The Eleventh Circuit approved the settlement of a class action suit over Duracell batteries: “The four plaintiffs law firms that brought the case were together awarded $5.7 million, while the 7.26 million class members they represented divvied up just $345,000 between them.” Ted Frank, well known to our readers, is asking the Supreme Court to review the case, which presents, among other issues, a chance to offer guidance about the cy pres diversion of settlement money to charities and good causes. [Roger Parloff, Fortune, earlier]
Free speech roundup
- Venezuela files suit in U.S. against American website, Dolar Today, that is critical of its currency policies [George Selgin]
- Michigan: “Felony prosecution for distributing pro-jury-nullification leaflets outside courthouse” [Eugene Volokh, earlier here, here, etc.] More: Judge tosses Denver D.A.’s attempt to jail jury nullification pamphleteers [Jacob Sullum, earlier]
- Federal agencies should not get to decide for themselves whether they’re violating the First Amendment [Ilya Shapiro, Cato on cert petition in POM Wonderful v. Federal Trade Commission]
- “After all, a wall can be built around many things, but not around the First Amendment.” One election lawyer’s response to cease/desist letter from Donald Trump [Chris Cillizza/Washington Post, letter courtesy Politico]
- Court in Turkey considering a doctor’s comparison of Turkish President Erdogan with “Lord of Rings” character Gollum, and the results are preciousss [Sarah McLaughlin, Popehat]
- Update on climatologist Michael Mann’s defamation suit, still in progress [Jonathan Adler, earlier]
- Attacks on the right to speak one’s mind are multiplying. Would better civics education help? [George Leef, Forbes]
Claim: dealer should have scraped off decals before reselling his car
A Texas businessman “is suing a Ford dealership for more than $1 million in financial losses and damages to his company’s reputation after a pickup truck he once owned ended up with Islamic militants fighting in Syria’s civil war.” According to Mark Oberholtzer, he got “thousands of harassing phone calls” after an image went viral of a truck bearing the marks of his plumbing company in the possession of Syrian insurgents. [CNN]
“Suffers memory loss, vertigo and seizures as a result of the injury…”
“…but was able to complete the 280-day world cruise.” Charges fly following a $21 million October jury verdict over a cruise mishap, as Holland America says a former personal assistant to the winning plaintiff stepped forward to tell a colorful tale of evidence concealment, email deletion, and witness tampering. [Seattle Times]
December 16 roundup
- Judge Jed Rakoff reviews new book by Columbia lawprof John Coffee on future of class actions [New York Review of Books]
- About that “vaping could cause popcorn lung” scare: “All conventional [cigarette smoke] contains… levels of diacetyl… a lot higher than those produced by e-cigarettes.” [Michael Siegel]
- A peek inside Kinder Surprise eggs, global candy favorite that cannot lawfully be brought into the U.S. [Business Insider, earlier]
- Man’s suit against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as “too white” raises eyebrows [New York Post, ArtNet]
- Courageous: in Saudi Arabia, lawyer Waleed Abulkhair, who has represented blogger Raif Badawi, imprisoned for doing his job [Scott Greenfield]
- Lawyer’s advice: bosses face legal risk if they let their employees join in #ElderlyChristmasSongs Twitter levity [Jon Hyman]
- Current food labeling standards “provide a big nudge for people to eat less saturated fats and more carbohydrates,” contrary to what many doctors now advise [Ike Brannon, Cato]
Slow down Baltimore evictions?
I’ve got a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post. An excerpt:
The Dec. 11 Metro article “Baltimore eviction rate among highest in nation” reported on advocates’ efforts to change eviction procedures to allow Baltimore tenants to stay longer in rental housing even when they fail to pay their rent. One effect, of course, would be to make it even less attractive to offer and maintain rental properties in the hard-hit city.
Before going farther down such a road, it would help to review failures of existing Maryland housing policies….
