From the comments: arrestees stay out?

Commenter Gitarcarver on yesterday’s item about how some in the Charlotte Police Department have talked about designating “public safety zones” where persons who have previously been arrested would be forbidden to go:

The City wants to make these zones based on arrests (not convictions.)

At the same time, an employer cannot ask whether a person has been arrested. Of course, there is now the push for “ban the box” which means an employer cannot ask about a conviction.

The City wants to say it can ban people and arrest people from public property, but those private companies can’t even ask about those convictions (much less arrests) during the initial hiring process.

Yeah.

THAT makes sense.

Filed under: criminal records and hiring, North Carolina, police

Banking and finance roundup

Robert Litan in Fortune on why Elizabeth Warren went after him;
“Economists have no idea how to measure the value created by the financial sector.” [Arnold Kling]
W$J at end of August had an investigative report on the (opaque, high-discretion, unaccountable) system of installing “monitors” in banks and other financial institutions to settle civil or criminal charges;
Update: in a sidebar to my City Journal piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this summer, I covered his charges of “redlining” against small upstate banks that did not operate in inner cities; now Schneiderman has extracted $825,000 from a Buffalo bank [NY AG press release]
No kangaroo courts at the SEC, please [Bloomberg View editorial on in-house adjudicators, earlier here, etc.]
How the FATCA law, deplored in this space for years, makes life hard for U.S. expatriates/spouses [Colleen Graffy, WSJ]
“Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans.” [New York Fed “Liberty Street Economics” via Tabarrok] Despite reports of FDIC back-off, Operation Choke Point controversy not over [Ballard Spahr via Kevin Funnell]

Filed under: banks, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Schneiderman, FATCA, Operation Choke Point, settlement monitors

“Arbitration is everywhere and not all bad”

Yale’s Stephen Carter on some of the problems with that New York Times hatchet job attacking consumer arbitration [Bloomberg View, earlier]

Filed under: arbitration, New York Times

Election results special

In an outbreak of economic sanity, voters in Portland, Maine on Tuesday rejected a $15 minimum wage, while San Francisco voters turned down a measure to crush AirBnB (complete with lawsuit-generating component). Ohio voters soundly defeated a proposal for a legalized, but monopolized, marijuana trade that many libertarian commentators considered worse than no bill at all. And after a race notable for its high volume of interest-group contributions, Pennsylvania voters chose to fill three seats on the state’s supreme court with a slate of three Democratic candidates backed by trial lawyers.

Filed under: Maine, minimum wage, Pennsylvania

Police and prosecution roundup

Mark your calendar: December 1 Cato hosts a policing conference in Washington, D.C.;
“Note: DOJ thinks flying from Chicago to Los Angeles is suspicious.” Well, no wonder they did a forfeiture then! [@bradheath]
Mississippi voters on Tuesday returned longtime Attorney General Jim Hood to office by 56-44 margin [Radley Balko; Jackson Clarion-Ledger; earlier Balko on Hood’s spotted record as prosecutor]
“No! Mine is more unconstitutional!” Police and council in Charlotte, N.C. mull “whether to create ‘public safety zones,’ city areas where people with past arrests would be prohibited from entering.”‘ [Charlotte Observer]
Harvard lawprof Jeannie Suk on the St. Paul’s sexual assault case and the rapidly changing definition of rape [Jeannie Suk, New Yorker]
Prison “pay to stay” charges can far exceed any reasonable ability to pay, and few outside the world of ex-offenders “even know it’s happening” [Scott Greenfield]
“Was it a turf war gone mad? Or a botched police response?” [Nathaniel Penn, GQ, on the Waco biker gang shoot-out, earlier here, here, here]

Filed under: forfeiture, Jim Hood, North Carolina, police, prisoners, sexual assault

Mother Jones fends off wealthy libel plaintiff

The magazine Mother Jones has defeated a defamation claim from wealthy Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot, who challenged its coverage of him and of his business. In a fairer legal system, the left-leaning publication would get attorneys fees — and so would other prevailing defendants. [Coyote]

Filed under: libel slander and defamation, loser pays

“Why don’t we talk to the guy and explain to him that we don’t infringe?”

Joe Mullin describes “how one software CEO tried to convince a patent troll to change his ways.” The tone of sweetness and light didn’t last long, however: “The conversation kept coming back to ‘if you pay us this much, we’ll go away,'” [Pegasystems CEO and founder Alan] Trefler said. “I concluded that was two hours of my life I’m not going to get back.” [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]

Filed under: patent trolls

November 4 roundup

“How to write an overlawyered email, in 4 easy steps!” [Inspired Law Blog]
Fifth Circuit upholds conviction of Texas lawyer Marc Rosenthal over pattern of fraud including but not limited to suborning of false witness testimony;
Emoticons/emojis begin arriving in court as evidence, a federal judge in Michigan having already been “asked to rule on the meaning of ‘:-P.'” [Amanda Hess, Slate]
Disabled access regulations as hobble-thy-competitor method: “AT&T says T-Mobile and Sprint Wi-Fi calling violates disability rules” [ArsTechnica]
From back in 2012, but missed: a law professor’s book assails fine print in contracts, and Scott Greenfield responds;
So strange how many expert witnesses say they have no idea how much they make [Brendan Kenny, Lawyerist]
Get those troops out of my house: “A symposium on the oft-neglected Third Amendment” [Ilya Somin]

Filed under: contracts of adhesion, disabled rights, expert witnesses, fraud, telecommunications

“Watching the Watchmen: Best Practices for Police Body Cameras”

“Body cameras undoubtedly gather valuable evidence of police misconduct, and although research on the effects of body cameras is comparatively limited there are good reasons to believe that they can improve police behavior. However, without the right policies in place the use of police body cameras could result in citizens’ privacy being needlessly violated.” Storage and release policies for video footage need to be carefully considered ahead of time as well. [Matthew Feeney, Cato]

Filed under: photography, police, privacy

City Journal at 25 — and alternate-side-of-the-street parking

Twenty-five years ago the Manhattan Institute, with which I was affiliated for many years, launched its extremely successful periodical City Journal. (Longtime editor Myron Magnet, now editor-at-large, has an account here of some of its triumphs.)

The very first issue had a piece from me on alternate side of the street parking. Contributors to that first issue, under founding editor Richard Vigilante, included William Tucker, Rick Brookhiser, Terry Teachout, Carolyn Lochhead, Mark Cunningham, Peter Salins, Rupert Murdoch (!), and others. My work appeared in City Journal most recently this summer with a profile of the work of Eric Schneiderman as New York attorney general (“Inspector Gotcha”) and you can read all of my contributions to the magazine here, on topics ranging from the case against slavery reparations to the struggle between Westchester County and HUD.

Congratulations to this excellent magazine as it enters its second quarter century under editor Brian Anderson.

Filed under: Manhattan Institute, NYC, roads and streets, WO writings