“The case against mandatory seat-belt laws”

The federal seat-belt-law mandate was the result of a 1980s deal between Reagan-era Transportation secretary Elizabeth Dole (proof, long before Mayor Bloomberg, that nanny-state tendencies transcend partisan labels) and Detroit automakers, who calculated that regulating their customers would help stave off regulating their own design decisions. And now? Less individual liberty, more scope for police discretion, and in some states a taste for revenue: “In California, a single seat-belt violation can be as much as $490.” [Radley Balko] Earlier on mandatory seat belt usage laws here, here (“saturation detail” police stops), here, etc. (“doggie seat belt” laws), here (Germany: Pope in Popemobile), here, and here (England: Santa’s sleigh), among others.

Because witches come not singly but in covens

Investigating Exxon over climate wrongthink just the start: “Democratic congressmen California Rep. Ted Lieu, alongside Vermont Rep. Peter Welch and Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging the country’s top attorney open an investigation of Shell’s history regarding climate change.” They claim the tobacco episode furnishes a precedent for prosecuting businesses “for colluding within their industry to deliberately mislead the public.” [Chris White, Daily Caller] Ten years ago in this space, we deplored as dangerous to free speech the Department of Justice’s embrace of the position that it could charge businesses with racketeering for taking what it called “false and misleading positions on issues.” [emphasis added].

Class action roundup

Time for more attorney general transparency

The model Transparency in Private Attorney Contract (TiPAC) Act, already enacted in more than a third of the states, are meant to shine light and impose basic controls on the cozy arrangements by which private attorneys get themselves hired by state attorneys general to file litigation on behalf of state interests, often on contingency fee. Lawyers in these arrangements are often found to contribute to the campaigns of the AGs that hire them. Typical provisions of the reform package “mandate public bidding, require the posting of contracts on websites, limit attorney’s fees, demand that firms keep appropriate records, and mandate complete control of the litigation by the government.” [Phil Goldberg, Real Clear Politics]

Labor and employment roundup

  • A good labor economics class lets you see through society’s secular religion [Bryan Caplan first, second, and third (“Why labor fallacies have replaced industrial organization fallacies in society’s secular religion”) posts]
  • “Meet The Obama Czars Who Decide How Your Workplace Runs” [Connor Wolf/Daily Caller, and thanks for quote]
  • Welcome news for employers: Seventh Circuit signals it isn’t buying EEOC’s attack on severance offers in CVS case [Jon Hyman, background]
  • Can a unionized Uber or Lyft driver file a grievance over your negative comment as a customer? “It’s not at all clear how union job protection policies can jibe with a community-rating economy.” [Brian Doherty, Reason]
  • Riffling through just one day’s BNA Labor Report, Michael Fox finds headlines like Firing After FMLA Request Raises Triable Issues, Recommendation Letter Saves Fired Professor’s Bias Suit, and Commission Seeks Comment on Workplace Murder Case [Employer’s Lawyer]
  • Disney exec: here’s our plan to engage in racial discrimination in hiring journalists [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism] Have they compared notes with BuzzFeed Canada? [Mediaite]
  • On minimum wage, New York Times editors find Hillary Clinton overly tethered to economic reality, urge cutting of final moorings [Charles Hughes, Cato] “The Evidence Is Piling Up That Higher Minimum Wages Kill Jobs” [David Neumark, WSJ]

Australia: Irish pub in trouble over vintage tobacco signs on walls

Owner Paul North of J.B. O’Reilly’s, a popular Irish pub in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, “could face prosecution or hefty fines” Playersnavycutafter Health Department inspectors discovered at his business a display of tobacco advertising, which is now banned there. The advertising in question? “Antique signs and memorabilia, including a number of collectable tobacco signs dating back more than 120 years,” although “most of the brands [are no longer] on the market and J.B. O’Reilly’s [does not sell] any tobacco products.” [Brisbane Times] Update: bar wins reprieve after provincial premier overrides health department directive.

France: great moments in discrimination law

Read deep enough into this very long New York Times report, and you learn that Air France has been stymied from dismissing some employees it suspects of Islamic radicalization because “individuals were often able to successfully challenge such dismissals in French labor courts”:

Guillaume Pepy, the head of SNCF, the French national railway operator, recently conceded that the country’s anti-terrorist services had alerted the company — which employs 50,000 people — to as many as 10 employees in the last year whom they suspected of having ties to Islamist groups. But rather than fire the employees and risk a costly discrimination suit, Mr. Pepy told a French radio in January that it was SNCF’s policy to ensure that the individuals were not allowed to be train drivers or signal operators or to hold other positions that could pose a security threat.

Other tensions in religious accommodation law:

…At certain bus depots, [a labor union official] said, some male employees wouldn’t take the wheel of a vehicle that had been previously driven by a woman.

“Rather than report the behavior to the authority’s human resource managers, Mr. Salmon said that supervisors simply adjusted the drivers’ schedules and routes to avoid handoffs between women and men. In one case, Mr. Salmon said, a woman who lived within walking distance of her depot asked to be transferred to a job across town rather than stay and continue to endure the harassment….

It’s precisely the employees managers are afraid of who may fare best in winning accommodation:

Paradoxically, [the director of a research institute] said, it is often the employees most open to dialogue who are the first to be pressed to adapt their religious practices, while more troubling behavior is sometimes allowed to continue unchallenged for fear of escalating the problem.

“Radical people make some managers nervous, and so they leave them alone,” Mr. Honoré said.

Justice Scalia and the Court, cont’d

  • Justice Kagan: “The fact of the matter is, you wake up in 100 years and most people are not going to know most of our names…. [T]hat is really not the case with Justice Scalia.” [David Lat, New York Daily News]
  • Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, his first landmark decision, was “turning point in the history of property rights” [Bill Fulton, Rice “Urban Edge]
  • Revive doctrine of enumerated powers? “Oh, Roger, we lost that battle a long time ago.” But then came Lopez… [Cato podcast with Roger Pilon, 3:50+]
  • Younger Scalia was quite positive about idea of an Article V constitutional convention, an idea he famously criticized later in life [Adam White, Weekly Standard; related here and here]
  • Jacob Sullum on Scalia and the Second Amendment (and more) and on the Drug War. More: Daniel Schwartz on the imprint he left on employment law even aside from Wal-Mart v. Dukes;
  • Blowup at Georgetown Law as profs Randy Barnett, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz flay colleague’s “startlingly callous and insulting” email to students on Justice’s death [Above the Law]
  • How Scalia changed originalism [Michael Ramsey in Liberty and Law symposium] In George Eliot’s phrase, his work on that issue was incalculably diffusive [Lawrence Solum]

“Time to Rein in Judicial Deference to Executive Agencies”

The Seventh Circuit case we wrote about in October, on whether a federal agency is entitled to deference in how it interprets the legal scope of its own regulations, is now before the U.S. Supreme Court on a petition for certiorari review. Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer explain why the Cato Institute has joined a brief urging the Court to take up the case of United Student Aid Funds v. Bible. [Cato at Liberty; more on so-called Auer deference]