“US Patent Office Grants ‘Photography Against A White Background’ Patent To Amazon” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt] Critics suspect there is prior art.
George Will on the Wisconsin John Doe probe
The syndicated columnist praises Judge Rudolph Randa’s
remarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives’ political speech.
Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny — fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cellphones and other devices.
And two Republican Wisconsin lawmakers are calling for a thorough review into the activities of the state Government Accountability Board, which “oversees Wisconsin campaign and election laws,” and whose contracted investigator, Dean Nickel, is reported to have played a role in setting in motion the process which resulted in the investigation of dozens of conservative organizations. [M.D. Kittle, Wisconsin Reporter/Watchdog.org] More: Milwaukee Federalist Society chapter roundup of coverage.
“They played the clock game. They let time run out.”
Infuriating: Rogue Philly cops who robbed bodega owners won’t face charges. [Philadelphia Daily News, earlier here, here, and here]
Banking and finance roundup
- Furor grows over Obama administration’s Operation Chokepoint program chilling bank access for legal but disfavored groups [Iain Murray, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, FDIC list (not just payday lenders but also lawful purveyors of pills, guns, ammunition, and much more), Hans Bader] Parallel, though not happening under same program: JP Morgan abruptly closes accounts of former Colombia finance minister who is a renowned international economist, apparently because he made it onto a list of diplomats and other “politically exposed persons” statistically associated with legal risks and high compliance costs [Business Insider] Update via Nolan followup: Dana Liebelson at Mother Jones quotes anonymous bank officials as claiming that some account closures are wrongly being attributed to the program, but even in defending it concedes that should banks opt for continuing to service clients in disfavored lines of business they will shoulder distinctive (maybe decisive) compliance costs from “manag[ing] these relationships and risks,” engaging in due diligence, etc. Also, lawmakers like Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) back the program; besides, this isn’t “the first time that feds have asked banks to keep an eye on their customers” since the Know Your Customer program goes back some years. So that’s comforting!
- “Court: Standard & Poor’s is entitled to discovery supporting its ‘selective prosecution’ claim” [Volokh, earlier here and here]
- “Plaintiff? Is That Really Necessary In A Class Action?” [Daniel Fisher on ZymoGenetics case]
- Backed by hedge fund, lawyers exploit anti-terror law to squeeze global banks [Norman Lamont, New York Post]
- “CEO facial masculinity predicts firm’s likelihood of being subject to SEC enforcement action” [Jia, Van Lent, and Zeng, SSRN via @brucecarton]
- “Reflections on High Frequency Trading” [Robert Levy, Cato]
- Banks finally lay to rest long-running litigation under Missouri second-mortgage law (MSMLA), though only after one Kansas City law firm ran up more than $600 million in settlements [Litigation Daily]
Qui tam suit against Taiwan-owned pipe maker
Daniel Fisher at Forbes gives the manufacturer’s side of the story behind a massive whistleblower suit seeking billions from J.M. Eagle over its supply of plastic pipe to public water and utility systems. Qui tam lawyers Phillips & Cohen give their side of the story here. Here’s Fisher on the law firm’s success:
The firm was founded by John Phillips, who as a congressional staffer helped draft a 1986 law that made it easier to pursue whistleblower cases. He subsequently earned enough to become a major Democratic Party donor and now serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy.
Update: Phillips & Cohen writes to say that the above quotation “contains an error: John Phillips was never a congressional staffer.”
Raising the cost of advocacy
Washington, D.C. intern hit with NLRB subpoena over blogging work for policy group critical of unions [Tucker Nelson, National Review]
Make way for fast-food self-order kiosks
They’re being helped along by tech advances (also — shhhh! — by minimum wage hikes) [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism; Bloomberg BusinessWeek]
New Mexico blinkers itself to foreseeability
Deborah La Fetra at Pacific Legal on a case that arose against a shopping mall after a runaway car smashed through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall into a medical clinic:
[On May 8,] the New Mexico Supreme Court decided in Rodriguez v. Del Sol Shopping Center that when a court decides whether a property owner has a duty to protect people from harm on the premises, the court must never consider whether the harm was foreseeable. PLF has long argued in premises liability cases that foreseeability cannot be dispositive, because the court must also consider the public policy considerations of imposing a duty to protect. The court’s holding that foreseeability must never be even a factor, however, sets it apart from every other court in the nation, to the detriment of New Mexican property owners and businesses….
This approach means that, as a practical matter, New Mexico courts can never dismiss a case on the grounds that the defendant owed no duty to the plaintiff. …This is a shocking departure from standard tort doctrine that squarely places upon courts the responsibility to determine the nature and extent of tort duties. All property owners and businesses in the state should be on notice that any accident, no matter how bizarre or unlikely, that occurs on their premises will almost certainly go to a jury – or settle.
Whole post here.
“Of course they handcuffed her…”
“… You can’t be too careful with a nine year old.” [Radley Balko; Portland, Ore.]
Heather Mac Donald on Schuette and the political-process doctrine
My former Manhattan Institute colleague tackles the recent racial-preferences case (earlier here and here) with the incisiveness and clarity for which she is well known [City Journal]
Schuette has been ridiculed by preference opponents for posing the question of whether the equal protection of the laws — i.e., race neutrality — violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. But even BAMN did not have the temerity to make so illogical a claim. Rather than arguing that a ban on racial preferences was unconstitutional per se, BAMN was forced to take up an arcane line of Supreme Court precedent that turned its complaint against Proposal 2 essentially into a quasi-voting-rights claim. It was the locus of decision-making, not the content of Proposal 2, that was unconstitutional, BAMN alleged. The proponents of Proposal 2 had denied minorities the ability to participate meaningfully in the political process, the group said, by resolving the question of racial preferences through a state ballot initiative, rather than at the university level.
This odd line of attack derived from the Supreme Court’s little-known “political process” doctrine, stemming in part from a 1982 case, Washington v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1. The Seattle City Council had passed a law requiring school busing to integrate local schools. In response, Washington state voters passed an initiative banning busing as a response to anything other than deliberate school segregation. Hearing a challenge to that initiative, the Supreme Court ruled that by moving the question of busing from a local to a state level, busing opponents had erected barriers to minorities’ right to political participation and had made it harder for them to defend their interests in the political arena, therefore denying them the equal protection of the laws.
The political-process doctrine is a jurisprudential disaster, made up out of thin air and shot through with unsupportable empirical assumptions — such as that higher levels of governmental organization inherently disadvantage minorities. The civil rights movement, after all, embraced the idea that the federal government was a better protector of minority rights than states or localities. Anti-preference voter initiatives failed at different stages in Missouri and Colorado, belying the claim that a voter referendum is stacked against minorities. Moreover, it’s preposterous to assert as a legal matter that a legitimate method of lawmaking suddenly becomes constitutionally infirm if a court deems its subject matter to be “racial.” The political-process doctrine is simply an ad hoc, desperate means of overturning on process grounds laws that a court couldn’t otherwise invalidate on their merits. And its application to the Michigan case produced several unintended consequences for preference supporters.
She also has some interesting speculation as to why the Court plurality might have chosen to keep the political process doctrine “on life support” rather than overrule it forthrightly. Read the whole thing here.