Cato’s Caleb Brown talks with attorney J. Cabou about the legal fight over Arizona’s civil asset forfeiture law, which authorizes “one-way” fees to be made available to prevailing law enforcement, but not to prevailing citizens. Note, by the way, that the (very real) due process objections to one-way fee-shifting are in many ways equally applicable to one-way fee-shift provisions found in numerous other areas of law, including discrimination and environmental statutes.
Archive for August, 2015
“Throwed rolls” result in Missouri suit
Lambert’s Cafe, based in Sikeston, Missouri, bills itself as the “Home of Throwed Rolls” because of its famous practice of having servers toss dinner rolls to customers. It’s now being sued for guess what [WDAF, RiverFront Times] Last year the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of a plaintiff claiming injury from a hot dog thrown by a mascot at a Kansas City Royals game, overturning a lower court which had instructed jurors that they were free to find hot-dog-flinging a risk known to occur at Royals games for purposes of an assumption of risk defense. More: Lowering the Bar and (thanks for link) Fox News.
Liability roundup
- Of course this exists [LivestockAccident.com]
- Eleventh Circuit: no, court can’t rely on professional association’s guidelines to exclude expert witness under Daubert [David Bernstein on Adams v. Lab Corp. of America, followup]
- “Why Can Plaintiffs Only Remember Solvent Defendants In Asbestos Cases?” [Abnormal Use, my two cents way back]
- “Predicting the future in tort law” [Kyle Graham]
- “LA County’s Lead Paint Lawsuit Could Spell Disaster for Apartment Owners” [Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles]
- Chicago personal injury attorney will face privacy suit over solicitations based on police crash records [Chamber-backed Cook County Record]
- No, it won’t: “Will HR 1927 Kill the Class Action?” [Andrew Trask/Class Strategist; Sean Wajert on House Judiciary action]
Little award, big fee
Shot: Jury awards Colorado discrimination plaintiff $19,000.
Chaser: “Then, her lawyers filed a motion for attorney’s fees and costs. They requested $575,683.83.”
To learn how it all turned out, follow the link. [Eric B. Meyer, Employer Handbook]
School and childhood roundup
- Why campus trigger culture and offense bans aren’t just anti-intellectual and a foretaste of wider speech regulation, but fail at specific therapeutic goal of reducing psychological upset [Greg Lukianoff/Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic cover story]
- Newtown shooting advanced existing trend toward a regular police presence in schools; consequences may include escalation of low-level discipline [ACLU of Pennsylvania report “Beyond Zero Tolerance,” pp. 28-34]
- “Scottish Government’s named person scheme criticized by experts who will implement it” [The Courier (Dundee), earlier]
- “Kids Dig for Worms, Sell to Fishermen. Town Says Not So Fast: That’s Illegal!” [Cornwall, Ont.; Lenore Skenazy]
- “British Universities See Ethics Committees as ‘Easy and Convenient’ Censors” [Zachary Schrag, Institutional Review Blog]
- “His son’s school requires student athletes to carry their own insurance, a move that many other schools also have had to make because of the rising costs from lawsuits.” [Charleston, S.C.-area Palmetto Business Daily] “NYC has paid nearly $20M from playground injuries since 2010” [Reuven Blau, NY Daily News]
- Mom in famous Silver Spring, Md. “free range kids” episode is writing book, solicits stories of unattended kids and CPS abuse
“HP Asks For Heavily-Redacted Documents To Be Sealed…”
“…Judge Responds With Heavily-Redacted Refusal” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt]
The race to patent Crispr
Amy Maxmen, Wired on the advances in DNA editing (via Jason Kuznicki):
But the attorney filing for Zhang checked a box on the application marked “accelerate” and paid a fee, usually somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000. A series of emails followed between agents at the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Broad’s patent attorneys, who argued that their claim was distinct.
A little more than a year after those human-cell papers came out, Doudna was on her way to work when she got an email telling her that Zhang, the Broad Institute, and MIT had indeed been awarded the patent on Crispr-Cas9 as a method to edit genomes. “I was quite surprised,” she says, “because we had filed our paperwork several months before he had.”
August 12 roundup
- “‘Game Of Thrones’ Fan Demands Trial By Combat” [Lowering the Bar]
- One way to lose your city job in NYC: “An administrative-law judge then agreed to his firing, noting [the deceased] didn’t show up at his hearing.” [New York Post]
- International Trade Commission asked to curb improper “imports,” i.e. transmissions, of data into the US, and yes, that could create quite a precedent [WSJ, R Street Institute, Niskanen Center, FreedomWorks letter] More: K. William Watson, Cato;
- Sixth Circuit panel explains in cement case why some towns (e.g. St. Marys) have no apostrophes, others do [St. Marys Cement v. EPA opinion via Institute for Justice “Short Circuit“]
- Proposed ban on export of some fine art from Germany stirs discontent [New York Times via Tyler Cowen]
- With its SEO budget already committed to “Oliver Wendell Holmes = doofus” keywords and the like, Volokh Conspiracy must rely on organic content to boost Brazilian apartment seeker clicks [David Kopel]
- But federal law forbids paying them, so the city won’t do that: “2 immigrants in U.S. illegally are named to Huntington Park commissions” [L.A. Times]
“93-year-old judge grows weary of 44-year-old housing bias case”
Only 44 years? By then a good case is just getting warmed up, right? Sixth Circuit Senior Judge Damon Keith has been hearing the Hamtramck, Mich. litigation since his days on the U.S. District Court, and is hoping it will be over soon. [ABA Journal]
Crime and punishment roundup
- “Regulatory Crimes and the Mistake of Law Defense” [Paul Larkin, Heritage]
- Victims of sex offender registry laws, cont’d [Lenore Skenazy]
- James Forman, Jr.: case against mass incarceration can stand on its own without flawed Jim Crow analogy [Boston Review and N.Y.U. Law Review, 2011-12]
- “For-profit immigration jails, where the inmates — convicted of nothing — work for less than peanuts.” [@dangillmor on Los Angeles Times]
- “The New Science of Sentencing: Should prison sentences be based on crimes that haven’t been committed yet?” [Marshall Project on statistically derived risk assessments in sentencing]
- Group of 600 New England United Methodist churches issues resolution calling for an end to Drug War [Alex Tabarrok, who was also profiled the other day]
- Prison guard in Florida speaks up about witnessing abuse of inmate, and pays a price [disturbing content, Miami Herald]