Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“The Church Will Not Lose Its Tax-Exempt Status”

Sam Brunson, a Loyola (Chicago) professor specializing in tax law, searched IRS private letter rulings and sums up the results at the Mormon website By Common Consent (via Paul Caron/TaxProf, who assembles other links). For some academics’ views on whether the Bob Jones U. precedent (exemption denied to educational institution on grounds of race discrimination) will or should be pushed further into other areas, see Inside Higher Education and Caroline Corbin, SSRN (sex discrimination).

More on the Bob Jones U. case: Regulation magazine, Jan./Feb. 1982, more via Steven Hayward. More on the parsonage (housing) allowance, one bit of the tax code that does favor religious entities over otherwise comparable nonprofits: Ronald Hiner and Darlene Pulliam Smith/Journal of Accountancy, Erwin Chemerinsky/Duke (anti), Jonathan Whitehead and Becket Fund (pro). Journalists stirring the pot recently: Felix Salmon, Fusion; Mark Oppenheimer, Time.

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Environmental roundup

  • “Environmental review makes it hard to do anything — even make a new bike lane” [Matthew Yglesias, Vox]
  • Outdoors education: don’t just treat nature as a museum for kids, let them play in it [Lenore Skenazy]
  • Not more outcry? “Philadelphia To Seize 1,330 Properties For Public Redevelopment” [Scott Beyer, more]
  • Influencing proceedings against Chevron: “Documents Reveal Ecuadorian Government Organized Protests on U.S. Soil” [Lachlan Markay, Free Beacon]
  • Inholders can be caught in maze of jurisdictional obstacles when attempting to challenge federal land takings, Nevada church deprived of former water use deserves a remedy [Ilya Shapiro, Cato on cert petition in Ministerio Roca Solida v. United States]
  • Touchy legacy for HUD today: New Deal housing programs advanced segregation, sometimes on purpose [Coyote]
  • Payouts in BP Gulf spill headed for $68 billion, much going to uninjured parties, sending message to overseas investors not to invest in US [Collin Eaton, San Antonio Express-News] Bad results in BP episode will help teach Takata and other mass tort defendants not to try the “right thing” again [Joseph Nocera, N.Y. Times]

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July 15 roundup

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Feel cheated to learn something you buy was made in USA? This is for you

“Even consumers who don’t have receipts may be entitled to as much as a $12 refund. And that’s true even for beer drinkers who have known all along that Beck’s is no longer made in Germany.” [Jacob Gershman and Tripp Mickle W$J on class action suits saying beverage companies should have warned more conspicuously that some foreign-sounding beers are actually brewed in U.S.]

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Banking and finance roundup

  • “But the questions of fairness are real and seem to be bolstered by the S.E.C.’s win/loss record in its home court versus its performance in district courts.” [Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times, earlier here, etc.]
  • With Greece as with subprime crisis, same regulators who messed up credit markets will probably ask for and get more power [Arnold Kling]
  • “In fact an AIG-and-taxpayer bailout of Wall Street firms engineered by government officials and Wall Street professionals with deep and ignored conflicts of interest” [Lawrence Cunningham, National Interest via Bainbridge]
  • CSR by way of SEC? “Disclosure Rules Are the Wrong Way to Push Social Change” [Thaya Knight, American Banker/Cato]
  • “Supreme Court Blasts Maryland Taxman’s Double-Dipping” [Elizabeth BeShears, Heartland on this year’s Supreme Court decision in Comptroller v. Wynne, I’m quoted]
  • Dodd-Frank: “Are State Regulators A Source of Systemic Risk?” [Mark Calabria, Cato]
  • Feds’ latest round of mega-settlements against banks prompts usual demands to jail execs. Is it really that simple? [Scott Greenfield]

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Carrying your medications around in a substitute container

A unanimous appellate panel in New York has ruled that Sephronia Bravo, 39, of the Bronx, is allowed to sue police after being “arrested [at a bus stop] for not having her prescribed medications in their original containers”:

Bravo said she refused to give consent, but the officers searched her purse anyway and found a single bottle containing her daily regimen of prescription medications and vitamins. …She was told she was being arrested for violating Public Health Law §3345, which prohibits possessing prescription medication “outside of the original container in which it was dispensed,” except for “current use.” …No illegal drugs were found and all charges were dropped at her first court appearance.

Police “later claimed they had seen her [at the bus stop] ‘exchanging small objects with another individual.” [New York Law Journal via author Benjamin Bedell, who adds, “Is there any normal day in which you could NOT be arrested for something?”] Earlier on legal hazards of seven-day pill boxes and the like.

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Executive suites and social justice at the NYT, one draft at a time

Get me rewrite! The New York Times’s initial story on the departure of interim chief executive Ellen Pao from social media community Reddit lacked egregious bias, so the paper went back to insert some. (More: Twitchy, citing my Twitter contribution.) Amid widespread mockery of the second version’s opinionated tone, the paper then published yet a third version pulling back from some of its friskier social justice pronouncements. Pao, as readers may recall, was the plaintiff in an earlier Silicon Valley suit over alleged gender discrimination and retaliation, a suit that failed before a jury but drew much favorable coverage along the way in the NYT and elsewhere.

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