Small banks and other regulated businesses now live at the permission of arbitrary regulators in a legal system that no longer protects individual rights. That’s the message of a letter sent to shareholders earlier this year by Frank H. Hamlin III, CEO of the small Canandaigua National Bank in upstate New York. In particular, Hamlin cites the way the office of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has pushed around two other upstate banks (not his) on ill-defined redlining charges based on doing too much of their lending in the suburbs. I write about it in a new post at Cato at Liberty.

The piece is a sidebar from a much longer piece I wrote on Schneiderman’s record in the Summer issue of City Journal, newly online. I’ll have more to say next week about other parts of that article.

Filed under: banks, Eric Schneiderman, New York state, rule of law