“Under the proposal, the massive class of non-Yahoo users won’t get any payment, but the class lawyers at Girard Gibbs and Kaplan Fox intend to ask for up to $4 million in fees. (The ultimate amount of fees will be up to the judge, but Yahoo has agreed not to oppose any fee request up to $4 million.) While users won’t get any payment, Yahoo will change how it handles user e-mails — but it isn’t the change that the plaintiffs attorneys were originally asking for.” [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]
January 15 roundup
- Malheur standoff: here come the self-styled “citizens’ grand jury” hobbyists [Oregonian, my two cents on this branch of folk law, earlier]
- Your egg-flipping, coffee-guzzling grandma was right all along about nutrition, federal government now seems gradually to be conceding [Washington Post]
- “Obama’s State of the Union pledge to push for bipartisan redistricting reform was a late add” [L.A. Times, Politico, American Prospect, Todd Eberly on Twitter, some earlier takes here and here]
- More Charlie Hebdo retrospectives after a year [Anthony Fisher, Reason] Another bad year for blasphemers [Sarah McLaughlin, more] The magazine’s false friends [Andrew Stuttaford; hadn’t realized that departing NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos, who so curiously compared the magazine’s contents to “hate speech unprotected by the Constitution,” has lately held “the James Madison Visiting Professorship on First Amendment Issues” at the Columbia School of Journalism]
- “The Ten Most Significant Class Action Cases of 2015” [Andrew Trask]
- More from Cato on Obama’s “mishmash” of executive orders on guns [Adam Bates, Tim Lynch, Emily Ekins]
- The “worst and most counter-productive legal complaint that’s been filed in a long, long time” [Barry Rascovar, Maryland Reporter on move by ACLU of Maryland/NAACP Legal Defense Fund to challenge as racially discriminatory the decision to cancel construction of a new Baltimore subway line]
NYC: “Examples of violations….Requiring all men to wear ties in order to dine at a restaurant.”
New York City issues its regulations on how employers, retailers, and other businesses covered by discrimination law must handle gender identity. “The NYCHRL requires [businesses] to use an individual’s preferred [pronoun] …such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir.”
Law school embraces social-justice theme
In 2014 the faculty of the Louis D. Brandeis Law School at the University of Louisville voted to commit the institution to “social justice,” and now plans are afoot to rebrand the public institution as the “nation’s first compassionate law school.” If everyone could settle on the same definitions of social justice and compassion, and maybe also agree that those values should trump others, the schools’ direction might look more neutral and scholarly, and less nakedly political. [Luke Milligan, Louisville Courier-Journal] U of L is hardly the first school to go down this path; as I note in my book Schools for Misrule, a number of law schools including some Top 30 institutions have veered off in the same direction in recent years, even before this year’s campus protests furnished considerable new momentum. But see: a second U of L lawprof dismisses the concerns as overblown, and points out that the school’s adoption of the word came in the context of a city-wide campaign in which various leading Louisville businesses and civic institutions had been prevailed on to declare themselves “compassionate.” [Caron/TaxProf]
P.S. If law schools want to jump into explicitly promoting social justice, John McGinnis has a modest proposal for how they might do that.
