- Feds investigating prominent Texas attorney and many-time Overlawyered mentionee Mikal Watts [MySanAntonio via PoL]
- Florida high court: lawyers not privileged to defame parties during informal witness questioning [Delmonico v. Traynor]
- Client’s story: not only did attorney try to kill me, he also gave me bad advice [Lowering the Bar]
- Some lawyers for city of Cleveland seek union representation, following municipal attorneys in S.F., D.C. and Houston [Cleveland Plain Dealer]
- Watch what you say about lawyers, part CLXXVI [NYLJ, “shakedown”]
- Former ATLA president Barry Nace fights disciplinary proceeding in W.V. [Chamber-backed WV Record]
- Minnesota lawyer who billed client for time he spent having sex with her won’t be allowed to practice for more than a year [TheLawNet, earlier on this candidate for “ultimate Overlawyered story”]
- Should she take the job offer from an apparently unethical attorney? If she has to ask… [Elie Mystal, Above the Law]
Archive for 2013
Bloomberg soda follies, cont’d
The mayor is urging New York state to adopt his city’s ban on large sugary drinks [NY Daily News, CBS New York] And under recently announced details, the city’s ban will prohibit the buying of 2-liter sodas with pizza deliveries and the buying of family pitchers at kid’s birthday party venues, even though such orders are commonly split among several customers in a party [New York Post]:
Typically, a pizzeria charges $3 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke. But under the ban, customers would have to buy six 12-ounce cans at a total cost of $7.50 to get an equivalent amount of soda.
“I really feel bad for the customers,” said Lupe Balbuena of World Pie in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
It will also restrict the offering of mixers as part of bottle service in nightclubs.
EU to curb bankers’ pay?
Wait till you see how the market reacts, advises Marc Hodak [Hodak Value]
Further light on bicycle-helmet laws
Following up on our earlier posts, a new NBER study finds (via Reason) that the main safety-related effect of helmet laws may be to discourage kids from riding bikes in the first place: “the observed reduction in bicycle-related head injuries may be due to reductions in bicycle riding induced by the laws.”
“Smothered by safety”
Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids is the guest essayist at Cato Unbound. Excerpt:
..any time a politician, principal, or bureaucrat wants to score points, he or she lets us know that kids are even more precious—and endangered—than we thought….
How far has society gone in dreaming up new dangers to protect our children from? Until you take a step back and look at all the new laws and regulations, you probably have no idea….
Over the summer, according to the Manchester, Connnecticut Patch, a local mom was charged with “risk of injury to a minor and failure to appear after police say she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.” This was a walk of half a mile….
…in the “real world,” stranger abductions are so rare that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep your child outside, unattended, so that statistically the abduction would be likely to happen?
The answer is about 750,000 years, according to author Warwick Cairns. And after the first 100,000 years or so, your kid isn’t even cute anymore. …
At the same time, there is a parallel process going on the regulatory world, with bureaucrats looking ever more intently for ever less likely dangers, on the grounds that kids can never be safe enough. This explains things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall of a line of children’s jackets last year because the elastic waistbands had toggles on it “that could become snagged or caught in small spaces or doorways, which poses an entrapment hazard to children.”
Yes, it’s true: Those toggles could snag. Does that make them inherently more dangerous than, say, pigtails that could get caught in a door, or a charm bracelet that could get snagged on an electric window? I’m just free-associating products and problems here, because that’s what it feels like the CPSC does, too.
In the discussion, Skenazy is joined by Anthony Green, James A. Swartz and Joel Best.
Dodd-Frank and small banks, cont’d
Tim Carney devotes a column to the regulatory squeeze. [Washington Examiner; earlier here, here, here, etc.]
Environment roundup
- Judge Kozinski, writing for Ninth Circuit panel, declares Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s harassment of whaling ships to fall under piracy law as covered by international treaty [Trial Insider, Julian Ku, Kevin Jon Heller, Eugene Kontorovich and more and yet more, SSCS’s black skull flag via Wikipedia]
- California Assemblyman Mike Gatto [D-Silver Lake] introduces AB 227, which would reform notorious Prop 65 by giving business 14 days to fix lack of warning before entitling lawyer to bounty [his blog, Dem caucus, Burbank Leader]
- Unintended, unsanitary consequences of plastic bag bans (Ramesh Ponnuru/ Bloomberg) And theft too? [Seattle Times]
- Writer who joined the circus for several days reports on Ringling Bros. elephant controversy: [Bill McMorris/Washington Free Beacon (quotes me), earlier]
- Study finds new CAFE fuel economy standards far less efficient than taxes in promoting conservation [Alex Tabarrok]
- Now Mark Bittman is being alarmist about cosmetics [ACSH, background]
- Overcriminalization looms large for Gulf Coast outdoor businesses, says TPPF’s Vikrant Reddy [FoxNews]
Gabelli v. SEC: statute of limitations on alleged undiscovered fraud
Yesterday by a 9-0 vote the Supreme Court agreed with a Cato amicus brief that the Securities and Exchange Commission has no power to seek fines or penalties after the statute of limitations has expired on challenged conduct by arguing that it did not discover the conduct until recently. I’ve got a discussion at Cato at Liberty. (& SCOTUSBlog, which also hosts this opinion analysis by Jonathan Macey)
Congress set to expand Violence Against Women Act
Because the important thing is to show that lawmakers have their hearts in the right place, which means not lingering over doubts about the constitutionality of the restrictions on speech or the implied rebuke to double-jeopardy norms or the nature of the delegation of federal power to tribal courts. Who cares about that stuff anyway when there’s a message to be sent about being tough on domestic violence?
P.S. In case you wondered, the U.N. is in favor.
To be jailed in Arizona for driving under the influence…
…you don’t actually need to have driven under the influence. If it’s an illegal substance, metabolites in your blood may suffice whether or not you were impaired at the time you actually did the driving. At least that’s the ruling of a state court of appeals; the Arizona Supreme Court could still reverse it. [John Ross/Reason, Scott Greenfield]