Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“You’re a domestic terrorist organization.” “No, you are!” “No, you!”

I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal [paywalled for some readers] with a piece on last week’s vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to brand the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization.” The resolution repeatedly takes the view that “advocacy,” “propaganda” and “promotion” of certain political viewpoints, or of gun ownership, constitutes terrorism or, as the case may be, “material support” for it.

First Amendment aside, there’s more than just symbolism in the board’s divisive attempt to change the meaning of words by main force. The resolution also declares a crackdown on city contractors who do business with the gun-advocacy group, and under current law that is very likely to be struck down in itself as inconsistent with the First Amendment under a 1996 Supreme Court precedent.

Some related links: the resolution; the 1996 Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr case, in which the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the First Amendment restrains localities’ discretion to shun contractors because of their politics; Jonathan Adler in 2015 on the Chick-Fil-A controversies; and reporting on the San Francisco supervisors’ resolution to use nicer, not-so-dehumanizing terminology about criminals (Jim Geraghty at National Review noticed this before me).

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“Truth won out over partisanship, as it should.”

If you didn’t follow the Leif Olson episode last week, here’s the nutshell version: the Bloomberg Law news operation ran a wildly unfair piece attacking a newly appointed Labor Department official; Olson, a conservative lawyer who is no relation to me, briefly lost his job but then was reinstated. I’ve written up my thoughts at Cato (“Man Engages In Sarcasm On Social Media. Career Survives”) and an editor at Bloomberg Law has already furnished a piquant sequel.

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Banking and finance roundup

  • Neat trick: banks can get Community Reinvestment Act credit for lending in “low-income census tracts” even when that means extending $800K mortgages to gentrifiers [Diego Zuluaga, Politico, related policy analysis and Cato podcast]
  • Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a plan to regulate private equity. It’s not good [Steven Bainbridge] When you’ve lost veteran liberal columnist Steven Pearlstein… [Washington Post]
  • Speaking of terms with ugly histories, maybe it’s time for Sens. Warren and Sanders to retire the metaphor of the financial sector as vampires or “vultures” engaged in “sucking” or “bleeding” [Ira Stoll, related]
  • Volume of securities litigation is on sharp upswing, policy remedies needed [Kevin LaCroix/D&O Diary and more, Chubb “Rising Tide” report] Rising in Australia too [Nicola Middlemiss, Insurance Business Australia]
  • Unconstitutionality of CFPB structure hasn’t gone away and neither has the need for the Supreme Court to tackle the issue [Ilya Shapiro on Cato certiorari amicus brief in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB] Appointment process for Puerto Rico financial oversight board under PROMESA law is of doubtful constitutionality [Shapiro on Cato amicus brief in Financial Oversight & Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Investment, LLC]
  • In an age of professional consultants, why does the law continue to require corporate governance to be delivered by way of individual board members? Firms specializing in board services could offer attractive alternative [Todd Henderson, Charles Elson, Stephen Bainbridge, Federalist Society Forum]

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Out of the past: New York adoptive families could face visitation demands from birthparents

Thank you to Naomi Riley for including me in her WSJ piece Thursday on a truly bad New York scheme to empower birthparents whose parental rights have been terminated to petition nonetheless for court-ordered visitation. The quotes from me:

In many cases adoptive parents do arrange with birthparents for some kind of contact after an adoption is completed. “Some adoptive parents are glad to agree to those conditions, and that’s fine for them. Where they have not, it is a very bad idea to adopt a presumption of enforcing such a long-term obligation on unwilling adopters,” notes Walter Olson, an adoptive parent and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

The legislation presents serious logistical concerns as well. What if an adoptive family wants to move across the country? Would the courts be able to prevent them? “Adoptive families are real families and deserve the full rights of other such families unless they have agreed to some other arrangement,” says Mr. Olson.

And more:

In a letter to Gov. Cuomo opposing the bill, the group New York Attorneys for Adoption and Family Formation explained that the law may also violate the due-process rights of adoptive parents. In 2000, they point out, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Washington state law.

Both houses of the New York legislature have now passed the bill, which is supported by legal services groups like the Legal Aid Society of New York City but opposed by the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York (AFFCNY), the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies (COFCCA), “which represents nonprofit foster care agencies statewide, and the New York Public Welfare Association (NYPWA), which represents county government child welfare directors.” [Michael Fitzgerald, Chronicle of Social Change] AFFCNY has more on its opposition here, and notes: “Adoptive families would have no choice but to hire and pay for legal representation for themselves.”

