Pennsylvania moves to adopt a “Correctional Officers’ Bill of Rights”

One would think the whole concept of the union-backed “correctional officers’ bill of rights” might have been thrown into disrepute by last year’s Maryland scandal, in which the statute was found to have entrenched problem guards even as the Baltimore jail descended into a scandalous state of gang-run corruption. But apparently not: the Pennsylvania House has unanimously (!) voted in favor of having that state adopt its own such “bill of rights,” weakening administrators’ power to investigate possible officer misconduct. Details of H.B. 976 here.

Who decides which distressing speech ought to be made illegal?

Once again, a law professor has stepped up to inform us that we need to join much of Europe in attaching legal penalties to hurtful speech. This time one patient refutation comes from Michael Moynihan [Daily Beast] The idea is about as fresh and new as sleeve garters, notes Jonathan Rauch [Volokh/WaPo] Further rebuttal from Ken at Popehat and Scott Greenfield.

Labor and employment roundup

  • Minimum wage laws are sentimental legislation with all-too-real effects [Jeffrey Dorfman] “Our Business’s Response to California $2 Minimum Wage Increase” [Coyote, with more on a union angle on minimum wage laws] Some experience from Europe [Steve Hanke, more, Cato overview of minimum wage debate]
  • Connecticut fires state labor department employee who gamed system to get benefits for friend, then reinstates after grievance [Raising Hale] Oldie but goodie: union contract in Bay City, Mich. gave teachers five strikes to show up work drunk before being fired [Mackinac Center two years back]
  • Background of Harris v. Quinn, now before SCOTUS: Blagojevich and Quinn favors for SEIU [George Leef, Forbes, earlier here, etc.]
  • If you decline to hire applicants who’ve sued previous employers, you may face liability over that [Jon Hyman]
  • More on class action seeking pay for volunteer Yelp reviewers [LNL, earlier]
  • “Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.” [Eric Hanushek et al, NBER via Cowen]
  • “L.A. Sheriff’s Department Admits Hiring 80 Problem Officers; May Not Be Able to Fire Them” [Paul Detrick, Reason]

Derek Lowe on the West Virginia chemical spill

Last month Charleston, W.V. suffered one of the worst American environmental calamities in years when coal-scrubbing chemicals burst from a tank farm and into its water supply, which had to be shut down for several days. So, you ask, given a great big injury for which it’s extremely likely that someone bears legal responsibility, how’s the litigation system helping out? Well, the operator of the tank farm having almost immediately declared bankruptcy in anticipation of massive legal claims, the net is naturally being cast wide for other defendants to sue, with some suits, for example, naming the water company as sole defendant.

According to Derek Lowe (crediting ChemJobber), one law firm’s suit drops the ball on identifying the exact chemical nature of the contaminant 4-MCHM, or (4-methylcyclohexane)methanol:

The court filing, by the law firm of Thompson and Barney, says explicitly:

30. The combination chemical 4-MCHM is artificially created by combining methylclyclohexane (sic) with methanol.

31. Two component parts of 4-MCHM are methylcyclohexane and methanol which are both known dangerous and toxic chemicals that can cause latent dread disease such as cancer.

Sure thing, guys, just like the two component parts of dogwood trees are dogs and wood.

Lowe also accuses an expert hired by the same law firm of “irresponsible fear-mongering” for encouraging alarm about a finding of just over 30 nanograms per milliliter of formaldehyde in the Charleston water, not a high level by many standards.

