- Chicago-area bus company keeps menacing customer-critics with lawsuits [Coyote]
- Some government officials want a say in who owns newspapers [Ira Stoll on Hartford Courant/Koch story] Using public apparatus to squelch political adversaries not exactly something new in America [David Beito on New Deal episodes]
- Barbarity: “Saudi Court Condemns Editor to 600 Lashes With Breaks” [Bloomberg (“insulting Islam”), Volokh]
- Scheme backed by many state AGs to roll back websites’ immunity for content posted by visitors “could singlehandedly cripple free speech online” [ACLU, earlier]
- Attention enemies of Ken at Popehat: even if you can find your bus pass you’ll still need to withstand his cat squirt bottle [Popehat; another speech case there (censorious bell can’t be unrung) and yet another (bogus DMCA notice)]
- State law providing that persons with erased records are “deemed never to have been arrested” never meant to muzzle discussion of arrests [Eugene Volokh]
- Nova Scotia: “cyberbullying legislation allows victims to sue” [CBC]
Archive for 2013
“Childproofing The World: How Much is Too Much?”
I joined Scott Wolfson, communications director at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, as a guest on Angie Coiro’s “In Deep” radio show to discuss the Buckyballs case and safety regulation generally. Earlier in the same segment was ZenMagnets.com founder Shihan Qu, who is also battling the CPSC on the desk magnet issue. You can listen here. My coverage of the Buckyballs controversy is here and we also discussed a number of other noteworthy controversies including state attorneys general’s efforts to shut down the “Prescription: Coffee” mug and the status of dangerous consumer items home-produced by way of 3-D printers. CPSC Commissioner Nancy Nord’s statement on the magnet set issue is here.
Groklaw shuts down on NSA privacy fears
Chilling effects of the surveillance state [Glyn Moody, ComputerWorld UK]:
Groklaw is shutting down, as a direct result of the revelations that the world’s communications – including our emails – are being spied upon by the NSA and GCHQ. That’s a huge loss for the open source world: Groklaw played an immensely important part in fighting off the absurd but dangerous SCO attack on free software. Alongside that main work it has conducted countless legal analyses of various other attempts to use patents and copyright to undermine open source. And it has done it applying the open source method of collaboration, a significant achievement in itself.
But the guiding force behind Groklaw, PJ, feels she can’t go on when something so fundamental as the privacy of her communications can no longer be taken for granted. In her final post, she compares the feeling to an earlier one when her flat was broken into, and someone went through all her belongings.
More: Brian Barrett, Gizmodo. We’ve cited Groklaw a number of times in this space.
Not unrelated: “What Should, and Should Not, Be in NSA Surveillance Reform Legislation” [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
Was revenge a factor in feds’ Standard & Poor’s action?
“Standard & Poor’s is trying to show it was unfairly singled out in a $5 billion fraud lawsuit 18 months after it downgraded U.S. sovereign debt. Getting the government to provide supporting evidence will prove difficult.” [Bloomberg Business Week]
Ralph Nader’s scheme for a Connecticut tort law museum
We have occasionally posted (here, here, and here) about the lawyer advocate’s longstanding plan for a museum in his home town of Winsted, Connecticut, dedicated to the praise and glorification of the American tort law system. The project has now dragged on fitfully through many years of economic stagnation, unexpectedly costly environmental remediation, changes of venue, and community suspicion (“a lot of empty promises”, one resident puts it), which may function as some kind of metaphor, no? [Torrington Register Citizen, Connecticut Law Tribune]
John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,” on crop destruction
In one of the most powerfully felt scenes of his novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck indicts the private business system for engaging in a practice as foolish and wicked as the willful destruction of food crops while children went hungry. Did any of the novelist’s New Dealer friends inform him that it was in fact a deliberately planned element of FDR’s agriculture policy? [David Henderson; more from Henderson on John Kenneth Galbraith and the dire effects of FDR’s policy on tenant sharecroppers]
International human rights roundup