Schools roundup
- Libertarians warned about this: New Jersey’s broad “anti-bullying” law used to silence 15 year old student’s political tweets [Robby Soave, Reason]
- “New proposal would put armed, retired cops in New Jersey schools” [NJ.com]
- Chapters ostensibly agreed, though their leeway to refuse not clear: “University of Alabama quietly testing fraternity brothers for drugs” [Al.com]
- About time Congress noticed: Sen. James Lankford asking questions about Department of Education’s Dear Colleague letter [FIRE]
- Schools vigilant against danger of grandparents reading aloud to class without background checks [Lenore Skenazy]
- No helicopters in sight: German preschool/kindergartens send kids as young as three to camp in woods [WSJ]
- Los Angeles and New York City school officials got same anonymous threat, but only L.A. closed schools [Ann Althouse]
Hand extended: pro bono as profit center
“The law firm Goodwin Procter, which laid off nearly 40 lawyers and staff last year, is asking the taxpayers of Worcester and Lowell, Mass., to pay the firm more than $1.75 million in legal fees for ‘pro bono’ work on behalf of aggressive beggars fighting city crackdowns.” [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism]
More on aunt v. nephew
Missed this last month: Charlotte Allen dissects how the case of the aunt suing her nephew over a hug gone wrong (covered here, here, and here) played out in the press and public opinion. [Weekly Standard]
State of the Union address live-tweets
I live-tweeted President Obama’s address last night (text) and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s Republican response (text) and here are some highlights:
Per advance copy of #SOTU speech, Obama's only reference to Supreme Court tonight is passing and diplomatically worded. #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
Obama speaks of "honest disagreement" about whether economy should be "rigged." Strange way to search for common ground! #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
Deja vu: Richard Nixon declared federal War on Cancer in 1971. But it's not that simple. NPR looks back: https://t.co/2IwaegiwTH #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
"Next generation manufacturing hubs"=corporate welfare-place-based-subsidy gobbledygook #CatoSOTU
— Nick Zaiac (@NickZaiac) January 13, 2016
Obama's calm, serious talk on terrorism, American strength, and American leadership I think is the strongest part of his speech. #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
+1 "We have to end practice of drawing our congr'al districts so politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around." #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
POTUS just mentioned drawing congressional districts read @walterolson's article on the topic: https://t.co/9uaudjeIX0 #CatoSOTU
— CatoEvents (@CatoEvents) January 13, 2016
Redistricting reform proposed in 111th Congress. Pelosi killed & Obama never backed. Why? Dems thought they'd control process in 2010.
— Todd Eberly (@ToddEberly) January 13, 2016
Dear GOP: Whoever invited Kim Davis should get one less ticket next time. https://t.co/gjVwYBPtCO #CatoSOTU @RandalJohnMeyer
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
Prez's delivery tonight struck me as fairly strong, circa 8 on scale where 10 = "sure to keep even Justice Ginsburg awake" #CatoSOTU #SOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
Haley: "We'd respect differences in modern families, but we'd also insist on respect for relig liberty as a cornerstone of our democracy."
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
+1 Haley "We'd recognize… separation of powers & honor the Constitution in its entirety,,, [incl'g] the 2nd & 10th Amendments." #CatoSOTU
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) January 13, 2016
An article V convention? Wrong idea, wrong time
Some serious constitutional conservatives, such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Rob Natelson for the American Legislative Exchange Council, have been promoting the idea of getting two-thirds of the states to call for an Article V convention to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Florida senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio recently made headlines by endorsing the notion. But I don’t think it’s a good one, as I argue in this new piece for the Daily Beast (the clickbait headline is theirs, not mine). It begins:
In his quest to catch the Road Runner, the Coyote in the old Warner Brothers cartoons would always order supplies from the ACME Corporation, but they never performed as advertised. Either they didn’t work at all, or they blew up in his face.
Which brings us to the idea of a so-called Article V convention assembled for the purpose of proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution, an idea currently enjoying some vogue at both ends of the political spectrum.
Jacob Sullum at Reason offers a quick tour of some of the better and worse planks in Abbott’s “Texas Plan” (as distinct from the question of whether a convention is the best way of pursuing them). Much more: Thomas Neale, Congressional Research Service report, 2014. (cross-posted, with some additions, at Cato at Liberty).
Gun safety, gun control, and the difference if any
“If you’re not for gun control, at least you should be for gun safety. That’s a line you hear a lot these days.” My response is at Ricochet, and touches on gun locks, the Obama idea of requiring more persons who sell firearms on an occasional or incidental basis to register as gun dealers, the notion of liability insurance mandates for gun owners, and, inevitably, the subject of gun control through litigation against manufacturers and dealers, a topic on which Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been doing a little backsliding of late.
Related, Charles Cooke in the New York Times “Room for Debate” feature, on “smart gun” myths: “Eventually, all American gun control advocacy descends into science fiction.” “Ban under-25-year-olds from owning guns? Not so fast.” [Eugene Volokh] And this looks like a don’t-miss story from Brian Doherty in the new Reason: “You Know Less Than You Think About Guns” (via David Henderson, who excerpts highlights).