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Discrimination law roundup

  • Don’t try to pull a “back where she came from” tirade at a private workplace [EEOC guidance (“potentially unlawful” for employer to allow); Daniel Schwartz]
  • “B.C. groin waxing case is a mockery of human rights” [Rex Murphy, National Post] Also from Canada: “Single dad facing Human Rights Complaint for asking the age and gender of a potential babysitter” [Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, related case]
  • Canada continued: inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women “strips the word genocide of meaning” [Jonathan Kay, Quillette]
  • More evidence that “ban the box” laws restricting criminal record inquiries “induce firms to engage in statistical discrimination that negatively affects the employment prospects of minorities.” [Peter Van Doren/Cato, earlier here and here]
  • Disparate-impact watch: Fifth Circuit rules, over a dissent, that landlords do not violate the federal Fair Housing Act by declining to accept Section 8 rent vouchers [opinion and denial of rehearing en banc (7-9) in Inclusive Communities Project v. Lincoln Properties; earlier here]
  • “Agencies that enforce antidiscrimination laws tend to be oblivious or hostile to constitutionally protected liberties in general and freedom of speech in particular.” [David Bernstein]

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“Wuest’s litigation history is more than unusual”

Judge William Alsup of the federal court in San Francisco has refused a motion to certify a privacy class action in which the named plaintiff would be a man who has “filed 10 other California Invasion of Privacy Act actions, none of which ever reached the class certification stage” but instead concluded with private settlements [Mario Marroquin, Legal NewsLine; Alison Frankel, Reuters]

“Wuest’s litigation history is more than unusual,” Alsup wrote. “This order finds that it shows a pattern of using the threat of class action to extract an undeserved premium on an individual claim. This pattern is further evidenced by the fact that in several of the bases, both Wuest and his counsel received settlement amounts disproportionate to maximum recovery allowed under the statute.

“The pattern is quite clear. The premium was something rightfully due to the ‘class’ but no absent putative class member ever got anything. Wuest and his counsel got it all.”

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Handwriting forensics group: tell people to “be wary” of us? See you in court!

Institute for Justice’s “Short Circuit“: “A member of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners writes an article for an American Bar Association journal, in which he opines that judges should trust handwriting experts certified by the ABFDE and ‘be wary of other certifying bodies.’ Board of Forensic Document Examiners: Say what! We’re an ‘other certifying body,’ and that spurious article has defamed our esteemed members. Seventh Circuit: ‘[T]he appropriate avenue for expressing a contrary point of view was through a rebuttal article, not a defamation lawsuit.'” [Board of Forensic Document Examiners v. American Bar Association]

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Fifth Circuit: basing judges’ fund on fines and fees violates due process

Orleans Parish, Louisiana (= county, in this case coterminous with the City of New Orleans) funnels the revenue from many criminal fines and fees into a judicial services fund which, while it does not pay judges’ salaries, does cover many related expenses including staff salaries, conferences and office supplies. Judges themselves help determine the volume of inflow to the fund by their rulings in cases. Now a unanimous Fifth Circuit panel has ruled that given the fund’s substantial dependence on such revenue, the parish “failed to provide a neutral forum” and thus violated defendants’ constitutional right to due process [Nick Sibilla/Forbes, ABA Journal; opinion in Cain v. White]

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“Air Canada ordered to pay $21K to two francophones over language violations”

A federal court in Canada “has ordered Air Canada to pay a total of $21,000 to two francophones for repeated violations of their language rights, including seatbelts on which the instruction to “lift” the buckle was marked only in English.” Among other elements in the complaints by Michel and Lynda Thibodeau: “that a French-language boarding announcement made at the airport” in Fredericton, New Brunswick, “was not as detailed as the English-language one” and “that planes’ emergency exit door signs were either in English only, or the English words were in larger font than the French ones.” [Canadian Press]

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Supreme Court roundup

  • Nice little Supreme Court you got there, be a shame if anyone came around to mess it up, say Sens. Whitehouse, Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Hirono, and Durbin in incendiary “enemy-of-the-court” brief [Robert Barnes, Washington Post/Laredo Morning Times; David French, National Review; James Huffman, Inside Sources]
  • Cato podcast triple-header, all with Caleb Brown: Trevor Burrus and Ilya Shapiro on Gundy v. U.S. and the limits of Congressional delegation, Ilya Shapiro and Clark Neily on the aftermath of double-jeopardy case Gamble v. U.S., and Trevor Burrus on the First Amendment case Manhattan Community Access Corporation v. Halleck (cable public access channel not a state actor);
  • Criminal forfeiture, where used, should track lines of individual owner and asset responsibility, not the loose all-for-one joint-and-several-liability standards of some civil litigation [Trevor Burrus on Cato certiorari petition in Peithman v. U.S.]
  • Federalist Society National Student Symposium panel on “The Original Understanding of the Privileges and Immunities Clause” with Randy Barnett, Rebecca Zietlow, Kurt Lash, Ilan Wurman, and moderated by Judge Amul Thapar;
  • On the independence of administrative law judges, issues left over from Lucia v. U.S. are now coming back up in SEC proceedings [William Yeatman on Cato Fifth Circuit amicus brief in Cochran v. U.S.]
  • Take-land-now, pay-later procedures may get pipelines built faster but at the expense of property owners’ rights. SCOTUS should act to assure just and timely compensation [Ilya Shapiro on Cato certiorari petition in Givens v. Mountain Valley Pipeline]

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