- Faking a Sept. 11 injury would seem basically as disgraceful as faking a war injury, no? [NY Post, Legal Ethics Forum; earlier on Ground Zero compensation here, here, here, here, here (2008 fraud), here, etc. ]
- “Illegal Aliens May Get License to Practice Law in California” [Volokh, earlier] A curious companion headline from only three and a half years ago, and also from California: “Government seeks forfeiture, managers’ prison time for hiring illegal aliens”
- A look back at the Keller Satanic-ritual-abuse case from Texas [Slate]
- Piacentile v. Amgen case “offers a little window into the ugly side of the qui tam business” [Steve McConnell, Drug and Device Law; related from same blog on case of U.S. ex rel. Watson v. King-Vassel, here and here]
- “Father and Daughter Sentenced in $1.5 Million Insurance Fraud Case” [San Diego D.A.]
- Michael McConnell in the Yale Law Journal on religious freedom;
- Child support law madness, Virginia division [Hans Bader]
Archive for January, 2014
Voucherizing indigent criminal defense
A reform proposal floated in a 2010 Cato Institute policy analysis is now becoming a pilot project in one Texas county. More: Greenfield.
“Will Supreme Court open the ‘lawsuit laundromat’?”
The Supreme Court will decide momentarily whether to review two more “musty washing machine” class actions. “The legal rules at play in the washing machine cases will have impact on a much broader array of businesses, which is why industry and technology groups have flooded the Supreme Court with briefs expressing their concern.” In particular, if the courts develop a liberal standard for “predominance,” it will often be feasible for lawyers to assemble class actions that include consumers who are not bothered by an alleged defect, as well as those that are. [James Copland, Washington Examiner] Earlier here and here.
New Jersey suit: Super Bowl tickets improperly not sold at face value
A lawyer representing a fan has sued the National Football League for allegedly breaking New Jersey state law by making just 1 percent of Super Bowl tickets available to the general public at face value. A section of the state’s Consumer Fraud Act reads, “It shall be an unlawful practice for a person, who has access to tickets to an event prior to the tickets’ release for sale to the general public, to withhold those tickets from sale to the general public in an amount exceeding 5% of all available seating for the event.” (But does “person [with] access” refer to the original event organizers, or only to middlemen who acquire tickets for resale?) The lawsuit “says it’s on behalf of all ticket buyers who have paid more than face amount for their tickets, along with anybody who couldn’t afford to buy tickets in an exorbitant secondary market, but who still wanted them.” [NJ.com] More: the NFL made me do it! [Abnormal Use]
Banking and finance roundup
- Still money left in that piggy bank: Justice Department shakes $1.7 billion out of J.P. Morgan because its custody wing kept handling a primary Bernie Madoff account while a distant equity desk grew suspicious of him, in what “looks a bit like a tax on bigness and integration” [Matt Levine, Bloomberg; NPR].
- Legacy of TARP one of cronyism and lawlessness [Mark Calabria, USA Today]
- NYT assails a couple of academics as mouthpieces for Wall Street, Felix Salmon has a bit to say about that [Reuters, EconBrowser, Bainbridge, Pirrong] Daniel Fisher on a possible tie-in with Times reporter David Kocieniewski’s earlier piece flaying Goldman Sachs over aluminum warehousing [Forbes]
- “Court Receptive to Overturning SEC’s Conflict Minerals Disclosure Rule” [Fed Soc Blog]
- “Target Breach — Are Dodd-Frank ‘Swipe Fee’ Price Controls to Blame?” [John Berlau, CEI “Open Market”] “Volcker Rule Overshoots Wall Street to Hit Utah” [same]
- “CFPB and Disparate Impact” [Hester Peirce, Point of Law]
- “It might cost you $39K to crowdfund $100K under the SEC’s new rules” [Sherwood Neiss, VentureBeat via @jerrybrito]
- Here’s a novel proposal for corporate governance: use the rules agreed upon by the original parties to the transaction [Hodak]
How could lawprofs have gotten the ACA case so wrong?
Again and again, as legal challenges to ObamaCare made their way forward, leading law professors dismissed as frivolous or inconsequential arguments that wound up convincing many or most Justices on the Supreme Court. David Hyman via Stephen Bainbridge:
Almost without exception, law professors dismissed the possibility that PPACA might be unconstitutional — but something went wrong on the way to the courthouse. What explains the epic failure of law professors to accurately predict how Article III judges would handle the case? After considering three possible defenses/justifications, this essay identifies five factors that help explain the erroneous predictions of our nation’s elite law professors, who were badly wrong,
but never in doubt.
Related: NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt, who has written powerfully about the lack of ideological diversity in academia, has this page of resources on the subject. And don’t forget my book Schools for Misrule.
More: Nick Rosenkranz at Volokh back in April.
The march of international human rights
London real estate values have soared, and a furor has broken out on the Left over one large landlord’s announcement that it no longer welcomes government-assisted tenants (related story on U.S. Section 8). According to at least one professor of law, international human rights treaties require the United Kingdom to take affordable housing steps [Aoife Nolan, HuffPo U.K.] Good to be aware of these things before we start ratifying any more of them…
Environmental roundup
- “A Milestone to Celebrate: I Have Closed All My Businesses in Ventura County, California” [Coyote, earlier]
- “Louisiana Judge Ends Katrina Flooding Lawsuits Against Feds” [AP/Insurance Journal]
- “Some shoppers who reuse plastic bags to dispose of animal waste will miss them” [L.A. Times via Alkon]
- Alameda County, Calif. conscripts out-of-state drugmakers into product disposal program: public choice problem, constitutionality problem or both? [Glenn Lammi, WLF]
- “Connecticut, Drunk on Power, Uses Bottle Bill to Steal Money” [Ilya Shapiro]
- “If successful, the New York lawsuits would extend the scope of the [habeas corpus] writ to an undefined array of nonhuman creatures.” [Jim Huffman, Daily Caller]
- Clean Water Act citizen suits never intended to be race to courthouse between officialdom, bounty hunters [Lammi, WLF on Eleventh Circuit ruling]
- Let’s stop measuring congestion, it just makes our environmental plans look bad [Randal O’Toole, David Henderson on California policy]
Suing over a study
I’ve got a short piece in the January Reason on the story (covered earlier here and here) of the lawyer who decided to sue a scientific journal publisher and the authors of a clinical report because the findings in the article made it harder for him to win personal injury lawsuits.
Fifty years ago today…
…the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in what was to become one of its most celebrated tort reform decisions. A profitable national manufacturer had been sued in a distant rural state in which it was decidedly unpopular, resulting in a runaway jury verdict which it sought to challenge on appeal. Pointing out the disadvantages of unpredictable and locally variable tort standards, the corporation’s lawyers pushed for a more uniform and modern standard of liability suited to a nationwide market, which the high court agreed unanimously to develop for the occasion and impose on state courts. And ever since 1964, the winning party in the case — that is to say, the New York Times Company — has taken a sympathetic editorial interest in the plight of other national businesses subjected to runaway verdicts in local courts.
Well, OK, maybe not that last sentence. But the rest of it did happen, in the celebrated case of New York Times v. Sullivan.