Weirdly, or tellingly? “Weirdly, two of [the New Jersey bridge plaintiffs] work for the attorney who’s representing them” [John Culhane, Slate via Howard Wasserman, Prawfs, earlier]
Bill Gates on minimum wage hikes
The Microsoft founder “warned against raising the minimum wage Tuesday on Morning Joe, saying it results in a ‘huge tradeoff’ that can adversely affect households in poverty.” [Free Beacon] Gates has pledged most of his fortune to philanthropic efforts, much of it targeted toward problems of poverty. [Wired]
Related: David Henderson has more on Gates’s point about how the minimum wage is not well targeted to reach poor people, and on how the impact on consumers of things like fast food is itself somewhat impoverishing. William Poole at Cato begins with the oft-repeated War of Economists’ Letters over whether minimum wage hikes do a lot of damage to employment or only a little, and then turns to the ethical questions. Tyler Cowen exposes some of the holes in the relatively new argument that the existing Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) unfairly subsidizes employers and that minimum wage hikes are somehow an efficient way to recapture part of the transfer. More links: Twitter hashtag #CatoMinWage; James Dorn, Cato (“Hong Kong grew rich without a minimum wage because it undertook the reforms that fuel growth”). And on layoffs following an arbitrated doubling of wages at a New York City casino: “This just in — demand curves slope down.” [Coyote] Plus: Teen employment after minimum wage hikes: “Is there any other issue where the data conforms so strongly to basic economic intuition, and yet is widely written off as a coincidence?” [Kevin Erdmann via Tyler Cowen]
January 22 roundup
- Reminder: federal panel finally mulling reform of ultra-costly pretrial discovery, now’s the time to send comments [Kyl/WSJ, earlier]
- Michigan woman convicted of false rape claim had sent man to prison for 10 years in earlier case [ABA Journal]
- Strickland, key figure in disastrous CPSIA law and then chief at NHTSA, lands at BigLaw’s Venable [AutoNews, Detroit News]
- A religious accommodation too far? Devout student at secular university asks not to work with female classmates [York U., Ontario; CBC via @amyalkon, also related on Nova Scotia aikido class] Inviting shop clerks to set up “no booze/pork” check lines is a sensitivity too far [Andrew Stuttaford, Secular Right]
- “Top 2013 Jury Awards: Price-Fixing, Nursing Home Liability, Defamation” [Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg] Top legal ethics stories of 2013 [Legal Ethics Forum and followup on R v Farooqi & Ors]
- Liberate history-talk: “Another Battle Against Silly Tour-Guide Regulations” [Ilya Shapiro] Handing out $1,000 fines in Charleston, S.C. [Brian Doherty]
- “The line between Salon and Granma is getting awfully blurry” [@dandrezner; more about DoNotLink.com]
16,000 demand letters, 17 agreements to pay
Is this patent asserter seriously overestimating the persuasive validity of its claims to own the process of scanning a document to email? Or is there a rash of inappropriate resistance by small businesses nationwide? “MPHJ has sent letters to approximately 16,465 small businesses nationwide. … it only received 17 (yes, 17!) licenses. Yet the price of these 17 licenses was thousands of small businesses going through the stress and expense of facing a threat of patent litigation.” MPHJ is said to believe that if a business has more than twenty employees and operates in various fields such as “professional services,” it very likely infringes on its patent and owes a royalty of $1,000-$1,200 per employee. [Julie Samuels, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica, more and related last year on patent asserters in the office scanning field]
“Government should not force people into unions”
Columnist George Will cites the Cato Institute amicus brief in Harris v. Quinn, the Supreme Court case over whether states may properly herd home caregivers reimbursed by government checks into collective representation [syndicated]. Earlier here. More: Ilya Shapiro, Michael Greve.
More: Reports on the oral argument from Ilya Shapiro, Cato, and from Reuters.
Product liability roundup
- “Furniture company founder files federal chair-collapse suit against rival manufacturer” [ABA Journal]
- Wrangling over Pennsylvania tobacco settlement aftermath “a never-ending buffet for attorneys” [Allentown Morning Call] Florida $27 million smoking award upheld [Daily Business Review]
- Autonomous cars and tort liability [Kyle Colonna, Case Western RJLTI/SSRN]
- Asbestos: Death of single fiber theory [Sean Wajert, Pa.] Radiologist Herron says he did nothing wrong [W.V. Record]
Peculiar tale of Russian asbestos-mining town [Foreign Policy] More: Lester Brickman on smokers’ asbestos cases [Chamber-backed LNL] - From the defense side, Beck chooses favorite and least-favorite drug and medical-device decisions of 2013;
- One can always hope: Will 3-D printing end product liability litigation as we know it? [Nora Freeman Engstrom, SSRN] “Philadelphia Becomes First City To Ban 3D-Printed Gun Manufacturing” [Zenon Evans] Once again on the vacuous but oft-repeated “NRA is a front for gunmakers” line [Tuccille]
Claim: resort’s ban on snowboards violates constitutional rights
“A group of snowboarders is suing Alta ski resort, claiming its no-snowboards policy violates their constitutional rights. ‘Alta’s snowboarding prohibition was initiated as a result of animus … towards the type of people they believed to be “snowboarders,”‘ claims the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court.” Alta, unlike other ski resorts to ban snowboarding, is on public land. [Salt Lake Tribune, AP]
When automakers can tell which customers are speeding
The capabilities of onboard GPS systems keep getting more impressive. And the product liability implications might nudge Detroit into using the information in ways unwelcome to customers, for fear of being blamed otherwise for crashes they might have prevented. [Volokh]
“Litigiousness, I always think, is a cry by losers”
Meet the lawyer who sued the Fort Lauderdale Bridge Club in a dispute over its having ended his membership. The club proceeded to declare bankruptcy under his courtroom onslaught: “Since then there have been more than 600 docket entries in the bankruptcy case as Rosen pursued numerous motions and litigation.” [Joe Patrice/Above the Law, Daily Business Report]