas pedal. A jury disagreed. [AP/NBC Los Angeles; L.A. Times]
New at Reason: “A step toward Facebook.gov?”
I’ve got a new piece at Reason.com expanding on my earlier reports on the new pilot program by which Facebook will give Maryland school officials a dedicated channel with which to seek takedown of posts and other material that in their view contributes to the problem of “cyber-bullying.” I think the program represents a disturbing step toward a wider government role as arbiter of what is allowed to be said in social media, the more so as it will be difficult or impossible to know whether takedown decisions at Facebook’s discretion are an entirely neutral application of the service’s “Community Standards” or are swayed in part by the wish to keep government bodies happy. I quote various press accounts, some affording additional insight into the existing and proposed takedown process, as well as commentary by Scott Greenfield, TechDirt, and the Daily Caller in which I’m quoted. Some additional commentary: Joy Pullmann/Heartland, Josh Blackman. More: Instalanched, thanks Glenn Reynolds.
“He was charged with using an ‘illegal letter'”
Dan Lewis at Now I Know on (now-easing) Turkish laws governing Kurdish cultural expression:
…until the early 1990s, using Kurdish in public was technically illegal (albeit not often enforced). Still to date, the Turkish government does not recognize the Kurdish language, and, therefore, the letters Q, W, and X do not exist in any official Turkish capacity. And while the law mostly goes unenforced and unnoticed, it has been used opportunistically to suppress Kurdish culture. Kurds were not allowed to use those letters when naming their children as recently as 2004, by way of one example. And in 2007, according to Public Radio International, when a Turkish mayor issued a greeting card wishing his townsfolk a happy “Nowruz” — the Kurdish spelling for the Kurdish and Persian New Year — he was charged with “using an illegal letter.” Really. (The charges were dropped.)