“A law professor who alleges he was bullied by colleagues and injured when a professor grabbed and squeezed his shoulder may pursue claims of assault and battery, but not intentional infliction of emotional distress, a federal judge has ruled.” [ABA Journal, Ohio Northern]
Archive for 2015
Suit: United didn’t say wi-fi based services wouldn’t work offshore
The named plaintiff in a class-action suit, a New Jersey woman, paid $7.99 for in-flight DirecTV on a trip from Puerto Rico but could use only ten minutes of it because the flight was mostly over water, where the signals don’t reach. Her lawyers are suing United Airlines over its alleged failure to “disclose that the services will not work as advertised when the aircraft is outside the continental United States or is over water” and want to represent a class of all DirecTV or wi-fi users who might have been affected. [Road Warrior Voices]
Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights laws, cont’d
Caleb Brown interviewed me for the Cato Daily Podcast on the rise of union-backed legislation in more than 15 states throwing up procedural barriers to investigating or firing police officers charged with misconduct. Maryland was the first state to pass such a law, back in the 1970s, and it has now been debating proposals to trim it back, which have intensified in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray story in Baltimore. Earlier on LEOBR/LEOBoR laws here and, generally, here, and be sure to check out Ken White’s annihilating post on the concept at Popehat, with comment discussion.
P.S. Perhaps not unrelated: charged officer “had been accused of theft four previous times” but was still on the Baltimore force [AP after surveillance cameras in federal sting operation allegedly showed officer pocketing thousands of dollars in a hotel room]
“Their town has become farcically overregulated”
Discontent at a land-use control process perceived as “condescending and obnoxious” helped fuel a surprise voter revolt in affluent Chevy Chase, Md., just across the D.C. border in Montgomery County. [Washington Post] Aside from intensive review of requests to expand a deck or convert a screened-in porch to year-round space, there are the many tree battles:
[Insurgents] cite the regulations surrounding tree removal as especially onerous. Property owners seeking to cut down any tree 24 inches or larger in circumference must have a permit approved by the town arborist and town manager attesting that the tree is dead, dying or hazardous.
If turned down, residents can appeal to a Tree Ordinance Board, which applies a series of nine criteria to its decision, including the overall effect on the town’s tree canopy, the “uniqueness” or “desirability” of the tree in question and the applicant’s willingness to plant replacement trees.
More: Philip K. Howard with ideas for fixing environmental permitting. [cross-posted at Free State Notes]
Great moments in copyright law
Historians are disturbed over a “royalties claim being brought by the heirs of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, against the publisher Random House Germany.” A book being published this month quotes from Goebbels’s diaries, and scholars are worried of precedent being set which would not only entitle heirs to profit from war criminals’ writings, but also give them approval authority over the usage of excerpts, which could lead to permission being traded for more sympathetic treatment. Goebbels committed suicide during the last days of the Nazi regime. [Matthew Reisz, Inside Higher Ed] “Maybe history needs a Son of Sam Law” [@KenSherrill on Twitter]
“Justices say addicts can sue doctors, pharmacies for addiction”
West Virginia: “A state Supreme Court ruling says juries can decide if residents who have broken the law by obtaining and using prescription painkillers can sue physicians and pharmacies for their addictions.” [Chamber-backed W.V. Record]
“How jury duty almost turned me into an anarchist”
Matt Welch’s experience being called for a civil jury [Reason] I, and this site, get a mention; I’ve had multiple reports of people bringing my books with them to the courthouse so as not to be picked for a jury. And I wrote for Reason about the jury selection process a while back.
More: In a followup post, Welch quotes passages from my 2003 article and confirms that, alas, the same practices are going on today, at least in New York City: the rigorous exclusion of jurors with any expertise or familiarity with difficult technical issues, and independent-minded people likely to be “thought leaders”; the avid efforts to plant preconceptions about the facts and issues of the case and extract individual “promises” of favorable votes, with no judge present; and so forth. There were hopes the round of reforms introduced by then-Chief Judge Judith Kaye some years back would clean up New York’s awful voir dire (jury selection) process, but clearly it hasn’t. Much less nonsense tends to go on in jury selection if the judge is present, and a key to the awfulness of New York voir dire — and its empowerment of lawyers — is the judge’s absence. Plus: Ilya Somin weighs in.
Buy our protective services, or we’ll rat you out to the feds
I’ve got a new post at Cato summarizing dramatic new testimony in the case (briefly noted here last year) of a laboratory company that got reported to the Federal Trade Commission for data breach — and drawn into a crushingly expensive legal battle — after it declined to buy data security services offered by a company with Homeland Security contracts. The battle has been raging for a while, with the nonprofit Washington, D.C. group Cause of Action representing LabMD and outlets like Mother Jones running coverage unsympathetic to its case.
Police and law enforcement roundup
- The magic of immunity: DEA commandeered truck for fatal sting, but doesn’t owe owner even the cost of bullet holes [Houston Chronicle, Radley Balko, Scott Greenfield] More: Lowering the Bar.
- Federal takeover of local policing is a truly bad idea [Glenn Reynolds, USA Today; Elizabeth Price Foley]
- Some of government’s worst messes come when there’s bipartisan agreement, as with lack of police accountability [Coyote]
- “Is Rakoff the Only Judge Not In Love with DOJ?” [Matt Kaiser, Above the Law on Judge Jed Rakoff’s “Mass Incarceration: The Silence of the Judges,” New York Review of Books]
- San Antonio cop “held his wife and children at gunpoint, striking his wife in the head with his gun, and had a 20 minute standoff with police before surrendering” but will keep law enforcement officer license [Cato National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, “worst case” for February] “Arbitrator says Cleveland police officer who sexted crime victims, visited women on duty, should keep job” [Cleveland.com, with a related series including “Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says arbitration process keeps bad cops on police force“]
- “We Should Be Wary of Federal Body Camera Funds” [Matthew Feeney, Cato, related from Feeney here, here, and here] More on bodycam programs from several points of view: Uri Friedman via Althouse, Bloomberg editors (anti), Alex Tabarrok, Radley Balko;
- Those ATF sting operations were even more exploitative and predatory than imagined [Balko, earlier]
Amtrak crash: #toosoon to trawl?
From attorney Larry Bodine’s Twitter account, two hours after last night’s crash of Amtrak’s Northeast Regional outside Philadelphia that left six dead and more than 65 injured:
The link in his tweet leads here, to a page at PersonalInjury.com with his branding.
P.S. Dean Weitzman of Silvers, Langsam & Weitzman, P.C.’s MyPhillyLawyer.com wasted little time in getting out a press release offering the firm’s services [Philadelphia mag]