“For now, the labor code is so complex, and violating it is so risky, that many French employers keep it in a separate room and speak of it with awe. Only specialists, on their staff or outside it, are allowed to consult the oracle, they say…. The Macron changes would help employers set the rules on hiring and firing, ignore the crippling restraints in the code that discourage taking on new workers, and limit unions’ ability to get in the way. Instead, individual agreements would be negotiated at the company or industry level between bosses and workers.” [Adam Nossiter, New York Times]
Archive for August, 2017
Food and drink roundup
- Activist nonprofits with big endowments using litigation to go after soft drink companies. Loser-pays would help [Tiger Joyce, Inside Sources, see also]
- “Cigar City” a familiar monicker for Tampa. Likelihood of confusion between a beer and a salsa brand? [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
- USDA checkoff programs, which require farmers and ranchers to participate in group marketing, suffer setback in Montana federal courtroom [Baylen Linnekin, Reason; Joe Fassler/New Food Economy on First Amendment challenge]
- C. Jarrett Dieterle reports from craft brewers conference [Inside Sources] More profiles of Flying Dog CEO Jim Caruso [Reason, The American Conservative; earlier here and here] The great German (regulated) beer stagnation [Esme Nicholson, NPR, 2016]
- Class action: consumer fraud to call dried/powdered vegetable ingredients “veggies”? [Lisa Fickenscher, New York Post] Entrepreneurial lawyers fatten on slack-fill cases [Candy Industry] If only buyers holding a sandwich had a way of judging its weight other than package size [Jake Offenhartz, Gothamist on suit against Pret-a-Manger]
- “The real opposition to food trucks was not coming from restaurants but from commercial real estate interests” [Aaron Renn, Urbanophile]
In Philadelphia, sue thy neighbor
Dozens of Registered Community Organizations (RCOs) across Philadelphia “have to provide their own liability insurance to protect their volunteer staffers, and all it takes is one or two lawsuits for premiums to reach untenable heights.” The lawsuits are readily forthcoming since a common role of RCOs is to submit comments on land use development proposals, high-stakes issue often leading to litigation. The Bella Vista Neighbors Association, involved in a lawsuit three years ago, was set to shut down just the other day when “a Utah-based carrier specializing in tough-to-insure entities — think fireworks, helicopter bungee jumps, and trampoline companies — stepped in, finalizing a plan hours before the meeting, which coincided with the last day of the association’s coverage.” [Julia Terruso, Philadelphia Daily News]
Talked into suing gun dealer, left stranded
“Brady Campaign urges couple to file a frivolous lawsuit. Couple goes bankrupt. Brady Campaign nowhere to be found.” [@jaycaruso summarizing his National Review story, earlier on Brady Campaign]
Update: Louisiana sheriff’s raid on blogger’s home
We reported last year on how the sheriff of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, relying on the state’s old and constitutionally infirm criminal-libel law, had raided the house and seized the computers of a local man suspected of being responsible for a gadfly blog that had criticized the sheriff and other community figures. Now, unsurprisingly, a federal judge is allowing a lawsuit to go forward seeking damages for the search: “Some qualified immunity cases are hard. This case is not one of them.” [Eugene Volokh]
Social media liberty roundup
- “Congress is on the cusp of gutting Section 230. This is the threat we’ve always knew was coming” [Eric Goldman, R Street Institute/TechFreedom letter, Emma Llansó/CDT on SESTA, Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act]
- Psychiatrist sues to unmask author of 1-star review that caused him “extreme and constant distress” [Post and Courier]
- Judge: Loudoun County, Va. public official violated constituent’s rights by blocking him from “Chair Randall” Facebook page [Sydney Kashiwagi, Loudoun Times, Eugene Volokh, earlier on asserted First Amendment right not to be blocked or deleted on officials’ accounts]
- “Ominous: Canadian Court Orders Google To Remove Search Results Globally” [Daphne Keller/CIS via Volokh, EFF; decision defended by Neil Turkewitz, Truth on the Market]
- “Washington law bans repeated online posts intended to ‘embarrass’ anyone” [Eugene Volokh and second post on Rynearson/Moriwaki dispute]
- Blasphemy laws: Taimoor Raza becomes first person sentenced to death in Pakistan over Facebook posts [CNN]
Podcast: states can rein in ADA lawsuit mills
In Arizona, where ADA filing mills have been running wild suing small businesses, Attorney General Mark Brnovich led an effort to bring one operation to account. He explains how in this Federalist Society podcast. I have a question near the end.
