Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Schuette v. Coalition, in tweets

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court, over two dissents, ruled that the voters of Michigan were within their rights under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to enact an amendment to the state constitution barring racial preference in public university admissions. (Earlier here, here, etc.) Justice Kennedy wrote a plurality opinion for three Justices, while Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Breyer, and Chief Justice Roberts wrote separate concurring opinions. Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Kagan was recused. Both sides maintained that the core controversy was not over whether Michigan was obliged to keep racial preferences as such, but rather over whether the state’s way of banning them (through voter constitutional amendment) had fallen afoul of the Court’s holding in earlier cases that the Equal Protection Clause requires that the political process itself not be arranged in ways unfavorable to minority interests.

I sent out tweets and retweets summarizing highlights of the Roberts, Scalia, Sotomayor, and plurality opinions and reprint them here, earliest first (starting with the Roberts and Scalia opinions).

More in a second post; and Hans Bader has an extensive analysis, including implications for costly preferences in public contracting.

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Radley Balko on structuring/”smurfing” laws

I’m a little late in getting to this, but last month Radley Balko wrote the definitive blog post on the appalling state of federal bank structuring law, which makes it a felony to arrange bank transactions in quantities of less than $10,000 so as to avoid reporting requirements that kick in at that threshold. He hits virtually every point we’ve made in this space over the past couple of years, including the trend toward “freestanding” structuring prosecutions not arising from any underlying criminal activity, the close connection to forfeiture law, the enlistment of banks as a covert surveillance/informant network not disclosed as such to customers, Congress’s removal of willfulness as a condition of the offense, the unusual concentration of cases coming out of the state of Maryland, the white-knight role played of late by the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice, and of course the jarringly atypical leniency extended to the most famous structurer of all, New York’s Eliot Spitzer.

The immediate news event that prompted the coverage, summarized by Eugene Volokh: a Seventh Circuit decision, in U.S. v. Abair, reversing and remanding for retrial the conviction of an Indiana woman convicted for withdrawing her own money from her bank in violation of the statute so as to finance her purchase of a house; the government took the house from her in forfeiture.

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Schools roundup

  • Excellent Mark Oppenheimer column cites new Cornell study: students deprived of whole milk and chocolate milk as choices “drank less milk, threw more milk away, and bought fewer school lunches over all” [New York Times]
  • “The process of tying curricular standards to federal money actually helps create the ‘ideological circus’ that [David] Brooks decries.” [Rick Hills, Prawfsblawg on Common Core]
  • School choice lawsuits and legislation news updates from Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and elsewhere [Jason Bedrick, Cato]
  • More applications of New Jersey’s pioneering “anti-bullying” law. And will it stand up in court? [Hans Bader, earlier here, etc.]
  • “When one New Zealand school tossed its playground rules and let students risk injury, the results were surprising” [Sarah Boesfeld, National Post (Canada)] Plenty of discussion of new Hanna Rosin piece “The Overprotected Kid” [Atlantic via Tabarrok; a contrasting view from Max Kennerly]
  • News you can use about applicability of Institutional Review Board regs to research on oneself [Michelle Meyer, Bill of Health] Another new blog about IRBs [Suffocated Science via Instapundit]
  • Community college suspends professor over Google Plus share of Game of Thrones quote on daughter’s T-shirt [Bergen Record]

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Allergic to vetoes?

President Obama has signed a bill he deems unconstitutional — it purports to (very slightly) restrict presidential authority to receive certain foreign ambassadors on U.S. territory — while issuing a signing statement calling the measure “advisory” [Josh Blackman] If Congress tries to get away with something unconstitutional, isn’t it more consistent with the President’s oath to defend the Constitution for him to veto it rather than sign-and-ignore?

One might sympathize (if not necessarily agree) with a President who gave up and signed a 400-page omnibus funding bill containing an unconstitutional provision on page 237 about the Cedar Rapids post office. But a bill whose whole point is unconstitutional is supposed to be the easy case, no?

More from Michael Ramsey at Originalism Blog, Mike Rappaport at the same, and Will Baude at Volokh Conspiracy.

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Peoria mayor sends cops after Twitter parodist

“Not long after learning about the parody Twitter account @Peoriamayor, the city’s real mayor, Jim Ardis, told police he wanted to find out who was publishing sometimes vulgar messages there, according to a search warrant filed Thursday. … Two judges signed off on warrants to get information from Twitter and Comcast. Another judge approved a Tuesday afternoon raid.” [Peoria Journal-Star via Scott Shackford/Reason; Justin Glawe, Vice]

P.S. Related from Starkville, Mississippi last year.

