Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“Speech is not violence, and violence is not speech”

From Matt Enlow on Twitter, in response to my request:

Not only did I put it to use as a avatar, but so did two of the staunchest free-speech advocates on Twitter, Popehat and Christina Hoff Sommers.

I’ve noticed that many who seek to blur the speech-violence distinction believe that doing so will enable more effective social disapproval of hurtful speech. But perhaps its more salient effect is to undermine the basis for drawing lines against frank violence of action, as is already happening.

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Public employment roundup

  • From 2014, missed earlier, and relevant to bounty-hunting and public sector incentive systems: George Leef reviews Nicholas Parrillo’s Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government [Regulation]
  • “Los Angeles’ Pension Problem Is Sinking The City” [Scott Beyer]
  • Firefighter unions throw their weight around in Arizona local politics [Jessica Boehm, Arizona Republic]
  • Public employee pay studies: “In this instance, I’d argue that casual intuition has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than does formal empiricism.” [Arnold Kling]
  • Public sector employees aren’t sicker than comparable private employees but do take more illness/injury days off [Steven Malanga, City Journal]
  • Mayor concedes there’s no “rational justification” for California city’s six-figure pensions, but that’s what the union got in its contract [Eric Boehm, Reason]

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Paid leave entitlements that backfire

Paid leave and child care policy mandates make women differentially more expensive to employ. And then? Vanessa Brown Calder speaks to Caleb Brown in a Cato podcast, after discussing the issue in an earlier blog post:

Though the United States doesn’t have a federally-mandated paid leave policy, it did enact a federally mandated unpaid leave policy, Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA), in 1993. And despite FMLA being an accepted part of the modern legislative fabric, the consequences of the policy are not all stellar. Analysis suggests women hired after the policy are five percent more likely to be employed but eight percent less likely to be promoted.

Though the U.S. hasn’t adopted a paid leave mandate, a few states have. Research on policy outcomes in California show female labor force participation rising after implementation of paid leave (maybe good?) and childbearing-aged female unemployment and unemployment duration rising, too (unambiguously bad). This is probably because the mandate made women universally more expensive in employer’s eyes, whether professional women intend to use benefits or not.

In the end, free benefits are not free. Notes Calder in the podcast: “Over the course of women’s lives, they are actually paying the price for some of these policies, and that’s something that is not part of the current debate.”

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Medical roundup

  • Scott Gottlieb likely to steer FDA in right direction [Daniel Klein]
  • Study of shorter versus longer medical consent forms “finds no significant difference in comprehension, satisfaction, enrollment” [Grady et al., PLOS via Michelle Meyer]
  • C’mon, ACLU and Covington: “Lawsuit Aims to Force Catholic Hospitals Perform Transgender-Related Surgeries” [Scott Shackford]
  • So much: “What The New York Times Gets Wrong On Vaping Regulation” [Sally Satel]
  • “Should you be compensated for your medical waste, especially if it turns out to be valuable? The right answer is: no.” [Ronald Bailey, Reason on Henrietta Lacks story]
  • Kimberly-Clark: we’ve sold 70 million MicroCool hospital gowns without a single complaint of injury from alleged permeability. Calif. jury: that’ll be $454 million [Insurance Journal]

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FIRE podcasts on free speech

Some recent installments in the FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) podcast series So To Speak, hosted by Nico Perrino: Bob Corn-Revere on “censorship: the bastard child of technology”; Flemming Rose of Cato, formerly with Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten; Sam Gedge of the Institute for Justice on campaign finance laws and the First Amendment; the “heckler’s veto” strikes Heather Mac Donald; Geoffrey Stone of Chicago Law on “Sex and the Constitution”.

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Judge in Ireland rules on playground fall

A child hurt herself falling on a playground in Dublin, Ireland, and this is what Mr. Justice Raymond Groarke of the Circuit Civil Court wrote:

She was engaged in a game of chase pure and simple and, while it is most regrettable that she became unbalanced and fell, this was simply an old fashioned accident and I fail to see any liability on the part of the school for that accident.

Lenore Skenazy comments:

Score one for those of us who understand that there is NO activity, even climbing out of bed, that is always 100% safe. So if we start outlawing activities that are generally, but not 100% completely safe, we will end up outlawing any movement whatsoever.

The judge also seems to realize that something is LOST even if a modicum of safety could be gained. Are kids really safer if they do NOT run around, use their bodies, burn calories, learn to play, deal with disappointment, organize their friends, and create something out of nothing — a game?

Nope. Kids need to play.

Reports The Independent: “The school did not seek an order for costs against the girl’s mother.”

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Medical liability: reviving the case for contract

“Typical medical malpractice reform efforts are aimed at lowering costs for physicians, but what if many problems associated with medical malpractice could be handled via contract?” In a new Cato Podcast with interviewer Caleb Brown, I discuss that subject and go on to talk about issues in malpractice reform, including arbitration and the “nod to federalism” in this year’s Republican medical liability proposal in Congress. Related: reasons why Cato adjunct scholar Jeffrey Singer is skeptical of federal reform.

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Claim: church’s rule against breast-feeding in the pews violates Virginia law

In 2015, following the lead of many other states, Virginia passed a “law that says women have a right to breast-feed anywhere they have a legal right to be.” The law provides “no exemption for religious institutions.” Now a mother and her attorney say Summit Church in Springfield, in the D.C. suburbs, had no right to ask her to use a private room to feed her baby during a service.

Personally, I’m fine with public breast-feeding no longer being categorized, as it once was, as an automatically shocking thing. But why is government dictation of how a church may arrange its rules for worship no longer categorized as an automatically shocking thing? [Michael Alison Chandler and Laura Vozzella, Washington Post] [adapted and cross-posted at Cato at Liberty; and welcome Mosaic Magazine readers]

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Oregon man fined $500 for calling himself engineer in email to state

By reader acclaim: “In September 2014, Mats Järlström, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state’s engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights don’t last long enough, which ‘puts the public at risk.'” The board fined him $500 for “practicing engineering without a license” and for referring to himself as an engineer in correspondence with the state despite his unregistered status. The Institute for Justice is in court on his behalf. [Jason Koebler, Motherboard]

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