Less than a mile before a police DUI checkpoint in Parma, Ohio, resident Doug Odolecki held a sign reading “Check point ahead turn now.” Police gave him a ticket and confiscated the sign: “Odolecki was issued a ticket and forced to hand over his sign. “Parma Police tell us they can’t get into the details of the pending case but a Sergeant told me that Odolecki was obstructing officers ability to do their job. They also said that the issue was with the part of the sign that said ‘turn now.'” [WOIO via AOL]
Class action demand: $10 billion for lost GM resale value
“It may sound silly, but lost resale value is what cost Toyota a whopping $1.3 billion in claims when those suits were settled in late 2012.” And if lawyers can extract $1.3 billion in a case where there was nothing wrong with the cars, imagine how much they might extract in a case where there was. [Jalopnik]
“I made a split-second decision to run into the store. …”
“…I had no idea it would consume the next years of my life.” Another mother arrested for leaving her kid in a parked car for a few minutes, from Lenore Skenazy’s files [Free-Range Kids; related, Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week]
Connecticut politicos to employers: please hold our coat for 8 years while we govern
“It is a truism that laws tend to be arranged for the benefit of the political class.” Even so, would you expect Connecticut law to provide that private employers must hold open the jobs of full-time elected officials for as much as eight years in case they decide to return? My new blog post at Cato has details.
June 19 roundup
- Heeding union and legacy air carriers, Congress nixes cheap flights to Europe [W.R. Mead/American Interest, Marc Scribner/CEI]
- Kneecapping the opposition: lawprof wants to yank trade associations’ tax exemption [CL&P]
- “Connecticut Supreme Court rules against man who got drunk and fell in bonfire” [Legal NewsLine]
- Making reform of big-city government a conservative cause [Scott Beyer]
- Judge: Pipe maker can sue qui tam law firm over press release calling products defective [Daniel Fisher, Forbes]
- British insurer group calls for action, says fraudulent accident claims up 18% in year [Insurance Journal]
- Long, detailed look at forces behind the madness that is the San Francisco housing market [Kim-Mai Cutler, TechCrunch in April]
PTO cancels Washington Redskins trademark as disparaging
Now that we’ll be canceling trademarks of sports teams with disparaging names, here’s one that got away. [Washington Post]
“Drug dealer gets €11k over Tesco sacking”
Annals of European employment law: “The Irish arm of supermarket giant Tesco has been ordered to pay a convicted drug dealer €11,500 for unfair dismissal.” The Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) found that the market should have considered sanctions less severe than dismissal given that the employee had cooperated with its process and that a manager admitted there was no evidence of public awareness of the employee’s legal troubles, which eventuated in a guilty plea and a suspended jail sentence. [Evening Herald (Ireland)]
Study: politically connected firms less likely to be hit with SEC penalties
Are you surprised? Study finds “that politically connected firms on average are less likely to be involved in SEC enforcement actions and face lower penalties if they are prosecuted by the SEC.” [Maria Correia, SSRN via Jeffrey Miron, Cato]
Environment roundup
- Coming to other towns soon: new stormwater regs ban car wash fundraisers at schools in Arlington, Va. [ArlNow]
- Krugman hides the ball on coal-fired utility regs [David Henderson]
- Coming in September: book on Chevron/Ecuador case by Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Paul M. Barrett [Business Roundtable]
- Simplified narrative of “business versus environmental regulation” obscures so much [Tim Carney, Washington Examiner]
- Environmental disclosure panel from Vermont Law School “Disclosure Debates” [video, summary by Caitlin Stanton for VLR’s Environmental Health, links to all videos, background]
- California: “Attorney General Posts 2013 Proposition 65 Settlement Numbers” [Cal Biz Lit]
- “Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” [Cato panel with Andrew Morriss, Richard Tren]
Feds to control driving navigation apps?
The urge to regulate distracted driving could reach down into your smartphone [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason; Marc Scribner, CEI]