- “The employees ran away and refused to talk to us…Even if we’re there to help them.” [NYT cheers New York nail salon raids, earlier on paper’s crusade against the salons]
- And now, the Times’s campaign to damn the Amazon: “The Liberty To Work Under Tough Bosses” [John McGinnis]
- Rule by White House decree begins to rile its employer targets: “Defense Contractors to Obama: Enough With the Executive Orders” [Defense One]
- “Lawsuit Reform Alliance Estimates $200m in Additional Costs for LaGuardia Airport Project Due to the ‘Scaffold Law'” [its press release, earlier on law]
- “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women” [Abigail Hall, Independent Institute via Alkon, related Peter Suderman on family leave mandates]
- Describing most public assistance programs to working families as subsidy for low-wage employers is “flatly wrong.” [Gary Burtless, Brookings, earlier on such claims, more from Tim Worstall (“McDonald’s Profits Are Not Subsidized By Welfare Payments To McDonald’s Employees”)]
- Wisconsin-style “Moral Monday” protests against North Carolina’s GOP administration have some familiar backing [News and Observer, more on phenomenon from John Locke Foundation]
Seattle’s “Fight for 15” — in 1907
In 1907, unions helped convince Seattle to enact a 15-cent minimum price for restaurant meals, part of a backlash against inexpensive Japanese-run eateries that were providing unwelcome competition for existing restaurants and unions representing their employees. In San Francisco the same year, a mob attacked and destroyed the 10-cent Horseshoe Restaurant on Folsom Street, causing a diplomatic incident between the United States and Japan [H.D. Miller, Eccentric Culinary History; part 1 of his story]
Eastern District of Texas bar group hires lobbyist
Don’t take away our lucrative shopping franchise! “Judges and lawyers from the Eastern District of Texas are battling back at legislation partially aimed at curtailing the inordinate number of patent cases argued in the region. The district’s bar association this week hired its first lobbyist, Gaylord Hughey, who will focus on ‘patent venue issues.'” [The Hill; more on the Eastern District]
Free speech roundup
- Supreme Court’s sleeper case of the term, Reed v. Town of Gilbert, may greatly toughen First Amendment scrutiny of many laws [Adam Liptak, New York Times]
- Authorities to press charges against Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly, arrested last year in a McDonald’s during Ferguson protests [Newsweek]
- Having said obnoxious things is grounds for exclusion from Canada. Right? [CTV] Related musings about speech that affronts us [Ken at Popehat]
- In case paralleling issues in SBA List v. Driehaus, Massachusetts high court strikes down false-campaign-speech law that enabled incumbent to inflict legal woe on critics; state’s attorney general comes off poorly in account [Ilya Shapiro and Gabriel Latner/Cato]
- Court strikes down of Idaho ag-gag law, and Prof. Volokh notes some parallels to Planned Parenthood covert filming battle;
- Update: city of Inglewood, Calif. not faring well in effort to use copyright law to keep a critic from putting video clips of its council proceedings on YouTube [Adam Steinbaugh, earlier]
- Denver digs itself deeper in charges over leafleting by jury nullification activists [Jacob Sullum, earlier]
“How Singer Won the Sewing Machine War”
The “Sewing Machine War” originated from legal combats amid one of the first “patent thickets,” while a pioneering 1856 patent pool ended it. “As licensing fees dropped from $25 per machine (almost half the total price) to $5 about a decade after the pool went into effect; dozens of new manufacturers entered the industry.” [Smithsonian, earlier; related discussion, Adam Mossoff, 2009; Robert Merges, 2015]
A culture war that allows no concessions
Hey, Denver city councilors: nixing an airport concession to punish Chick-fil-A for its politics is a blatant First Amendment violation [Jonathan Adler, Denver Post; earlier on mayors-vs.-Chick-fil-A here, here (diversity of views within ACLU), here, etc., and my writing elsewhere] In Board of Commissioners, Wabaunsee County v. Umbehr (1996), the Supreme Court found that under the First Amendment, while some balancing tests and exceptions are applicable, the government is not broadly free to withhold business from independent contractors based on disapproval of those contractors’ speech on issues of public concern. Note also the more recent round in which Boston and New York City officials vowed retaliation against Donald Trump after controversial remarks.
Ninth Circuit raps prosecutors’ use of press clip
Was the L.A. Times’s reporting manipulated in hopes of helping federal prosecutors win a case? If so, the effort sure backfired [Ken at Popehat, with commentary on the “too-cozy too-credulous relationship between law enforcement and the press”] And from the Fifth Circuit, also on prosecutorial misconduct: “The online anonymous postings, whether the product of lone wolf commenters or an informal propaganda campaign, gave the prosecution a tool for public castigation of the defendants that it could not have used against them otherwise, and in so doing deprived them of a fair trial.” [ABA Journal]
New York “Annoyance Lawyer” sues Uber
New York attorney Todd C. Bank “sued Uber Technologies Inc. over its robocall campaign attacking New York Mayor Bill de Blasio over his proposal to limit the number of drivers.” Mr. Bank bills himself as the “Annoyance Lawyer.” Isn’t that term generic by now? [Bloomberg]
The silence of the Texas bikers
Why aren’t we hearing more about the 177 arrested Waco bikers? ‘Cause there’s a big ole gag order in place [Tamara Tabo, Above the Law; earlier]
One small banker’s warning
Small banks and other regulated businesses now live at the permission of arbitrary regulators in a legal system that no longer protects individual rights. That’s the message of a letter sent to shareholders earlier this year by Frank H. Hamlin III, CEO of the small Canandaigua National Bank in upstate New York. In particular, Hamlin cites the way the office of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has pushed around two other upstate banks (not his) on ill-defined redlining charges based on doing too much of their lending in the suburbs. I write about it in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
The piece is a sidebar from a much longer piece I wrote on Schneiderman’s record in the Summer issue of City Journal, newly online. I’ll have more to say next week about other parts of that article.