- Effort to qualify California ballot initiative to curb state’s infamous ADA filing mills; Harold Kim (US Chamber) podcast on lawsuit abuse and small businesses;
- Costly canines: Ohio’s Kent State will pay $145,000 for not letting two students have emotional support dogs in housing [Insurance Journal]
- USC football coach Sarkisian and alcohol: “Lessons In Disability Accommodation and the Interactive Process” [Nancy Yaffe, California Employment Law]
- “Does ADA require nursing homes to admit obese patients?” [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
- “It’s difficult to think of a piece of legislation that failed more abysmally than the ADA. So now what do we do?” [Scott Sumner; we’ve been on the post-ADA decline in labor force participation by the disabled for a long, long time]
- After football player collapses on field with heat stroke, resulting in nine-day coma that brings him near death, team doctor refuses to clear him to play again due to re-injury risk; Fourth Circuit reverses lower federal court that had ruled for his claim of disability discrimination [Gavin Class v. Towson University, opinion]
- Second Circuit: hearing-impaired IBM employee can’t get to jury after rejecting sign-language translation and transcripts of company videos as reasonable accommodation on the ground that captioning would have provided overall nicer experience [Wait a Second! via Daniel Schwartz]
From the children’s bookshelf: “Pelle’s New Suit”
The Cato Policy Report invited holiday book recommendations from various people associated with Cato. Here is my contribution:
Pelle’s New Suit by Elsa Beskow
In the picture book Pelle’s New Suit by Elsa Beskow (1910), little Pelle needs new clothes and begins by shearing wool from the pet lamb he takes care of.
He asks his grandmother to card it and she agrees if he will weed her carrot patch. His other grandmother will spin the carded wool into yarn if he will look after her cows in the meantime. The painter says that while paint is no good for coloring yarn, if Pelle will fetch him some turpentine he happens to need from the general store, he can use the change to buy a packet of dye. So Pelle rows off to accomplish that task (yes, rows; this is Sweden, and they might all just live in an archipelago). Amid delicate drawings of village life, this is first a lesson in doing chores with a willing hand, but also a gentle parable in production, exchange, and the division of labor, which includes domestic labor (one of his tasks is to babysit his little sister). At the end, Pelle rejoices in a new suit made by the labor of others — and which he has fully earned.
No sex without constabulary notice, please, we’re British
“A man cleared of raping a woman has been ordered to give police 24 hours’ notice before he has sex. … The order – which was drawn up by magistrates in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, and extended in York – reads: ‘You must disclose the details of any female including her name, address and date of birth. You must do this at least 24 hours prior to any sexual activity taking place.'” The order also limits his access to the internet and cellphones and requires him to notify police should he change his residence.
“Sexual risk orders were introduced in England and Wales in March last year and can be applied to any individual who the police believe poses a risk of sexual harm, even if they have never been convicted of a crime. They are civil orders imposed by magistrates at the request of police.” Note, again, that according to the reports he was acquitted of the charge, not convicted. [BBC York and North Yorkshire News, Guardian]
Warning: “Tropical painkiller is the name of a cocktail…”
“…it should not be used as a pain reliever.” [Bill Childs]
@overlawyered RT @billchilds: Noted! pic.twitter.com/4FgaLOiA6c
— Bill Childs (@billchilds) December 25, 2015
A question about the Title IX campus crackdown
Some prominent scholars and many civil libertarians have been up in arms about the recent federally driven incursions on due process rights of those accused of sex-related offenses at colleges. Faculty, when their rights are adversely affected, have begun suing. Which raises a question: “Why has not one single major university president brought a legal challenge against [the Dear Colleague] letters?” [Coyote]
“CTA pays $4.3 million in wrongful-death settlement”
The Chicago Transit Authority in September “approved a $4.3 million payment to the family of a Pilsen woman who in 2009 was killed by a hit-and-run driver and then struck again by a CTA bus following the car.” The driver who struck Martha Gonzalez in a pedestrian crosswalk sped off and was never caught; the bus driver who subsequently hit Gonzalez’s body, who has subsequently retired, was not issued a traffic ticket in the incident. [Chicago Tribune, September]
Environment roundup
- On the Flint water fiasco, building for many months now, multiple levels of governments have plenty to answer for [Detroit News (“Lower-level [state DEQ] officials continued to downplay severity of Flint’s drinking water problems for almost 3 more months.”), The Hill and Detroit News (EPA), earlier and on government impunity] More: David Mastio, USA Today (even after fiasco, prevailing blood-lead levels in Flint children greatly improved from ten years ago); Rob Sisson/ConserveFewell; Matt Pearce/L.A. Times.
- Background on Oregon standoff: what would a market-based federal lands grazing program look like? [Randal O’Toole, earlier on Malheur refuge occupation here, here]
- “Trying to Build a Catskills Resort Despite Mountains of Regulation” [Cori O’Connor, WSJ]
- “Next stop for Paris climate deal: the courts” [Politico] Chart overview of climate change litigation in U.S. [Arnold & Porter via Kyle White, Abnormal Use]
- “The emerging cross-ideological consensus on zoning” [Ilya Somin] “Zoning Laws Transfer Wealth in the Wrong Direction” [Noah Smith]
- Time for Supreme Court to revisit its doctrine on exhaustion of state litigation remedies in takings cases [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- Pulitzer logrolling, politicization of Columbia J-school are old stories, but vendetta against Exxon adds a few new twists [Fraser Seitel, O’Dwyer, earlier]
Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez: make mine moot
Can a defendant in a class action moot the whole proceeding by offering the named plaintiff the full value of his claim, thus “picking him off”? No, or at least not in the case at hand in Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday by a 6-3 margin. I discuss the case in a new post at Cato. More, Alison Frankel/Reuters, Howard Wasserman/Prawfs; earlier here and here]
New Richard Posner book on law schools and the judiciary
Paul Horwitz finds Richard Posner’s new book, Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary, full (inevitably) of provocative ideas and high-quality digressions. About the recommendations, Horwitz is less convinced: the book “wants to turn law schools into a device for the large-scale industrial cloning of Richard Posner himself.”
Plus: Noteworthy interview with Harvard lawprof Duncan Kennedy, of Critical Legal Studies fame [Tor Krever, Carl Lisberger and Max Utzschneider, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left] And: “Why Are There So Few Conservative/Libertarian Law Profs, Even Though They Are More Productive Than Liberal Law Profs?” [Paul Caron/TaxProf, Jonathan Adler on James Cleith Phillips, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy/SSRN]
Banking and finance roundup
- Bernie Sanders still rants and raves about Glass-Steagall Act. Who will break the news to him? [Catherine Rampell/WaPo, P.M. Carpenter (Krugman, Pearlstein in accord with Rampell), earlier] “Hillary Clinton vows to go ‘well beyond’ Dodd-Frank” [Housing Wire via Kevin Funnell]
- “In the past, ‘financial institutions were unwilling, for relationship reasons, to litigate against each other…That has changed dramatically.'” [Daniel Fisher quoting New York attorney Brian Fraser]
- “Government Thinks You’re Too Dumb To Try Crowdfunding” [Ben Weingarten, The Federalist]
- “If every bank behaved like Abacus, the financial crisis wouldn’t have occurred.” So guess which bank got prosecuted [Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker back in October]
- Billions in free money for consumers, just by regulating credit card fees! Sorry, it’s not that simple [Todd Zywicki]
- “The war against cash”: government vs. the cash economy [Daniel Mitchell, Cato, first and second post]
- New IRS authority to secure revocation of passports should give pause to everyone concerned about American liberty [Investors Business Daily]