- More on broad “right of publicity” bill in New York legislature [Jonathan Peters, Columbia Journalism Review; earlier]
- “Court Orders Man Who Sued News Orgs For Clipping His Facebook Video To Pay Everyone’s Attorney’s Fees” [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
- ABC settles “pink slime” defamation lawsuit on undisclosed terms [AP, earlier]
- “Power Line” blogger attends media reception at White House, finds notes subpoenaed by travel ban challengers [Scott Johnson, City Journal]
- “Europe serves as a warning against Sarah Palin and Trump’s libel law crusade” [Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner]
- Litigation consequences of scripted hookups on reality TV: last paragraph is especially surreal [James Callenberger, Vulture]
Archive for July, 2017
“Walmart sued after teen steals machete and kills her Uber driver”
Because anti-shoplifting measures should be perfect, and because these days what isn’t reasonably foreseeable? “It is unclear whether Walmart employees and their security staff were aware that the girl had the weapons when she left the store.” [David Kravets, Ars Technica]
Pronoun prescription in Canada
“Few Canadians realize how seriously these statutes infringe upon freedom of speech. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has stated, in the context of equivalent provisions in the Ontario Human Rights Code, that ‘refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity … will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education.'” [Bruce Pardy, National Post] We noted the New York City Human Rights Commission’s similar guidance last year.
July 5 roundup
- Court order (arising from federal demand for information on three accounts) forbids Facebook “from communicating the existence of the warrants to its users” [Paul Alan Levy]
- “The great intellectual property trade-off”: brief guide to IP by economist Tim Harford [BBC]
- Eye-opening if dogmatic history of how federal government and other institutions connived at residential segregation [David Oshinsky in N.Y. Times reviewing Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law]
- About those “do not remove under penalty of law” mattress tags [Now I Know]
- What comes after a Congressional Review Act (CRA) repeal of a regulation? [Sam Batkins and Adam White, Cato Regulation magazine]
- Estate tax, DC Metro, bogus search-engine takedown suits, and kudos for a Democrat in my latest Maryland policy roundup [Free State Notes]
$600,000 award for not accommodating employee’s “Mark of the Beast” beliefs
“A longtime employee of Consol Energy Inc. is entitled to over half a million dollars in damages because of the coal company’s failure to accommodate his religious concerns about a handprint scanner, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled….[Beverly Butcher Jr.’s] understanding of the biblical Book of Revelation is that the ‘Mark of the Beast’ brands followers of the Antichrist, allowing the Antichrist to manipulate them. The use of Consol’s hand-scanning system, Butcher feared, would result in him being so marked. Butcher believed that, even without any physical or visible sign, his willingness to undergo the scan could lead to his identification with the Antichrist.”
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took Butcher’s side against the company. “At trial, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the EEOC. Butcher was awarded $150,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. The court also awarded Butcher $436,860 in front and back pay and lost benefits.” [Jeffrey Rhodes, SHRM; Dawn Solowey, Seyfarth Shaw; EEOC v. Consol Energy]
Trump admin: don’t strike down Obama overtime edict, we’re planning to walk it back
“The U.S. Labor Department told a federal appeals court Friday that while it intends to revise the Obama-era rule that made millions of workers eligible for overtime pay the agency will continue to defend its authority to create and enforce such a regulation.” One hopes the walkback will be complete or nearly so, since overtime mandates for midlevel employees were one of Obama’s most destructive policy initiatives. Better yet would be for the federal government to beat a retreat from this 1930s-era body of law entirely. [Erin Mulvaney, NLJ; AP/L.A. Times; earlier here and here]
Supreme Court roundup
- A strong 9-4 showing: “Even in a ‘Slow’ Year, Cato Continues Its Winning Ways at the Supreme Court” [Ilya Shapiro]
- Court follows up Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections with another race-and-redistricting case, Cooper v. Harris [SCOTUSBlog symposium]
- “What Do We Mean By a “Pro-Business” Court — And Should We Care?” [James Copland, Case Western Law Review]
- Kennedy’s opinion for Court cites Cato amicus brief in Packingham v. North Carolina, ruling unconstitutionally overbroad law preventing nearly all social media access by released sex offenders [earlier]. Speech limits aren’t the only unconstitutional restrictions such offenders face. High court should take Karsjens case next [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald]
- CALPERS v. ANZ Securities Inc.: pendency of class action does not suspend three-year time limit for filing individual securities actions [Kevin LaCroix/D & O Diary, Federalist Society podcast with Mark Chenoweth]
- Why I’m not joining the fury over Justice Gorsuch’s dissent in Pavan v. Smith, the case over Arkansas’s handling of birth certificates post-Obergefell [my Twitter sequence, more from Erica Goldberg]
“Outrage is easy. Science is hard.”
Daniel Gold in the New York Times and Kenneth Turan in the L.A. Times review “Food Evolution,” a new documentary on fear of GMOs directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy and narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Trailer here.
“Customers shall read and fully understand” owners’ manual in its entirety before operating vehicle
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is not being sold as an ordinary street vehicle, and the disclaimers and waivers that customers are being required to sign are not ordinary either [Patrick Rall, Allpar via Davey G. Johnson, Car and Driver]
Overlawyered turns 18 years old
Overlawyered published its first post on July 1, 1999. That means we’ve achieved 18 years of continuous publication. You can read the first half-month of posts here. Happy birthday to us!
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