Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

$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]

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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]

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Supreme Court roundup

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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!

To get more Overlawyered in your social media diet, like us on Facebook here (and don’t forget to like the Cato Institute and the page for our editor Walter Olson) and follow us on Twitter (ditto and ditto).

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Land use and environment roundup

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Lawsuit against dog dismissed

Randall Kevin Jones was injured by police canine Draco when apprehended, and proceeded to sue the animal itself, among others, under Georgia law for negligence. The Eleventh Circuit ordered the claim against the dog dismissed, noting “that the practical problems with suing a dog are virtually endless.” [Jordan Fowler, Washington Legal Foundation] To quote the opinion in Jones v. Fransen:

…under the express terms of Georgia law, only a person may be held liable for breaching a legal duty. … Not surprisingly, O.C.G.A. § 50-21-22(4), which we use to determine the meaning of words used in Georgia’s tort statutes, does not define the word “person” to include dogs.

In a 2001 case called Dye v. Wargo, the Seventh Circuit likewise dismissed an attempt to sue a police dog.

P.S. “I have here a stack of affidavits declaring the defendant a good boy.” — @jhimmibhob on Twitter.

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Campus climate roundup

  • This seems an important point: requiring students to engage in social justice work impinges on their moral independence [Julie Lawton, DePaul Law]
  • 7 minutes of madness: astounding Michael Moynihan video on the Evergreen State blowup [Vice News, language]
  • Classics in ruins [Sandra Kotta/Quillette, parts one, two]
  • “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race” [Coyote]
  • Claim: college violated Title IX by not doing more to stop anonymous off-campus social media posts [T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post on suit against University of Mary Washington]
  • Historical figure almost wholly forgotten except as name on building. Worth exhuming just to manifest our disdain? [Charles Reichmann, San Francisco Chronicle on Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley] More: Online shaming mobs from both sides of the political spectrum now going after provocative academics [Heterodox Academy]

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