- Alarming: “2,500 Georgia Doctors Lack Malpractice Insurance: Report” [Insurance Journal]
- Improper FDA contact with trial lawyers behind closed doors? [DDLaw, Ed Silverman, WSJ CorpInt]
- AFGE fights efforts to refer patients at troubled VA hospitals to civilian specialists [Betsy McCaughey, Investors] Civil service rules entrench bad VA managers [Rep. Jeff Miller, Time mag]
- Improved understanding of brain damage in newborns could have litigation implications [New York Times “Well”]
- Budget measure widens Medicaid program rights to recoup medical outlays by grabbing part of plaintiff tort recoveries [King & Spalding]
- “Ronald Reagan and AIDS: Correcting the Record” [Carl Cannon]
- Rating the FDA’s various drug review divisions [Manhattan Institute, The Hill, more]
“You could be liable for $150,000 in penalties…”
“…settle instead for $20 per song.” Rightscorp, a new for-profit copyright cop, “is now preparing technology that could flood the Internet with ‘hundreds of millions of notices’ to alleged copyright infringers.” [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]
Stephen Carter on the Laycock affair
Yale Law’s Stephen Carter lacks patience for the start-a-conversation-by-FOIAing-someone’s-emails approach to academic controversy:
Laycock’s approach to the constitutional issue [underlying Hobby Lobby and the Arizona version of RFRA] may be right or wrong, but it’s well within the mainstream conversation of legal scholarship. The late Ronald Dworkin, often tagged as the greatest defender of liberal theory in the legal academy, argued last year in his final book that Catholic adoption agencies with religious objections to adoption by same-sex couples should have a constitutional right to disobey laws requiring them to violate their convictions.
But even when a professor holds opinions off at the far margin, to target him or her for intimidation is an affront to the freedom that makes the academy worth cherishing.
“Jindal signs bill to scuttle levee board oil suit”
Fines, fees, probation, and the “new debtor’s prison”
A twelve-minute Cato podcast in which I talk to Caleb Brown about how government can roll minor fines over routine offenses into crushing financial burdens and years of entanglement in the criminal justice system. A particular problem: systems that assign fines and payments to the account of actors in the justice system and for-profit private contractors which can operate under a perverse incentive to trip up petty wrongdoers and keep them in the system. The National Public Radio special “Guilty and Charged,” based on a yearlong investigation, is here. Many of my examples are taken from it, including the persons drawn into the system after fishing out of season and making an illegal left turn, and the woman saddled with a $10,000 debt on emerging from prison. Radley Balko discusses. I’ve written earlier on the problems with private probation, on a Shelby County, Alabama judge’s 2012 finding that the town of Harpersville was engaged in a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” and more broadly on law enforcement for profit and its forfeiture branch.
Related: Tyler Cowen on a new book about persons living at the margins of the law, Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Earlier: link to writings by Barbara Ehrenreich and David Henderson. Sequel: woman dies in Pennsylvania jail after failing to pay truancy fine.
Washington, D.C.’s resident vultures
There’s a lot of amusement about the pair of vultures (real ones) who’ve taken up residence on Washington, D.C.’s K Street. In a new Cato post, I explain what attracts them.
Free speech roundup
- “Tenured Wisconsin Prof Sues Former Student Over Online Comments on Her Teaching” [Caron/TaxProf]
- Recent Paul Alan Levy profile: “The web bully’s worst enemy” [Washingtonian] HHS signals it won’t pursue case against blogger [Levy, earlier] Arizona Yelp case angle [Scott Greenfield]
- Get your ideas out of town: threats against hotel “have escalated to include death threats, physical violence against our staff and other guests” [Deadline Detroit; “men’s rights movement” conference]
- UK police investigate Baptist church after “burn in Hell” sign reported as “hate incident” [Secular Right]
- Please don’t give him ideas: “Should it be against the law to criticize Harry Reid?” [Trevor Burrus, Boston Herald]
- “MAP: The places where blasphemy could get you punished” [Washington Post]
- Only three states – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kansas — have laws inviting vengeful secret John Doe probes [Ilya Shapiro, earlier]
Of associational freedom, nary a crumb left
A discrimination-law panel in the state of Colorado has confirmed a ruling that Jack Phillips, a baker of wedding cakes, cannot turn away a gay couple’s request based on religious scruples, and further ruled, quoting the Denver Post, that he is “to submit quarterly reports for two years that show how he has worked to change discriminatory practices by altering company policies and training employees. Phillips also must disclose the names of any clients who are turned away.” [Scott Shackford; CBS Denver]
Posner tosses “scandalous” settlement: lawyers “sold out” clients
“A federal appeals court has rejected an ‘inequitable — even scandalous’ class-action settlement, removed the lead lawyer and reinstated ‘defrocked’ lead plaintiffs who had objected to the deal.” The ruling, involving a class action against the Pella Corp., window manufacturers, is another triumph for Ted Frank, former contributor to this blog and now a prominent objector through his Center for Class Action Fairness. [ABA Journal, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin (“attorneys would receive $11 million in fees while their clients would get, at most, $8.5 million — and likely much less”)]
US customs seizes 7 violin bows from Budapest orchestra
The feds’ insane war on antiques and musical instruments continues. “Orchestra spokesman Adèl Tossenberger said in an e-mail that the seized bows did not contain any ivory and the orchestra received a certificate from a Hungarian expert verifying this.” It is unclear why they had to pay a $525 fine anyway. A few days earlier, according to a German publication, “the Munich Philharmonic nearly cancelled three performances at Carnegie Hall in April after that orchestra’s string players could not produce CITES certificates for their bows.” [WQXR, The Violin Channel] Earlier on the old-ivory ban here, here, and here; on musical instruments here, here, and here.