Archive for 2013

“Massive lawsuit against bloggers is reined in”

A lawyer who’d been widely and scathingly criticized over his handling of a case — unfairly he thought — proceeded to sue bloggers and journalists for defamation, so many that the total of defendants reached 74. It’s over now, but a New York state judge declined to award sanctions, which may possibly say something about the difficulty of obtaining sanctions under today’s prevailing legal standards, especially in New York. [Tom Crane, San Antonio Employment Law Blog; Popehat (“Our legal system is so broken that it can take years to resolve even the most patently vexatious, harassing, and incompetently prosecuted lawsuits like this one.”)]

P.S. “Loser pays would have been valuable here. Costs to each defendant would teach a memorable lesson.” [@erikmagraken]

Filed under: bloggers and the law, libel slander and defamation, loser pays, New York, sanctions

Update: charges dropped against Kiera Wilmot

Authorities have dropped charges against the Florida teen “who was expelled and charged with two felonies after conducting an unauthorized but harmless science experiment on the grounds of her school.” [Jesse Walker, earlier] And in the feel-good story of the day, former NASA astronaut Homer Hickam “awarded Kiera a scholarship to attend the United States Advanced Space Academy (ASA), a branch of the famous Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.” [Black Youth Project]

Filed under: Florida, schools, science and scientists, zero tolerance

Rather die than be a girl?

Cathy Young checks out a much-told anecdote of misogyny, and finds that there isn’t much there. [Minding the Campus]

Filed under: colleges and universities

IRS scandal, cont’d: “It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe”

As Ezra Klein says IRS furor has nowhere to go, more and more keeps tumbling out [Althouse, Examiner, flashback, Chronicle of Philanthropy, MSNBC video, WaPo, WSJ (“Higher-Ups Knew of IRS Case”), Kim Strassel/WSJ]
Background: partisans on both sides have taken shifting positions of convenience on whether nonprofit political advocacy is abuse of the tax laws or free speech worthy of protection [Dave Weigel] Now if only the IRS would stop behaving like one of the partisans [Scott Walter, NY Post] Ideas for reform [Conor Friedersdorf]
“A note on 501 (c)4 corporations” [Coyote] Paul Caron/TaxProf latest daily link roundup;
Apologia for Service’s misconduct does no credit to New Republic or Noam Scheiber [Nick Gillespie]
Echoing my post of yesterday, Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy seeks to distinguish between political affiliations of IRS personnel that have some arguable relevance to the scandal, and those that really seem like stretching;
If you missed it: Cato video, “The I.R.S. Abusing Americans is Nothing New.”

Filed under: politics, scandals, taxes

“Portland sued for workplace fragrance use”

Two years ago the city of Portland, Ore. became the first to adopt a voluntary policy against fragrance use in city offices. (A similar Detroit measure had been taken in response to a lawsuit.) Now Julee Reynolds, a city worker who says she suffers from multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), has sued Portland for allegedly not doing enough to enforce the policy. [KOIN; earlier here, here, etc.]

Filed under: cosmetics, disabled rights, Oregon, workplace

15,989 views yesterday on Overlawyered

One of our best traffic days ever, fueled by an Andrew Sullivan link to our post correcting an overzealous effort to connect the dots in the IRS scandal.

Filed under: about the site

Regulating across national lines

New SEC chairman Mary Jo White shows better sense about it than some newspaper editorialists that could be named [Louise Bennetts, Cato]

Filed under: extraterritoriality, New York Times, Securities and Exchange Commission

“Law Student Sues Law School For Implying He’s Litigious”

“Watch what you say about lawyers” is an old theme around here, but in light of developments at Wake Forest it might need to be extended to law students as well. [Above the Law, more]

Filed under: law schools, watch what you say about lawyers

Labor and employment roundup

Gov. Christie vetoes bill enabling workers and job applicants to sue employers who asked about Facebook use [NJLRA, Star-Ledger, more]
“Shockingly a British pub might want to hire British employees,” NYC Human Rights Commission sees things differently [Amy Alkon]
Anticlimax: despite fears, NLRB won’t ban at-will disclaimers in employee handbooks [Jon Hyman]
“Equally injurious to the children of the laboring classes is their utilization by their parents in theatrical and operatic shows” [Kyle Graham]
Senate confirms plaintiffs’ class action attorney as newest appointee to EEOC [Stoel Rives]
Public accounting: “Two advances for pension transparency” [Josh Barro]
At least there’s one category of young worker for whom job prospects remain bright, namely kids of Andrew Cuomo’s friends [David Boaz]

Filed under: Andrew Cuomo, discrimination law, EEOC, Facebook, New Jersey, NYC

The Daily Caller fires a blank at Lois Lerner

The IRS scandal is a genuine scandal, for sure; efforts to portray it as merely a “scandal” within quotation marks, as by the L.A. Times’s Michael Hiltzik, are well answered by Megan McArdle, Patterico, Ed Krayewski, and (implicitly in advance) by this Josh Barro column exploding the notion that 501(c)4 status was somehow intended only for volunteer fire departments and the like and not for politically engaged citizen groups.

Once the scandal momentum gets going, however, people start in on all sorts of efforts to connect dots that may not have any necessary connection or even qualify as dots at all. Example: at the Daily Caller this morning, reporter Patrick Howley is out with a story headlined, “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections.”

Curious, I read on to see which law firm with strong Obama connections Lerner’s husband, an attorney named Michael Miles, is a member of. It turned out to be Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, a pillar of the Atlanta legal establishment known for its strong tax practice.

Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan is a so-called BigLaw firm. Per the American Lawyer’s profile, it has 387 lawyers and represents all sorts of clients, with an emphasis on corporate work across a wide range of industries.

So what’s the evidence that Sutherland has “strong Obama connections” or is tight with White House Democrats? Here it is: according to Howley, the firm:

hosted a voter registration organizing event for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship.

Really? In a 387-lawyer BigLaw firm, those are the strongest Obama links Howley was able to come up with? As with virtually all BigLaw firms, Sutherland has attorneys active in both parties who host events favorable to one side or the other. It took me only a minute or two on search engines to confirm that Sutherland lawyers and alumni are quite successful in landing prominent appointments under Republicans. Here’s a 14-year Sutherland alum (though he’d moved on to other employers in the interim) who served as National Executive Director of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney in 2000 and went on to a distinguished career as ambassador appointed by that administration. Here’s a Sutherland attorney (“top lawyer at the Pentagon for six years”) nominated by President George W. Bush to the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Of course, some BigLaw firms do have a distinct coloration that falls toward one side of the political spectrum while tolerating the occasional maverick from the other. Is this true of Sutherland? I consulted the Open Secrets database and found that in the last election cycle the firm’s lawyers donated $41,700 to Mitt Romney and $35,413 to Barack Obama. In Congressional races, the firm’s lawyers donated $38,040 to Republican candidates and $25,350 to Democrats. The biggest recipient by far in the Congressional races? Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who got $16,250 from Sutherland lawyers. Overall, these figures would rank Sutherland as not a particularly heavy hitter among law firms in federal donations. Twenty other law firms’ attorneys gave upwards of $1.2 million in the last election cycle, mostly leaning much more toward the Democratic side than did the donations from Sutherland’s attorneys.

I suppose “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Ted Cruz connections” would have made for too confusing a headline on a Daily Caller lead story.

Filed under: lawyers, scandals