Privacy and surveillance roundup

  • “Live or travel within 100 miles of a US Border? America’s Internal Checkpoints” [Wes Kimbell, Reason]
  • EFF, ACLU sue Los Angeles seeking disclosure of how automatic license plate readers [ALPRs] are used to track motorists [The Newspaper]
  • Would cops run unauthorized background checks on someone appointed to a police oversight board? [Ed Krayewski/Reason, St. Louis County, Mo.]
  • “How the NSA bulk data seizure program is like gun registration” [Randy Barnett]
  • Text sent to Kiev protesters points up downside of cellphone location signaling: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” [NY Times]
  • As New York AG Schneiderman pursues AirBnB, privacy is collateral damage [Ilya Shapiro and Gabriel Latner, Daily Caller]
  • Oops! California Obamacare exchange passed along visitors’ personal info to insurance agents without permission [L.A. Times]

The FTC second-guesses Apple design

“Do you really want a regulatory agency designing your iPad?” asks dissenting commissioner Joshua Wright. The Federal Trade Commission considers it an unfair consumer practice for Apple to leave a buying window open for fifteen minutes after password entrance during which further app purchases can be made without keying in the password again; occasionally children have approached an untended tablet and engaged in purchases without asking permission. [Gordon Crovitz, WSJ; Wright dissenting statement]

“Backyard swimming pools should be banned”

Australian journalist Jo Abi is perfectly serious about the idea:

Drowning is one of the leading cause of death in children under five with majority of those deaths occurring in backyard pools. So why haven’t backyard pools been banned? If any other product or activity caused so many injuries and deaths in our most vulnerable they would be banned, there would be lawsuits, there would be outrage. Except backyard pools are an intrinsic part of Australian culture, and it’s costing us children’s lives.

One who isn’t persuaded is Lenore Skenazy, who quotes a commenter at the Australian iVillage site:

I understand one always wants to take measures to prevent deaths, but 16 deaths a year is 0.00000064% of the population. …

We really need to be careful with these kind of ideas, it might not be the banning of cars but the amount of rules that can be added in the name of safety is and will continue to spiral out of control. People seem to want a zero fatality society yet this is not only impossible, the quest for it will create a culture and country based on fear and draconian governance. Given the rules in place now, and articles like this asking for more, 100 years from now you won’t be allowed to swim at all or build, play outside, run, experience anything really.

Lenore Skenazy will be speaking at Cato tomorrow (Wednesday)(Update: postponed to March 6 due to weather). To attend, register here.

More from comments, Bill Poser:

There’s a factor missing from this discussion. The dangers of backyard pools have to be balanced against the dangers of not having them. It seems likely that backyard pools contribute to public health in two ways: (a) by increasing the cardiovascular fitness of the people who use them, who might exercise less if they did not have access to backyard pools; (b) by teaching children to swim and keeping up the swimming ability of adults. Here again, one can learn to swim elsewhere, but it is likely that the availability of backyard pools brings about swimming instruction and practice that would otherwise not occur. We can’t formulate an intelligent policy without knowing the marginal increase in deaths from heart attacks and drownings due that would be incurred by banning backyard pools.

Police and prosecution roundup

  • “When do awful thoughts, shared with complete strangers, become criminal actions?” [Robert Kolker, New York mag]
  • Why grants to local police departments are among the federal government’s most pernicious spending [Radley Balko, whose new Washington Post blog/column is thriving]
  • How bad did you think Florida prosecutor Angela Corey was? She might be worse [Balko, earlier]
  • “The unintended consequences of compensating the exonerated” [Will Baude]
  • Thousands of Americans are behind bars following shaken-baby convictions. How many are innocent? [Jerry Mitchell, Jackson Clarion-Ledger/USA Today, earlier here, here]
  • Private probation as “judicially sanctioned extortion racket” [The Economist]
  • “DOJ to Prohibit Profiling Based on Religion, National Origin, and Gender in Federal Investigations” [FedSoc Blog]

Super Bowl ads in review

A Georgia lawyer aired an ad bizarre enough that it’s made the rounds of the legal sites:

More from Lowering the Bar (“As Rolling Stone suggests, it is a little problematic that the ad depicts him desecrating a grave and smashing a grave marker, even if he does it with a flaming sledgehammer named after his dead brother and to a badass metal soundtrack.”)

Meanwhile, over at Cato at Liberty, I’ve got a commentary on the Coca-Cola ad with at least a tangential relation to language law, the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressives, and the gracefulness of being good winners regarding the success of English assimilation.