- In Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, Kennedy preserves statistical sampling as a way of proving classwide liability; liberal side would have prevailed even with Scalia on court [Mark Moller/PrawfsBlawg, Daniel Fisher, Paul Karlsgodt]
- Cato’s amicus brief suggests nifty administrative-law fix by which Court could excuse Little Sisters of the Poor without stoking culture war [Ilya Shapiro]
- Oral argument in case on whether RICO racketeering law applies extraterritorially [Daniel Fisher, first and second posts; RJR Nabisco v. European Community]
- Luis v. U.S.: oddly split Court restricts freezing of untainted assets when needed to pay for criminal defense [Jonathan Adler, Scott Greenfield]
- Caetano: Court tells Massachusetts to revisit its opinion that Second Amendment cannot apply to stun guns [Jonathan Adler, Eugene Volokh]
- As predicted, Court won’t take up weak claim by Oklahoma and Nebraska that Colorado’s pot law harms them [Tim Lynch and Adam Bates]
- Amicus wranglers, amicus whisperers; friends of court seen to display flock, herd, pack behavior [Adam Liptak, New York Times]
“Denying Housing Over Criminal Record May Be Discrimination, Feds Say”
HUD to private landlords: from now on, prepare to defend a discrimination suit if you decline to rent to felons. After all, any such rule might have disparate impact on members of protected groups. [NPR] Julia Vitullo-Martin writes: “Amazing, given that government — in the form of public housing — has refused to rent to felons since Clinton administration reforms.”
Patent holder persecutes Pennsylvania photographer
Outfit that sued Pennsylvania photographer over a patent allegedly covering online photo contests must pay attorney fees after a pro bono defense by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [ArsTechnica]
April 6 roundup
- Do lawyers find ways to litigate over the effects of the leap day, Feb. 29, that is inserted into the calendar every four years? Glad you asked [Kyle White, Abnormal Use]
- Weren’t regulations supposed to have fixed this, or is it that accommodation rules for air transport are legally separate from those for ordinary commerce? “More flights seeing odd animals as emotional support companions” [WHIO]
- Tiny desk and art magnets: Zen Magnets wins partial but important legal victory against Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) [Zen Magnets, Nancy Nord, earlier]
- Federal government, which has passed no law on private-sector LGBT bias, considers withholding funds to punish North Carolina for declining to have one [New York Times; earlier on Obama EEOC’s wishful effort to generate such coverage through reinterpretation of other law]
- Spirit of trade barriers: Nevada workers walk off job to protest use of workers from other U.S. states [Alex Tabarrok] Expansion of foreign trade “has revealed, not created, problems in the American economy” [Scott Lincicome] More: “Limiting trade with low-wage countries as severely as Sanders wants to would hurt the very poorest people on Earth. A lot.” [Zack Beauchamp, Vox; related Jordan Weissmann, Slate (what Sanders told NYDN “should be absolutely chilling to the developing world… inhumane”)]
- Latest ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) cause célèbre is over 6-year-old Lexi, whose world is getting upended because of her 1.5% Choctaw descent (a great-great-great-great grandparent on her father’s side) [Christina Sandefur/Federalist Society blog, Naomi Schaefer Riley, New York Post earlier generally on ICWA and in my writing at Reason and Cato on the Adoptive Couple case]
Government buys billboards urging more power for government
Billboards in Washington state urging tougher environmental regulations on farmers were funded by (if this still comes as any shock) the federal taxpayers, through a grant program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And that wasn’t disclosed, although by agency rule it was supposed to be. [Don Jenkins, Capital Press] A few months ago EPA got caught illegally expending tax money to stir up pressure on Congress to support a wider interpretation of its own powers on the “Waters of the United States” rule. More on advocacy funding here.
Related, from way back in 1999, “Smart Growth at the Federal Trough: EPA’s Financing of the Anti-Sprawl Movement” by Peter Samuel and Randal O’Toole, Cato Policy Analysis #361:
The federal government should not subsidize one side of a public policy debate; doing so undermines the very essence of democracy. Nor should government agencies fund nonprofit organizations that exist primarily to lobby other government agencies. Congress should shut down the federal government’s anti-sprawl lobbying activities and resist the temptation to engage in centralized social engineering.
“I’ve been around the world six times on the back of a chicken.”
The New York Times in its “Op-Docs: Verbatim” series provides re-enactments of noteworthy real-life exchanges. “In this dramatization of transcripts from a legal deposition, lawyers grapple with a plaintiff’s bizarre testimony about the destruction of his chicken’s pasture.”
Scotland’s Named Person controversy heats up
We’ve warned for a while about the scheme in Scotland to appoint a state functionary, a so-called Named Person, to look after the interests of every child — not just every child in state care or for whom there are indicia of dangerous neglect or abuse, but every child, period. Now the results are coming in from early rollout of the scheme in some parts of the country. [The Scotsman]
[The professor’s] shock was compounded by the fact that work on this dossier, known as a Family Record, had started without his knowledge. He had only discovered its existence by accident long after the details of his home life had begun to be recorded. Furthermore, it was only after an eight-month battle with his local health board that he managed to obtain a redacted version of the document, which began to be compiled after an acrimonious break-up with his wife which led to a protracted legal row over access to their two children.
