Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Donald Trump vs. the Washington Post

Do you think Donald Trump is the first U.S. politico to menace publishers over bad coverage? Not even close. My new Cato piece cites a few examples from a depressingly long history. Plus: reprinted at Newsweek.

Bonus: Sen. Sherman Minton (D-Ind.) who put forth the remarkable proposal to make it “a crime to publish anything as a fact anything known to be false,” and who had led a Senate committee’s investigation of the Gannett newspaper chain over its (then) Republican-leaning politics, was later nominated by President Harry Truman to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served for seven years and became a leading exponent of judicial deference to the executive branch.

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Deirdre McCloskey on the bathroom battle

I was hoping/waiting to hear what eminent economist Deirdre McCloskey, born Donald, would have to say about the transgender bathroom flap. Wish granted, thanks to Warren Coats and his blog:

Before I “passed” (surgery, working at it) I was frightened to go into a ladies’ room, but I could hardly go into a men’s room in a dress. You can imagine how dangerous that would be! I was allowed to put Female on my driver’s license in tolerant Iowa in 1995. But you are right that it is unwise in such matters if nothing much is going wrong to stir things up. I’ll bet now that Iowa has rules from the state. Then it was left to Iowans’ ample common sense. My passport F was tougher—I wept to the woman at the New Hampshire passport office, and she relented and sent my passport the day before I was boarding a flight to go to Holland to teach for a year, in January 1996. So the State Department unofficially was cool. A year later I tried to get Harvard to change my degree from Harvard College class of ’64 to the women’s college, Radcliffe. The male dean I spoke to thought not. I whined, “But the State Department had no problem giving me an F passport.” With a smile in his voice he replies, “But Harvard is older than the State Department!”

“There’s more on all this in my memoir of my transition, Crossing: A Memoir (1999 University of Chicago Press).

“The bathroom “issue” is entirely phony. It has never been a problem. Anyway, if men wanted to sneak in (they don’t), they could always have done so, with or without North Carolina’s law. How is it to be enforced? DNA testing by the TSA at every bathroom door? Anyway, your house has a unisex bathroom, I presume, and in Europe they are not entirely uncommon—after all, the stalls have doors. Etc, etc. On both sides it is just a club to beat up the other side in the silly Cultural Wars, and to make people hate and disdain each other. Adam Smith would not have approved.”

Meanwhile, Hans Bader argues that the Obama administration stands on very shaky ground both legally and prudentially in trying to impose a single nationwide set of practices by way of Title IX and funding cutoffs, aside from whether that set of practices is in fact the right one. More: Richard Epstein/Hoover, Roger Pilon/Cato, Robby Soave/Reason, Neal McCluskey (no relation)/Daily Caller, and earlier here and here on the North Carolina law.

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May 18 roundup

  • Do behavioral economists acknowledge policymakers’ own foibles? Not often it seems [Niclas Berggren via Bryan Caplan]
  • China, not unlike our own attorney general-environmentalist alliance, is cracking down on the work of what it deems ideologically harmful nonprofits [ABA Journal]
  • Barking mad: new ABA ethics proposal would deem it professional misconduct for lawyers to discriminate on various grounds, including “socioeconomic status,” in choosing partners, employees and experts [Eugene Volokh, Sara Randazzo/WSJ Law Blog]
  • Virginia still has a law requiring annual safety inspection of your car, and it’s still a bad idea [Alex Tabarrok]
  • Court in Canadian province of New Brunswick rules against honoring will that left estate to racist group [CBC]
  • From the left, Paul Bland sees Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Spokeo v. Robins as a big loss for business defendants [Public Justice, earlier] Contra: Andrew Pincus, plus more from WLF.

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Feds overreach in prosecution of FedEx for failure to snoop

“Federal prosecutors have accused FedEx of knowingly shipping illegal drugs in interstate commerce and laundering money by merely doing its job: delivering packages (in this case, from online Internet pharmacies) to their intended recipients and getting paid for the service. …To avoid the very sort of ‘gotcha’ prosecution at issue here, Congress inserted exceptions for common carriers in each of the relevant statutes” authorizing shipment of prescription medications and controlled substances when done in the usual course of business.