And then I talk about Maryland lawmakers’ having enacted various legal changes to slow down foreclosures, and the unpleasant aftermath, a story told here. Why would a state want to go through a very similar wasteful, blight-encouraging exercise for rental property? (cross-posted from Free State Notes)
U.S. government’s social media vetting for visa applicants (see update/correction)
“Fearing a civil liberties backlash and ‘bad public relations’ for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said.” According to former acting DHS undersecretary John Cohen, political “optics” inhibited U.S. officials from the fully legal course of checking the social media posts of visa applicants. The process came under scrutiny after the granting of a fiance visa to Tashfeen Malik, a resident of high-terror-risk Pakistan who had extensively discussed jihad and martyrdom online. [ABC News; but see below updates/corrections, which correct significant errors in the early reporting]
It’s important to keep straight that our Constitution restricts what the U.S. government can do to U.S. persons, but imposes little if any constraint on what it can ask of those seeking to enter.
P.S. Alex Nowrasteh talks with several immigration lawyers who say they know of instances in which social media postings by persons under U.S. immigration scrutiny got vetted. More: James Taranto (quoting New York Times’s statement that “immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks,” with “pilot programs” to do so in place since the fall of last year).
Update: contradicting widespread reports in the press, FBI Director James Comey now describes the couple as having expressed jihadist sentiment in private but not in public messages on social media [Washington Post] And the New York Times now apologizes for early, erroneous reporting based on anonymous sources which misled much of the press and commentariat into believing Malik’s extremist sentiments were in plain sight.
Medical roundup
- FDA and other agencies launch crackdown on more than 100 dietary supplement companies [Orange County Register editorial, thanks for quoting]
- 14 years ago Sally Satel warned that political correctness was getting into medical schools in a big way. How prescient was that? [Yale Daily News via Dave Huber/The College Fix on Yale med-school dean’s capitulation to demands for “anti-oppressive” curriculum reform, video of Satel on C-SPAN “Book Notes” with Brian Lamb discussing “P.C., M.D.“]
- Unexpectedly! “Insurer cutbacks squeeze patients out of high-end care” [Houston Chronicle]
- “Deflate Drug Prices by Reforming the FDA” [Richard Morrison, CEI, thanks for quote]
- Penny wise: Obama plan would penalize doctors who recommend routine prostate cancer tests for older men [WSJ, Betsy McCaughey/New York Post]
- “Clearly, it would take an extraordinarily overbearing [British] state to move [sugar] consumption anywhere close to this target.” [Christopher Snowdon]
- Widely asserted ethical prohibition on paying organ donors comes at more than a monetary price [Alex Tabarrok](link fixed)
Climate speech: “One assumes that there is something illegal about that, but, even if there isn’t…”
Environmentalist writer Bill McKibben, often cited as a key intellectual influence behind the push to have some climate advocacy by business declared illegal, concedes to a friendly interviewer that he’s “not sure what the legality of all this is” concerning ExxonMobil’s alleged conduct: “one assumes that there is something illegal about that, but, even if there isn’t…” [Rolling Stone] William Tucker alleges, based on his account of a personal encounter some years back, that the New Yorker writer himself elects to de-emphasize as politically unhelpful (as opposed to actually false) some scientific insights favorable to nuclear generation of electricity [Real Clear Energy, no #McKibbenKnew hashtag yet]
Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman confirmed to Judy Woodruff that donations to “climate denial organizations” such as the center-right American Enterprise Institute (!) are central to his probe [PBS] I worked at AEI back in the 1980s but have no recollection of spending time on any issues related to climate change, although perhaps I had better wait for the subpoena before saying anything definitive.
Daniel Fisher at Forbes notes the likely course of the “fishing expedition”: “if you are the New York attorney general you can create public theater to bring pressure on a particular defendant.” Fisher notes that oil majors face political risks in Africa, central Asia and thanks to our feckless politicians, the United States too (duplicate link fixed now). Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller notes evidence that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), an impresario of the climate prosecution push, conferred behind the scenes with scientists who signed a letter endorsing the effort. And Richard Epstein discusses the various developments in a Hoover podcast.
Kozinski vs. Wilkinson on criminal justice reform
How can you resist a debate between two of the nation’s most distinguished federal appeals judges — Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit and J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth — moderated by Tim Lynch? [more; coverage, Jacob Gershman, WSJ]
P.S. More on Judge Kozinski’s recent ideas on criminal justice reform (sample: let defendants choose jury or bench trial, study exonerations in depth, go after bad prosecutors) from Eugene Volokh and Radley Balko.