Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for July, 2014

The way the macaron crumbles

Bureaucracy and taxes in Greece strangle a woman’s dream of a baking business before she even gets it properly launched [Despina Antypa, New York Times via Dan Mitchell]:

…as happens so often in Greece, the bureaucrats had other plans. In a country where you are viewed favorably when you spend money but are considered a criminal when you make it, starting a business is a nightmare. The demands are outrageous, and include a requirement that the business pay taxes in advance equal to 50 percent of estimated profit in the first two years. And the taxes are collected even if the business suffers a loss. I needed only 20 square meters for my baking business, but inspectors told me they could not give me permission for less than 150 square meters. I was obliged to have a separate toilet for customers even though I would not have any customers visit. The fire department wanted a security exit in the same place where the municipality demanded a wall be built. … I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves.

More: Hans Bader.

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Fireworks on the 4th? Bring your own Coke

Eight of the twelve most affluent counties in the United States are in the Washington, D.C. area, and high among them stands Howard County, Maryland (Columbia/Ellicott City), where the celebrations tomorrow will be a bit constrained:

Some find it a damper on the festivities to bring Howard County’s Fourth of July fireworks into compliance with County Executive Ken Ulman’s December 2012 edict sharply restricting the sale of sweet beverages and high-calorie snack food at county-sponsored events. Under the regulations, which are “the first and only of their kind in the state,” at least “50 percent of packaged food offered at county events must contain 200 calories or less per portion”; prepared food, such as funnel cakes and soft-serve ice cream, is not covered. [Baltimore Sun via Quinton Report] The rules exempt the county’s “Wine in the Woods” event, held each May.

Whether or not the policy mirrors the preferences of voters in Howard County (and who knows, it might), it serves the function of affluence signaling in the conspicuously prosperous county. One reason families pay a premium to move to a county like Howard is the implicit promise that their kids will grow up with plenty of worldly, educated, skinny role models and that the government is not going to be run in line with the wishes of poorer or lower-status residents. Message sent!

[adapted from my Free State Notes blog]

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Upcoming film on Hudson Farm case

The group Save Farm Families is doing a nonfiction film (link to trailer) about the Hudson Farm case, in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper group, backed by a University of Maryland environmental law clinic, sued an Eastern Shore chicken farming family on charges a judge later threw out as unfounded. More at my local policy blog Free State Notes.

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$215,000 payout to man removed from L.A. chambers in Klan regalia

The “city of Los Angeles will pay $215,000 to end a free-speech lawsuit involving a man who was kicked out of a public meeting after showing up wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. …[Michael] Hunt, who is black, attended the meeting while wearing both the KKK hood and a T-shirt that featured a profanity and a racial slur used to describe African Americans.” Hunt’s attorney, Stephen Rohde, denied a city report that his client had on being ejected “thanked the security officers for providing him with a ‘big payday’.” Hunt had “previously received a $264,286 jury award stemming from a 2009 lawsuit in which he challenged the city’s vending restrictions on the Venice Boardwalk. The city also paid Hunt’s lawyer $340,000 in legal fees for that case.” Rohde, meanwhile, had been the attorney suing the city in another recent case involving complainants repeatedly ejected from city council meetings; in that case jurors had awarded the complainants only $1 each, the city still had to pay the attorney about $600,000 in legal bills under a “one-way” fee shift entitlement for successful civil rights suits. [L.A. Times, ABA Journal]

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July 3 roundup

  • As Brooklyn changes, so do its juries: “more sophisticated people… they don’t believe [plaintiffs] should be awarded millions of dollars for nothing.” [NY Post quoting plaintiff’s lawyer Charen Kim]
  • Richard Epstein: Massachusetts buffer zone statute “should have been upheld, not struck down” [Hoover Institution, earlier on McCullen v. Coakley, my related comment]
  • “Runners” as in client-chasing for injury work: “Arkansas AG Files Suit Against Chiropractic ‘Runners'” [AP]
  • Fox, henhouse: 2012 law says local transit agencies must sit on boards helping set their own funding [Randal O’Toole, Cato]
  • No-good, terrible, really bad idea: occupational licensure for software professionals [Ira Stoll]
  • More proliferation of legally required video surveillance [Volokh; guns, cellphone sales]
  • How do you expect the IRS to back up headquarters emails when we throttle its IT budget down to a mere $2.4 billion? [Chris Edwards, Cato]

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“New York’s highest court strikes down cyber-bullying law”

We warned that there were First Amendment problems with the overbreadth of these legal proposals, and the New York Court of Appeals sees things the same way. [People v. Marquan M.; Volokh] Two dissenters would have cut down the scope of the law significantly and deemed the remainder constitutional, but the majority invalidated it in its entirety, whether applied to minors or persons of full legal age. We’ve earlier criticized cyber-bullying enactments and proposals in Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere.

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Consumer non-disparagement clauses gone wild: the sequel

As we’ve reported earlier in a series of posts, an online supplier named KlearGear inserted into its customer agreement a clause prohibiting “any action that negatively impacts KlearGear.com [or] its reputation.” When a couple nonetheless left a negative review, it billed them $3,500 and reported them for nonpayment to credit raters. The couple filed an action to which KlearGear failed to respond, and a court in Salt Lake City has now granted their request for a total of $306,750 including $250,500 in punitive damages, though the collectibility of that sum is unknown. [CL&P]

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International human rights law roundup

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