School and childhood roundup

  • Why campus trigger culture and offense bans aren’t just anti-intellectual and a foretaste of wider speech regulation, but fail at specific therapeutic goal of reducing psychological upset [Greg Lukianoff/Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic cover story]
  • Newtown shooting advanced existing trend toward a regular police presence in schools; consequences may include escalation of low-level discipline [ACLU of Pennsylvania report “Beyond Zero Tolerance,” pp. 28-34]
  • “Scottish Government’s named person scheme criticized by experts who will implement it” [The Courier (Dundee), earlier]
  • “Kids Dig for Worms, Sell to Fishermen. Town Says Not So Fast: That’s Illegal!” [Cornwall, Ont.; Lenore Skenazy]
  • “British Universities See Ethics Committees as ‘Easy and Convenient’ Censors” [Zachary Schrag, Institutional Review Blog]
  • “His son’s school requires student athletes to carry their own insurance, a move that many other schools also have had to make because of the rising costs from lawsuits.” [Charleston, S.C.-area Palmetto Business Daily] “NYC has paid nearly $20M from playground injuries since 2010” [Reuven Blau, NY Daily News]
  • Mom in famous Silver Spring, Md. “free range kids” episode is writing book, solicits stories of unattended kids and CPS abuse

The race to patent Crispr

Amy Maxmen, Wired on the advances in DNA editing (via Jason Kuznicki):

But the attorney filing for Zhang checked a box on the application marked “accelerate” and paid a fee, usually somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000. A series of emails followed between agents at the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Broad’s patent attorneys, who argued that their claim was distinct.

A little more than a year after those human-cell papers came out, Doudna was on her way to work when she got an email telling her that Zhang, the Broad Institute, and MIT had indeed been awarded the patent on Crispr-Cas9 as a method to edit genomes. “I was quite surprised,” she says, “because we had filed our paperwork several months before he had.”

August 12 roundup

  • “‘Game Of Thrones’ Fan Demands Trial By Combat” [Lowering the Bar]
  • One way to lose your city job in NYC: “An administrative-law judge then agreed to his firing, noting [the deceased] didn’t show up at his hearing.” [New York Post]
  • International Trade Commission asked to curb improper “imports,” i.e. transmissions, of data into the US, and yes, that could create quite a precedent [WSJ, R Street Institute, Niskanen Center, FreedomWorks letter] More: K. William Watson, Cato;
  • Sixth Circuit panel explains in cement case why some towns (e.g. St. Marys) have no apostrophes, others do [St. Marys Cement v. EPA opinion via Institute for Justice “Short Circuit“]
  • Proposed ban on export of some fine art from Germany stirs discontent [New York Times via Tyler Cowen]
  • With its SEO budget already committed to “Oliver Wendell Holmes = doofus” keywords and the like, Volokh Conspiracy must rely on organic content to boost Brazilian apartment seeker clicks [David Kopel]
  • But federal law forbids paying them, so the city won’t do that: “2 immigrants in U.S. illegally are named to Huntington Park commissions” [L.A. Times]

Crime and punishment roundup

  • “Regulatory Crimes and the Mistake of Law Defense” [Paul Larkin, Heritage]
  • Victims of sex offender registry laws, cont’d [Lenore Skenazy]
  • James Forman, Jr.: case against mass incarceration can stand on its own without flawed Jim Crow analogy [Boston Review and N.Y.U. Law Review, 2011-12]
  • “For-profit immigration jails, where the inmates — convicted of nothing — work for less than peanuts.” [@dangillmor on Los Angeles Times]
  • “The New Science of Sentencing: Should prison sentences be based on crimes that haven’t been committed yet?” [Marshall Project on statistically derived risk assessments in sentencing]
  • Group of 600 New England United Methodist churches issues resolution calling for an end to Drug War [Alex Tabarrok, who was also profiled the other day]
  • Prison guard in Florida speaks up about witnessing abuse of inmate, and pays a price [disturbing content, Miami Herald]

Last year’s (and next’s) Supreme Court term

Caleb Brown interviews me and Trevor Burrus about some of the term’s lower-profile Supreme Court cases, including Abercrombie & Fitch (religious accommodation), disparate impact housing discrimination, Yates (whether the Sarbanes-Oxley financial accounting law forbids destroying fish), Horne (raisin takings), three-strikes sentencing and (Trevor) the Texas confederate flag license plate case. We also preview next term’s important Friedrich v. California Teachers Association case on public sector union dues collection (more on which, Michael Rosman).

Related: ten cases the Court should have taken last term but didn’t [Mark Chenoweth, WLF]

Labor and employment roundup

  • Really, I never want to hear one word ever again about Gov. Andrew Cuomo being “at least good on economic issues” [Peter Suderman and Nick Gillespie, Reason (New York will mandate $15/hour for most fast-food workers, which in many upstate cities could amount to 75 percent of average wage); Heather Briccetti/New York Post (activists bused from one hearing to next to jeer opponents); Nicole Gelinas/City Journal (Cuomo picks online guy to represent business on brick-and-mortar-endangering wage board), Joanna Fantozzi/The Daily Meal (possible legal challenge); Coyote on Card and Krueger study]
  • Labor markets don’t behave the way sentimental reformers wish they behaved, part 53,791 [Seattle minimum wage hike: Mark Perry (largest half-year decline in foodservice jobs in region since Great Recession; but see, Brian Doherty on problems with that number series) and Rick Moran (“Employees are begging their bosses to cut their hours so they can keep their food stamps, housing assistance, and other welfare benefits.”); David Brooks via Coyote]
  • Employers scramble to monitor, control time worked in response to Obama overtime decree [WSJ] “No one wants to go back to filling out time sheets…. managers fear (rightly) that I will have to set arbitrary maximum numbers of work hours for them.” [Coyote] Business resistance aims for the moment at (deliberately abbreviated) public comment period [Sean Higgins, Washington Examiner] “Can Obama Really Raise Wages for Millions of People So Easily? Quick answer: no” [David Henderson; WSJ/@scottlincicome on seasonal pool-supply company]
  • Hillary Clinton and the Market Basket Stores myth [James Taranto]
  • Labor Department proposes tightening regulation of retirement financial advisers [Kenneth Bentsen, The Hill]
  • Proposed: “well-orchestrated” state ballot initiatives aimed at overturning employment at will [Rand Wilson, Workplace Fairness] My view: “Everybody wins with at-will employment” [Ethan Blevins, Pacific Legal amicus briefs in Supreme Court of Washington, followup on oral argument, and thanks to PLF for citing my work in its amicus brief in Rose v. Anderson Hay and Grain; much more on employment at will in my book The Excuse Factory, also some here]
  • The SEIU’s home caregiver membership motel: you can check in, but just try checking out [Watchdog Minnesota Bureau]