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“Denial of Disabled Lawyer’s Request For ‘Shadow’ Assistant Wasn’t Bias”

How far can an employee go in ADA demands before finally going too far? [Charles Toutant, New Jersey Law Journal]

The lawyer, a deputy attorney general known as E.H. in court papers, made 30 requests for special treatment in the course of his first year on the job—ranging from reserved indoor parking, adjusted timing on elevator doors, a grab handle in the rest room and transportation to court appearances—all of which were granted.

He sued because his 31st request—for a personal assistant who would “function as his shadow”—was refused.

On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that the Attorney General’s Office did not violate laws against disability discrimination. The court said deference was due the findings of the Civil Service Commission that an assistant was not warranted because it would not help E.H. address his weak job performance.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was new, there was hopeful talk among some disability advocates of what some wary employers nicknamed “two-for-one” hiring — demands that a second employee be put on payroll to assist the first. While courts have generally declined to go along with this idea, it is sobering to think the issue might be close enough that the worker’s very poor job evaluations might have mattered one way or the other.

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Push to censor Google search inquiries

It’s being led by our perennial-favorite state-AG mentionee (D-Miss.)

Meanwhile: Houston judge reported to have issued what law professor Josh Blackman calls “blatantly unconstitutional” gag order requiring Google not only to remove all records of certain allegations against an individual, but also to refrain from discussing the gag order itself [Houston Chronicle]

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Discrimination law roundup

  • Mayor de Blasio settles firefighter bias suit on terms sympathetic to plaintiffs [City Journal: Dennis Saffran and Seth Barron]
  • One way to dodge some Culture War fights: roll meaning of “public accommodation” back to travel, lodgings, places of public amusement, etc. [Andrew Kloster, Heritage] As original/creative expression goes, florists and cake-bakers sometimes outdo NYT’s Greenhouse [Ann Althouse] From Dixie Chicks to Hobby Lobby, few escape hypocrisy when commerce collides with convictions [Barton Hinkle]
  • Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigating Florida’s popular Bright Futures college scholarship program [Orlando Sentinel]
  • Do EEOC mediators overstate risk of legal action to extract big settlements from employers? [Bloomberg BNA, Merrily Archer on survey] New Colorado expansion of employment liability bad news for large and small employers alike [Archer]
  • “Religious exemptions — a guide for the confused” [Eugene Volokh]
  • Washington Post columnist repeats myth that Lilly Ledbetter “did not know she was being paid less than male counterparts” until after statute of limitations had run; Hans Bader corrects [letter to editor]
  • If helping out local people was one reason your town decided to back public housing, you might have been played for suckers [AP on DoJ suit against Long Island town over local preference]

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From “The Rule of Nobody”

We mentioned Philip K. Howard’s new book “The Rule of Nobody” the other day. Here’s another excerpt (which also appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s “Notable and Quotable”:

The 2009 economic stimulus package promoted by President Obama included $5 billion to weatherize some 607,000 homes—with the goals of both spurring the economy and increasing energy efficiency. But the project was required to comply with a statute called the Davis-Bacon Act (signed into law by President Hoover in 1931), which provides that construction projects with federal funding must pay workers the “prevailing wage”—basically a union perk that costs taxpayers about 20 percent more than actual labor rates. This requirement comes with a mass of red tape; bureaucrats in the Labor Department must set wages, as a matter of law, for each category of construction worker in each of three thou- sand counties in America. There was no schedule for “weatherproofers.” So the Labor Department began a slow trudge of determining how much weatherproofers should be paid in Merced County, California; Monmouth County, New Jersey; and several thousand other counties. The stimulus plan had projected that California would weatherproof twenty-five hundred homes per month. At the end of 2009, the actual total was twelve.

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Mark Steyn on Kinder Eggs: “Choc and Awe”

Mark Steyn revisits the subject of Kinder Surprise eggs, the chocolate-wrapped toys popular in much of the rest of the world but forbidden under a distinctive U.S. law which bans the “embedding of non-nutritive items” in confectionery. According to the Department of Homeland Security, border agents confiscated more than 25,000 of the prohibited treats in more than 2,000 seizures during one recent year. Earlier here (Steyn: “The real choking hazard is the vise-like grip of government”), here, etc.

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