UK tourists abroad file wave of food poisoning claims
“Tens of thousands of UK tourists have put in for compensation [for food poisoning] in the past year, even though sickness levels in resorts have remained stable,” reports the BBC, in what Mark Tanzer, chief executive of trade travel association Abta, says is “one of the biggest issues that has hit the travel industry for many years”. Travel firm Tui “said it had experienced a 15-fold rise in holiday sickness claims in the past year, costing between £3,000 and £5,000 a time.”
Joel Brandon-Bravo, managing director of Travelzoo UK, told BBC Radio 5 live’s Wake Up To Money that the upward trend was being driven by claims management companies.
“People are being called when they get back from holiday and encouraged to make claims and we’ve also seen evidence of them employing touts outside resorts encouraging people to make a claim and walking them through the process to make it easy for them,” he said….Abta says the cases usually involve holidaymakers who have been abroad on all-inclusive deals, who argue that because they only ate in their hotel, that must have been the source of their alleged food poisoning.
Sometimes it is possible to cast doubt on the claims, per a report by Tanveer Mann at Metro:
Two British tourists who claim they were left ‘bed-ridden’ as a result of food poisoning actually had more than 100 drinks while on an all-inclusive holiday in Gran Canaria, according to their hotel bill….
The CEO of [defendant] Jet2holidays, Steve Heapy, said: ‘The sharp rise in the number of sickness claims is costing hoteliers and travel companies dearly, and it’s frustrating when so many are made a year or more after the holiday has ended.
There is also fear that some overseas resorts will begin barring access to British holidaymakers entirely as unprofitable.
In the BBC report, Abta “says laws designed to stop fraudulent claims for whiplash have instead pushed the problem of false insurance submissions on to overseas holidays instead. This is because of a cap on the legal fees that can be charged by law firms pursuing personal injury cases at home.”
A note on college-degree credentialism in the workplace
From “Walker” in the comments at the Slate Star Codex blog (“Scott Alexander”), which had been discussing the overemphasis on college degrees as a prerequisite for mid- to upper-level management jobs that some persons without degrees could perform very well:
I am a mid-level engineering manager for a very large aerospace company. Their rationale for requiring degrees is clear and I suspect it is shared by many companies. They prefer to hire all of the skilled employees as “exempt”, meaning not subject to fair labor standards laws and not eligible for overtime. The state and federal labor overseers require that the company have well-defined rules for distinguishing exempt from non-exempt and the company uses a degree as one of the primary criteria. The HR folks will absolutely not allow deviations from this policy because it would jeopardize the entire company job category structure. I can cite examples and details if anyone is interested but this is a really clear policy across every place I have worked.
California: ADA lawsuit mill destroys family’s restaurant dream
“The lawsuit devastated him,” Moji Saniefar said. “He didn’t want to operate it anymore.”
What’s worse, she said, is that Zlfred’s ended up closing and her father died before a federal judge in March this year dismissed the ADA lawsuit.
“He never got to know that he won the case,” Saniefar said.
Fatemeh and Gholamreza “Reza” Saniefar “owned Zlfred’s restaurant in central Fresno for nearly 40 years. The restaurant closed in March 2015 after it was sued for ADA violations.” Now their daughter is suing two law firms involved in the action, which she alleges was part of a pattern of mass-produced complaints intended to extract money under the Americans with Disabilities Act and California law. [Fresno Bee]