Buffalo Bills to pay nominal $3 million for sending text messages

“The Buffalo Bills have agreed to pay up to $3 million – largely in the form of debit cards redeemable only at the team store – to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the team of sending too many alerts to fans who signed up for a text-messaging service.” Plaintiff Jerry Wojcik contended “that the team violated the terms of its text service by sending him 13 messages over two weeks when it promised to send no more than five per week. … He claimed in his suit that the extra texts violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and he sought statutory damages of $500 per excessive message for negligent violations and up to $1,500 per message for willful violations.” His lawyers will pocket $562,500. [Buffalo News]

Liability roundup

  • By convention the business/defense side isn’t fond of jury trial while plaintiff’s side sings its praises, but Louisiana fight might turn that image on its head [Hayride, sequel at TortsProf (measure fails)]
  • Generous tort law, modern industrial economy, doing away with principle of limited liability: pick (at most) two of three [Megan McArdle]
  • Fallacies about Stella Liebeck McDonald’s hot coffee case go on and on, which means correctives need to keep coming too [Jim Dedman, DRI]
  • Interaction of products liability with workplace injury often provides multiple bites at compensation apple, overdue for reform [Michael Krauss]
  • Ford Motor is among most recent seeking to pull back the curtain on asbestos bankruptcy shenanigans [Daniel Fisher; related, Washington Examiner] “Page after page he sits on the straw man’s chest, punching him in the face” [David Oliver on expert affidavit in asbestos case]
  • Kansas moves to raise med-mal caps as directed by state supreme court, rebuffs business requests for collateral source rule reform [Kansas Medical Society]
  • Let’s hope so: “More stringent pleading for class actions?” [Matthew J.B. Lawrence via Andrew Trask, Class Strategist]

Additional Bundy Ranch thought

I will not say I told you so for fear of coming off as ungracious, but Coyote has no such compunction:

I could find about a thousand far more sympathetic examples of folks screwed over by government land use regulations — e.g. people whose puddle in the backyard is suddenly a wetlands that they can’t build on. But for some reason Conservatives all rushed to pile on this one example. Stupid.

Only a thousand?

Don’t ban unpaid internships

Unpaid internships are standard practice at the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in political campaigns. Should they be banned for private-sector employers? I answer “no” in a new U.S. News “Debate Club” also featuring a contribution by Dan Rothschild of R Street Institute as well as contributions by three advocates of a ban. Excerpt of mine:

With eyes wide open, students with many options have long sought out voluntary unpaid internships because they’re an arrangement that can rationally benefit both sides.

In an Auburn University working paper last month (via), four economists reported on a study that found internship experience was associated with a 14 percent increase in the rate at which prospective employers request interviews of job seekers. As a predictor of the rate of callbacks, an internship on the resume actually worked much better than a business degree itself.

Yet class-action lawyers and labor activists now attack internships as — in the trendy, elastic new term — “wage theft.” These same lawyers and activists go to court demanding millions of dollars retrospectively over arrangements both sides understood perfectly well at the time to be unpaid — and think shakedowns like these should *not* be called “theft.” …

In modern America, it’s never more than a short jump from “this set-up isn’t for everyone” to “let’s ban it.”

I go on to discuss the sclerosis of the European job market, especially when it comes to youth employment, and observe that the “campaign against internships is part of a wider campaign against low-pay work options in general — call it a campaign to get rid of any stepping stones in the stream that aren’t sturdy enough to support a whole family.” And I note the curious contrast with higher education pointed out by my colleague Andrew Coulson: “Paying to Learn Nothing = Legal. Paying Nothing to Learn = Illegal.” Earlier coverage here. And adapted with additional material into a longer Cato version here.

“This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop”

“The age-21 rule sets the U.S. apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving.” — Camille Paglia in Time on why the national minimum drinking age law “must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust.” Related: “A drinking age of 21 infantilizes adults who are otherwise able to serve in the military, marry without permission, enter into business contracts, buy tobacco, vote and run for public office. It forces college administrators to be babysitters rather than educators. And it doesn’t achieve its stated goals.” [“ABC debacle should stir debate on Virginia’s drinking age,” Rick Sincere, Richmond Times-Dispatch] Earlier here, here, here, etc. Plus: Relevant political thoughts from Glenn Reynolds last year.

Related, if distantly: study in Britain finds liberalization of bar closing hours associated with decline in traffic accidents [Jeffrey Miron, Cato]

Supreme Court on racial preferences, cont’d

A few more notes on the case already covered yesterday in tweet form:

Scalia sets the stage beautifully: “[In this] jurisprudential twilight zone… we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires?” The drama, however, is not destined to play out on that rhetorical stage, since all eight Justices, even Sotomayor and Ginsburg, claim to believe that the Equal Protection issue is only whether Michigan citizens chose a constitutionally valid method by which to end preferences.

To me, this much increased the interest of the case. The constitutionality of racial preferences as such has been thrashed out for years in so many high-profile Court decisions that anyone who cares has had ample chance to think about the issue. There has been far less attention to the unprincipled, un-administrable, substance-masquerading-as-procedure Reitman/Hunter/Seattle line of cases, by which the Court occasionally and selectively intervenes to reverse democratically arrived-at processes when they come out with the “wrong” policy answer. Scalia and Thomas are ready to overrule this bad line of cases directly; the plurality, for better or worse, are not (yet) willing to do so, and instead limit the cases’ reach in ways that neither Scalia nor Sotomayor find logically compelling.

Sotomayor’s mantra “Race matters” is likely to thrill some readers — it has already been in use for a while as a catch-phrase in academia and elsewhere — but as a device for organizing a legal opinion, it’s at best … imprecise. All the other Justices agree that race matters, but disagree on how. As Ilya Somin and David Bernstein point out at Volokh Conspiracy, Sotomayor also gerrymanders “race” in a way convenient to her purposes, using it to include Hispanic-Americans (who aren’t a race) while breathing not one word about Asian-Americans (a more genuine racial classification whose situation of being both historically disadvantaged *and* discriminated against in university admissions cries out for recognition). “Race matters,” indeed. More thoughts: Roger Pilon and Ilya Shapiro, Cato. (adapted newer version at Cato at Liberty, and thanks for SCOTUSBlog mention).

Intellectual property roundup

  • Federal judge invalidates two patents Intellectual Ventures had used to sue banks [Ars Technica]
  • Is there an actual debate over the economic effects of stronger vs. weaker IP protection, or are people talking past each other? [Simon Lester, Cato]
  • “Teller Wins Lawsuit Over Copied Magic Trick Performance” [Hollywood Reporter] Custom, informal law enforce joke “property” among comedians [McGraw/Warner, Slate]
  • I read the news today, oh boy/ And now I have to pay a license fee/ [ABA Journal on actions against song lyrics sites; earlier here and here; h/t for joke to Rogers T.]
  • “Paper” town, placed by cartographer on map to foil plagiarism, springs into real life [Now I Know]
  • Unsuccessful courtroom demand for access to list of donors to “Save Podcasting Campaign” [EFF]
  • Idea of giving people copyright in their faces (as against facial-recognition systems) “has two demerits: it is unconstitutional, and it is insane. Otherwise, it seems fine.” [Info/Law via @petewarden]