- Disabilities treaty might hit Senate floor soon; Sen. Hatch opposes [The Hill, Hatch, Heritage; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Right to expropriate trumps right to privacy? Georgetown lawprof claims Swiss bank confidentiality violates human rights [Stephen Cohen, SSRN via TaxProf]
- No thanks, we like our First Amendment: curbs on internet “hate speech” top agenda of UN committee;
- You know those unsound “no recognition of foreign law” bills popular in some state legislatures? Among their unintended effects could be to interfere with recognition of some international adoptions [Jefferson City, Mo. News Tribune, earlier] Court strikes down Oklahoma sharia ban [NPR]
- Two views of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty, which President Obama is due to sign any day now [Bob Barr/Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (editorial dismisses issue as mere “scarelore”)]
- Conservatives for looser asylum laws? About the German homeschooler case [Ann Althouse]
- Claim: international law forbids complicity in the death penalty [Bharat Malkani, OJ] Hans Bader on European court’s invalidation of “whole-life” sentences [CEI “Open Market”]
- “The War of Law: How New International Law Undermines Democratic Sovereignty” [Jon Kyl, Douglas J. Feith, and John Fonte, Foreign Affairs; Peter Spiro, OJ; related ForeignPolicy.com interview with Kenneth Anderson and Brett Schaefer]
Shock! “Double Stuf Oreos Don’t Actually Have Double The Creme” (Update: co. denies)
According to a math teacher’s calculations, a sample yielded only 1.86 times as much filling between the chocolatey wafers, not “double.” Here’s the report, by Rachel Tepper in Huffington Post. Using comments, who would like to predict whether some law firm will file an intended class action over this problem within the next twelve months, on a scale where zero indicates “completely confident that there will not be such a lawsuit” and 10 indicates “completely confident that there will be”?
Bonus, from the article: “And Mega Stuf Oreos have only 2.86 times the creme in a regular Oreo. The prefix ‘mega’ literally means a factor of one million, which, granted, is impossible to translate to an Oreo. Still, perhaps another name could have sufficed.”
P.S. As a reminder, class action lawyers sued the Subway restaurant chain after it was reported that its “Footlong” sub was actually more like 11 inches long. And a federal judge is reconsidering a recent ruling allowing class action claims to go forward over the appearance on an ingredient list of “evaporated cane juice,” i.e., sugar.
P.P.S. Welcome Digg and Fark readers.
Update: “While I’m not familiar with what was done in the classroom setting, I can confirm for you that our recipe for the Oreo Double Stuf Cookie has double the Stuf, or creme filling, when compared with our base, or original Oreo cookie,” a spokeswoman for Nabisco told ABC News.
Coming soon: Washington, D.C. starts investigating itself
“News crossed this weekend that U.S. bank JP Morgan is being investigated by U.S. regulators for hiring well-connected people in China. Specifically, the bank is said to be under investigation for hiring two bankers whose fathers ran big Chinese companies that later hired JP Morgan for several assignments.” [Henry Blodget, Business Insider]
Supreme Court asked to review cy pres settlements
We have often reported on controversies over cy pres class action settlements, in which part or all of a settlement fund goes to charities, universities, advocacy groups, or other unrelated institutions as opposed to actual victims of the sued-over conduct. Most appeals courts have agreed that cy pres raises distinctive issues that call for judicial oversight, yet the various federal circuits have marched off in different directions as to the appropriate nature and extent of such oversight, leading to inconsistency at least, and perhaps also to forum-shopping by lawyers seeking lenient standards.
Now figures well known to many of our readers — Ted Frank of the Center for Class Action Fairness, and David Rifkin and Andrew Grossman of Baker & Hostetler — have petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari in a case arising from a privacy suit against Facebook over its Beacon program that eventuated in a cy pres settlement. “More than $6 million of [the] money was directed to the establishment of a new Internet privacy foundation with an advisory board that includes a Facebook representative and a plaintiffs’ lawyer from the case.” [Alison Frankel; Ted Frank/PoL; CCAF] Related: the “real problem with cy pres has never been that it is too costly. The real problem is that it creates an incentive for class counsel to act against the interests of the class.” [Andrew Trask]