Secretary of State John Kerry says he’ll “leave it to other people” whether ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers should be considered “an enemy of the state,” as urged by a Rolling Stone interviewer [James Taranto] The law firm of Brownstein Hyatt sees indications that the effort to prosecute ExxonMobil for wrongful advocacy on climate matters will be “the next Keystone Pipeline,” an issue seized on by environmental advocates as symbolic well beyond its practical importance. And Steve Coll, dean of Columbia’s journalism school, insists that the lefty donors behind the school’s recent support for a Los Angeles Times hit job on Exxon were “prominently disclosed” — a good case for the Internet Wayback Machine. [Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller]
“Good morning, this is your California unemployment insurance fraud hotline….”
“…How can we help you commit fraud today?” [Coyote]
Related, an entry of mine from Twitter’s #ExplainaFilmPlotBadly:
Profit-hungry insurance company resists death benefit payout despite clear policy language #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly pic.twitter.com/9N2Px6jgft
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) December 13, 2015
Crime and punishment roundup
- If tempted to idealize the U.K. justice system, be aware it was in a London court that Saudi millionaire beat rape charge by arguing that he “tripped” into sexual congress [New York mag]
- Dear Reuters: it would be great if you could report the full story behind a perp walk like Martin Shkreli’s [Ken White, Popehat]
- Better for ten innocents to be imprisoned than one businessperson go free: “The New York Times has come out against the creation of a minimum mens rea element for all federal crimes.” [Scott Greenfield, Scott Shackford] More: Orin Kerr; more Greenfield; Cato podcast on mens rea with Robert Alt.
- Obama Justice Department’s incursions on mens rea dovetail with its efforts on the responsible corporate officer doctrine [Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer, National Review]
- Escalating fines and fees, as well as a probation system under an incentive not to work, drag down poorer residents of Biloxi, Miss. [Radley Balko]
- How federal law came to define “sex trafficking” to include non-coerced adult prostitution [American U. law professor Janie Chuang quoted by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post “Fact Checker”, who also debunks wildly inflated figures from Attorney General Loretta Lynch]
- If only the late Gary Becker, a towering figure in law and economics, could have been persuaded to give up one of his less happy theories… [Alex Tabarrok]
One reason contingent-fee law firms outsource a lot
An element of case management like organizing medical records, if done in-house, “cannot be expensed to the file,” as this vendor of offshore (India-based) physician services reminds attorney clients.
“To act as though every accusation must be true harms the overall credibility of assault claims.”
The makers of the controversial advocacy film on sexual assault, “The Hunting Ground,” have suggested that by criticizing the film as unfair, Harvard law professors might be creating a hostile environment at their school, which itself might violate Title IX [Samantha Harris, FIRE; The Crimson; Paul Horwitz and Howard Wasserman, PrawfsBlawg; compare recent University of Mary Washington case, in which dean was said to violate Title IX by talking back publicly against accusations]
Jeannie Suk, one of the Harvard professors who has criticized the film, now has an important piece in the New Yorker. One reason we should pay attention to the piece is that its author might soon be silenced, depending on what her institution sees as its Title IX obligations:
This is a piece on a subject about which I may soon be prevented from publishing, depending on how events unfold….If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors’ statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined.
At least for now, though, Professor Suk can speak out:
Fair process for investigating sexual-misconduct cases, for which I, along with many of my colleagues, have fought, in effect violates the tenet that you must always believe the accuser. Fair process must be open to the possibility that either side might turn out to be correct. If the process is not at least open to both possibilities, we might as well put sexual-misconduct cases through no process at all.
Moreover, she points out, an “always believe” premise in the end undercuts the cause of vindicating true accusations:
“always believe” unwittingly renders the stakes of each individual case impossibly high, by linking the veracity of any one claim to the veracity of all claims…. The imperative to act as though every accusation must be true—when we all know some number will not be—harms the over-all credibility of sexual assault claims….equating critique with a hostile environment is neither safe nor helpful for victims.
“The most dangerous law for New York businesses”
Jim Copland in Crain’s New York: the notorious Martin Act, wielded by New York’s attorney general, “creates a risky climate for companies by putting too much power in the hands of a single politician.”
Literary corner: “Today and Tomorrow in Tom Wolfe’s New York”
Few books of our own era would make it onto my desert island list; one is Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While I’m late getting to Michael Lewis’s new profile of Wolfe, it’s reason enough to renew a Vanity Fair subscription, especially the priceless story of how Wolfe rewrote his dissertation on status jockeying among 1930s literary leftists after Yale turned it down as “tendentious” and “disparaging” to its oft-lionized subjects.
Early in my time at the Manhattan Institute, after Wolfe’s New York novel The Bonfire of the Vanities had made a gigantic popular success, I put together a roundtable on “Today and Tomorrow in Tom Wolfe’s New York” with Terry Teachout, Richard Vigilante, the late Walter Wriston, and others. MI published it as an envelope stuffer one-off with, if memory serves, a cover letter in which Wolfe himself mentioned observations the various participants had made, but in his own words. Not to say I was awe-struck at this, but for the next few days I wandered the streets of New York talking to the trees.
Bill of Rights Day — and the return of the general warrant?
December 15 marked Bill of Rights Day, and Tim Lynch rounds up ways in which most of the constituent amendments in the Bill of Rights are under pressure from government today. And in a Cato Daily Podcast, Caleb Brown interviews Georgetown Law’s Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School on the history of general warrants, important in the development of the Fourth Amendment, which many assumed we abolished but may be making a comeback.
Back to an “assault weapons” ban?
Just as polls show that American public opinion has turned against a ban on so-called assault weapons, comes a push from Democrats on Capitol Hill and gun-control forces to reintroduce such a ban. I’ve got a post at Cato at Liberty with many links on why the shift in public views is backed by solid evidence.
Bounty-hunting lawyer collects Illinois taxes nationwide
Wineries that ship to customers nationwide are among the latest targets of a Chicago attorney who has developed a lucrative freelance enforcement niche. Steven Diamond and his firm of Schad, Diamond and Shedden “have filed hundreds of suits against various companies in industries such as cookware, flowers and motorsports” and more recently beverage makers under “an Illinois law that requires businesses to collect sales taxes for the state, not only on what they sell, but on shipping-and-handling charges. A whistleblower rule allows anyone within the state to sue in the name of Illinois and collect any recovered funds.” [Wine Spectator] While a number of other states also tax shipping charges, Illinois authorities, unable to agree on how to interpret a relevant decision by their state’s high court, have given conflicting guidance on when taxes are owed. [Wines and Vines, Tom Wark, Schiff Hardin, WTAX]
P.S. Related on the practice of tax farming in the Roman Empire and pre-Revolutionary France, and latter-day parallels, here, here, and here.