Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

August 5 roundup

  • Makes perfect sense: to make transportation more accessible to its residents, Montgomery County, Maryland orders 20 taxi companies to close down [Washington Post]
  • “New ‘Gainful Employment’ Rule Spells Trouble For For-Profit Law Schools (And Would For 50 Non-Profit Law Schools)” [Caron, TaxProf]
  • “To comply with a twisted interpretation of TCPA, Twitter would have to stop providing certain services altogether.” [Harold Furchtgott-Roth] “New FCC Rules Could Make Polling More Expensive, Less Accurate” [HuffPost Pollster]
  • To draft the unpassable bill: Scott Shackford on the politics and bad policy behind the omnibus LGBT Equality Act [Reason] “So How Can Anyone Be Opposed to Non-Discrimination Laws?” [Coyote] More: Establishment liberalism reluctant to admit it’s changed its thinking on religious accommodation, but that’s what’s happened [Ramesh Ponnuru/Bloomberg View]
  • Update: “Court rejects claim over goat goring in Olympic National Park” [AP, earlier here and here]
  • “I would receive 100 other identical stories [from asylum seekers] with only the names changed.” [The Australian, 2013]
  • “Some protested that DNA testing amounted to a violation of canine privacy because dogs were not capable of consent.” [New York Times on Brooklyn condo dispute via @orinkerr]

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3 Comments

  • Re: the TPCA

    Nearly all of the unsolicited robo calls I get are of the “complete scam” variety: Penny Stocks, “Congratulations, You’ve Won a Vacation”, “Your Business has been approved of a $250,000 loan”, or “We’re calling from Google about your business listing”.

    No law will stop these people. They don’t care about laws.

    Instead there will just be more compliance costs and nuisance lawsuits for legit companies that call customers on stale numbers, etc.

    • By Robert

  • “Makes perfect sense: to make transportation more accessible to its residents, Montgomery County, Maryland orders 20 taxi companies to close down” Well, I agree that requiring 100% is a mis-allocation of public assets, and putting companies out of business for noncompliance is ham fisted. But, Walter, you are misrepresenting this article here and you are a better man than that. Cut it out.

    • I don’t think Walter has misrepresented anything.

      The article states clearly:

      … Among the measures approved Tuesday by the County Council, one aims to improve taxi service and requires the County’s Department of Transportation to develop a plan to increase the number of wheelchair-accessible cabs that have lifts or ramps, with a goal of having 100 percent accessible taxicabs within 10 years. …

      … The law required that 6 percent of a taxicab company’s fleet comprise wheelchair-accessible cabs by the end of last year. Some companies exceeded the requirement, the taxicab commission said, but 20 companies did not comply and were recently ordered to cease operations.

      Requiring 100% of every fleet to be wheelchair accessible makes no sense whatever. Taxis are dispatched. Anybody who calls a cab company can request an accessible cab. Cabs aren’t buses that run fixed routes to pick up whatever passengers appear at a stop.

      And even buses can only accommodate only a limited number of wheelchairs (usually 2 in my bus riding experience).

      If a cab company is not refusing to dispatch an accessible cab to customers who request one, why should 100% of its fleet be accessible?

      What’s next? Requiring every restaurant menu item to be fat-free or sugar-free to accommodate the small percentage of customers who might have dietary limitations?