While courts have generated no case law authoritatively interpreting these exemptions in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and the Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act (FDCA), “the need to do so had never presented itself because no prosecutor had ever dared to bring such a dubious indictment in the previous 45 years of the CSA’s existence.” [Cory Andrews, Washington Legal Foundation; earlier (“Feds indict FedEx for not snooping into packages”)]

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Wage and hour roundup

  • Los Angeles hotel workers catching on to real intent of city ordinance carving out sub-minimum wage at unionized employers [Scott Shackford, Reason, earlier] “Why Sports Authority is throwing in the towel and closing all of its stores” [Kevin Smith, San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Pasadena Star-News]
  • “France might pass a law that makes it illegal to send after-hours work emails” [Washington Post]
  • Boiled at slightly lower temperature: DoL considering knocking down salary threshold a bit, $47,000 rather than $50,440, for its awful upcoming overtime mandate [Jon Hyman; video from Partnership to Protect Workplace Opportunity, group critical of regs; earlier here, etc.]
  • “Eleventh Circuit Reins in NLRB’s Mischaracterization of Independent Contractors as ‘Employees'” [John Park, Washington Legal Foundation]
  • “Relax Everyone: NELP’s New Report Says The Minimum Wage Doesn’t Cost Jobs” [Tim Worstall] “The Economic Denialism of a $15 Minimum Wage” [John McGinnis; Chris Edwards/Cato] David Henderson scrutinizes work by left-wing Berkeley economist Michael Reich backing $15 minimum [EconLog]
  • Idea of abolishing the tip system, pushed by some labor activists and eyed as a fallback by businesses tied up in wage law knots, meets with huge resistance from restaurant staff in U.S. [NPR]
  • “Hillary Clinton Just Turned the Democratic Party Into the Party of the $15 an Hour Minimum Wage” [Peter Suderman]

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NYPD gun-permit bribery scandal

Under New York City’s stiff gun control laws, it can be famously hard to obtain a carry permit from the NYPD’s license division — at least, famously hard if you’re an ordinary resident without cash or connections to spare. Now, scandal [DNAInfo, New York Daily News]:

A Brooklyn businessman has been charged by the feds with obtaining gun permits for friends and other businessmen by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to NYPD officers in its License Division, authorities said on Monday….

In all, Lichtenstein boasted that he obtained 150 weapons for his friends and associates, charging them about $18,000 each time, and giving $6,000 of the payout to his police connections. If true, that means corrupt officers raked in as much as $900,000.

It’s yet another reminder, Ira Stoll points out, of the general rule that draconian regulation begets corruption — and a caution to those who propose to inflict NYC-style regulation on other parts of the country.

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“The Federal Leviathan Is Crushing Colleges and Universities”

Jenna A. Robinson and Jesse Saffron, Pope Center:

Last year…the Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education—formed in 2013 at the behest of a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and comprised of top university officials from around the country—released a stunning indictment of what it called the “jungle of red tape” produced by the Education Department. The report cited analysis from George Mason’s Mercatus Center that showed federal higher education mandates increased by 56 percent from 1997-2012.

Today, the situation is bleak: There are thousands of pages of federal regulations, and the Education Department has to release “guidance” letters to clarify vague rules once per day, on average, according to the Task Force.

Case studies from individual schools reveal just how burdensome compliance can be. One example comes from Vanderbilt University, which recently analyzed its federal compliance costs and found that they accounted for $150 million—or 11 percent—of the university’s 2013 expenditures. (Vanderbilt announced that for each student, those compliance costs “equate to approximately $11,000 in additional tuition per year.”)

Earlier here. More from reader mx in comments, who notes that the Chronicle of Higher Education has criticized the Vanderbilt number on the grounds that most of the university’s regulatory costs ($117 million of $146 million) is attributed to compliance related to research, which is not necessarily charged to students as tuition.

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Environment roundup

  • Clarifying Penn Central: does a government taking property violate Fifth Amendment when it groups together commonly owned parcels in such a way as to avoid an obligation to provide just compensation? [Ilya Shapiro, Ilya Somin on Supreme Court case of Murr v. Wisconsin]
  • How to win NYC real estate cleverest-deal-of-year award: sacrifice floor space to outwit regulation [Alex Tabarrok]
  • Desert delirium: “Phoenix has the cheapest water in the country” [Coyote]
  • If you ban low-quality housing you might discover it was the only housing low-income people could afford [Emily Washington, Market Urbanism]
  • Who’s cheering on/gloating over climate-speech subpoenas? Media Matters, of course, and some others too;
  • “Exhibiting Bias: how politics hijacks science at some museums” [John Tierney, City Journal]
  • Hadn’t realized Karen Hinton, of Chevron-Ecuador suit PR fame, was (now-exiting) flack for NYC Mayor De Blasio [New York Post; Jack Fowler/NRO]

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