Initially pushed through with little opposition, the plan is now causing political grief for the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party of Nicola Sturgeon. Ruth Davidson, leader of the third-place Scottish Conservative Party, has called for rethinking the scheme, and now Scottish Labour Party leader Kezia Dugdale has suggested a halt to its implementation, while still favoring it in principle. The scheme is set to become effective for Scotland as a whole on August 1.
Tragic cases like that of 11-week-old Caleb Ness, the Edinburgh baby killed by his father despite the involvement of social work and health staff, have convinced the Scottish Government that action has to be taken. Indeed, the Named Person approach has the support of many organisations within civic Scotland, including children’s charities and teaching unions, who believe it will help struggling families and prevent tragedies…. In general, health visitors will act as Named Persons for pre-school children, with head teachers taking up the mantle as they get older.
Where not redacted, the 60-page file on the professor’s family had included observations on his children appearing to have diaper rash and runny noses not cleaned for a while, and observed the father “did not appear to take advice on board fully” regarding the thumb-sucking habit of his younger son:
“I find it sinister. I find it very creepy. I find it chilling,” he said. “They just hoover up all of this hearsay and then collate it into huge documents and on to databases. Under the new legislation all sorts of people have access to these databases. All they need is four or five reasons for intervention and they can hoover up information from any database and there is no control over whether this is true or not.”
[cross-posted at Cato at Liberty]
What it took to introduce competition in alcohol retailing
Bethesda Magazine profiles David Trone, whose Total Wine and More chain has helped introduce or reintroduce price-cutting, the negotiating of quantity discounts from vendors, and other advances in the business model for alcohol sales. Along the way, after infuriating competitors who were protected by existing state regulatory arrangements, Trone has been arrested three times, targeted by a Pennsylvania attorney general who was himself later sentenced to prison, subjected to grand jury proceedings at which allied merchants were urged to sever ties with him, and much more, which culminated in getting most of the charges thrown out and paying money to settle others. He spent millions on legal fees. After bad regulatory and legal experiences in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Trone shifted to a new strategy, part of which has involved generous campaign contributions: “So generally what we do now when we enter a new state is hire a lobbyist, hire a great legal team, and go meet the regulators. It’s preemptive, 100 percent.” Now he’s running for Congress.
“Bad News: The Justice Dept. Has Restarted Its Program to Share Seized Property with Police”
Cheers went up from several quarters, including this one, in December and January when the Department of Justice pulled back on its “equitable sharing” forfeiture program, which provides state law enforcement a backdoor way to profit from asset forfeiture to a greater extent than their own state laws would let them do. Payments under the program were halted in December (because federal funds had run short) and then, in the final days of his service as Attorney General, Eric Holder announced that he would apply new rules limiting the scope of the practice.
Now the flow of money has resumed, albeit under the more restrictive new rules. “Given this week’s announcement, the chances that the Obama Administration will take further steps to rein in forfeiture abuse in its final year seem slim.” [Adam Bates/Cato, Scott Shackford, Ilya Somin, Santa Fe New Mexican (views of Brad Cates)] More: Trevor Burrus and Randal John Meyer.
Campus climate roundup
- Madness at Harvard Law School: “This is an occupation,” so activist group Reclaim HLS gets to take down posters it disagrees with [The Crimson; Harvard Law Record (“Barlow said that one protestor told him that if he wanted to post a sign, he could attend Reclaim’s plenary meetings and vote with them about whether or not certain speech should be approved. But he could not, he was told, post a sign without prior approval from Reclaim.”); Avrahm Berkowitz/The Observer]
- “Refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement” is part of Edinburgh University safe space policy, and now a student leader is in trouble for allegedly raising her arms to indicate disagreement as well as shaking her head in a seeming “no”; while disputing its application to her own action she continues to defend the rule itself [Huffington Post UK]
- “Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions.” [John Hasnas, Wall Street Journal on faculty ideological diversity] Plus: conversation between Tyler Cowen and Jonathan Haidt;
- Which campus environment provides a fairer process for accused students: Duke in 2006, or Yale today? [KC Johnson; more, Ashe Schow/Washington Examiner (Michigan, Berkeley)] Federal judge blasts Brandeis over Title IX process in “kissing sleeping boyfriend” case [Steve Miller/Independent Gay Forum, KC Johnson/Storify]
- Student militants storm Berkeley stage intent on silencing Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich [Robby Soave: Reason, The Daily Beast]
- The Ford Foundation, which has done so much to transform academia, is profiled along with president Darren Walker [Larissa MacFarquhar, New Yorker; my critical view of Ford] Funding postmodern feminist glaciology: “Has it become the National Science and Other Ways of Knowing Foundation?” [Jerry Coyne]