- All aboard! “Louisiana AG hires nine private law firms, 17 attorneys for federal antitrust pharmaceutical lawsuit” [Legal NewsLine]
- National Association of Insurance Commissioners has, and exploits, legally privileged status as collector of insurance data. Time for open access [Ray Lehmann]
- Europe’s antitrust charges against Google remind us of “the poverty of the standard antitrust doctrine” [Pierre Lemieux]
- Court blasts Morrison Foerster for ‘nonsensical’ legal theories and ‘carnival fun house’ arguments [ABA Journal]
- “Trolls aren’t the primary problem with the patent system. They’re just the problem Congress is willing to fix.” [Timothy Lee, Vox] What makes you think lawyers and rent-seekers aren’t going to turn “patent reform” to their own purposes? [Mark Mills]
- “It only goes that one direction, too.” Rachel Maddow recognizes the fairness problem with one-way fee shifting, this one time [Huffington Post on pro-defendant Colorado firearms law]
- CPSC still going after Zen Magnets, which isn’t backing down [Nancy Nord, earlier]
Don’t get cozy with a laptop adapter and fall asleep
A California woman claims in her lawsuit that her “husband was using his Apple laptop when [she] fell asleep with her arm on top of the adapter for approximately 40 minutes. She woke up groggy, felt ‘itchy,’ and went to bed. The next morning she felt pain and discovered a ‘one-inch boil’ on her arm.” She’s suing Apple for not adequately warning that the adapters get hot and shouldn’t be left in contact with bare skin for extended periods. [Nick Farr, Abnormal Use]
Would-be clients “happen not to have been born human”
A lawyer’s concession in an unsuccessful PETA suit against Sea World presaged a New York judge’s recent (corrected) ruling on chimpanzee rights [Jeff Stier, San Diego Union-Tribune]
Banking and finance roundup
- Home-court advantage: SEC wins against defendants 90 percent of the time when it litigates before its own judges [Jean Eaglesham/W$J, Thaya Knight/Cato, earlier]
- Oops! “Corporate Inversions Increase U.S. Tax Revenues” [Rita Nevada Gunn and Thomas Lys/SSRN via Paul Caron/TaxProf, related, earlier]
- “How U.S. rules on conflict minerals are making life worse for desperately poor people in war-torn Congo” [Politico, earlier]
- “Lock up the banksters.” “Lock up the drug dealers.” Dara Lind spots some populist parallels [Vox]
- Should bank boards owe fiduciary duty to regulatory as well as investor interests? [Marc Hodak]
- “Nobody’s Worried About ‘Too Big to Jail’ Any More” [Matt Levine/Bloomberg View] “Hunting Whales: The Problem With Prosecuting SIFIS” [Thaya Knight/Cato]
- Luigi Zingales: market economists need to address question of when and how finance sector goes wrong, or others will do it for them [“Does Finance Benefit Society?“, presidential address to American Finance Association, Buttonwood/Economist, Arnold Kling]
Suing the Ivies over discrimination against Asian-Americans
“A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a federal discrimination complaint against Harvard University, claiming racial bias in undergraduate admissions.” A chance to find out how serious the university establishment, federal agencies, and the courts are about norms of non-discrimination [Bloomberg, Eugene Volokh on Bill Clinton 1995 comment, Razib Khan/Unz]
Doing online “reputation management”?
Don’t do it this way, advises Eric Goldman.
“N.J. Supreme Court to Decide if Leaving Kid in Car for a Few Minutes Equals Child Abuse”
On a cool and overcast day, a mother in New Jersey left her sleeping child in a running car for a few minutes to enter a store, with no injurious consequences — except that she herself was tossed onto a child abuse registry. She is now contesting the denial of a hearing, and David Pimentel summarizes what is at stake [Lenore Skenazy]:
If the N.J. Supreme Court upholds the lower court, child-left-in-car cases in New Jersey will be very straightforward. Even if the investigation shows that no criminal child endangerment occurred (so charges are dropped), absent extenuating circumstances, it will be virtually automatic that the parent will be branded as a “child abuser” for the rest of his or her life. Not only is the parent presumed guilty, the parent is not even entitled to a hearing to prove his or her innocence.
Federal judge: families can sue Philadelphia over its forfeiture practices
“A lawsuit challenging the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office’s use of state civil-forfeiture laws will proceed in federal court after a judge rejected calls from city lawyers to throw it out….Of the four plaintiffs seeking class-action status, three had their houses threatened after relatives were accused of dealing drugs on their properties. None of them have been accused of involvement in a crime.” Under a procedure called “seize and seal,” the city grabs real estate before owners have had a hearing in court. [Philadelphia Inquirer] “The fourth plaintiff’s car was seized after his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia.”
Brad Pitt options book on Chevron/Ecuador case
“Brad Pitt’s production company has edged out George Clooney’s to win the film rights to a book about the epic, fraud-marred Ecuadorian environmental suit against Chevron, according to two sources with indirect knowledge of the situation.” Back story: “Pitt is known to have been interested in the Lago Agrio pollution for several years, and has visited Ecuador with his wife, Angelina Jolie, to observe the situation and meet with [plaintiff lawyer Steven] Donziger’s team.” However, the book, Paul Barrett’s Law of the Jungle, includes much detail unfavorable to Donziger, who has lashed out against it and numerous other journalistic treatments of the affair such as Michael Goldhaber’s Crude Awakening. [Roger Parloff, Fortune] We’ve been covering the story for years, but alas have yet to hear from any stars interested in optioning rights.
Why would the IRS be outsourcing tax audits to a private law firm?
Sen. Orrin Hatch wants to know why the Internal Revenue Service has hired Quinn Emanuel to assist in auditing Microsoft, with the power to compel sworn testimony [Sean Hackbarth, Institute for Legal Reform] For a sampling of the complications that can arise when governments hire outside law firms to prosecute tax cases, see our coverage of the Mississippi/MCI case or, in another part of the forest, the IRS’s periodic experiments with using private debt collection lawyers.