Labor and employment roundup

  • Ostrowsky v. Con-Way: “Alcoholic Truck Driver’s Relapse Is Grounds for Firing, Third Circuit Rules” [Legal Intelligencer]
  • “Most minimum-wage workers are members of families with an average income of $42,500” [Richard Rahn] “Increases in the minimum wage actually redistribute income among poor families by giving some higher wages and putting others out of work” [David Henderson] “Most Americans Favor Raising the Minimum Wage, Unless it Costs Something” [Emily Ekins]
  • Time Warner case: “Is the denial of paid paternity leave discriminatory?” [Jon Hyman]
  • We’d never saddle consumers with the sorts of harassment/discrimination liability we saddle businesses with; let’s consider why [Bryan Caplan]
  • “Special Exemptions: How Unions Operate Above the Law” [Kevin Mooney, CPPC UnionWatch]
  • Should free-marketeers appreciate “alt-labor” (worker centers, etc.) as less coercive than the New Deal union model? [Robert VerBruggen, Ben Sachs, more]
  • Worker hands office colleague an article titled “De-clawing cattiness at work” and nothing good ensues [Employers Lawyer]

“In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year.”

Someone must have deactivated the Dallas Morning News’s B.S. detectors [Amy Alkon] The paper’s editors uncritically cheer new proposals from Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe for legal changes including wider use of forfeiture and more draconian sentences for johns. More: “There have been two compelling-prostitution cases filed in Har­ris County this year. Not 300,000. Two.” [Mark Bennett] Yet more: the paper corrected 11/24.

Intellectual property roundup

  • Trademark infringement claims as way to silence critics: Jenzabar gets comeuppance in form of court award of more than $500,000 in attorney costs [Paul Alan Levy, earlier and more]
  • Court holds Google Books project to be fair use [Matthew Sag]
  • Questioning the ITC’s patent jurisdiction: “Why should we have a trade agency litigating patent disputes?” [K. William Watson, Cato, more, yet more, related]
  • Courts come down hard on copyright troll Prenda Law [Popehat]
  • Annals of patent trollery: New York Times et al rout Helferich [EFF, Liquid Litigation BLLawg] Monolithic Power Systems v. 02 Micros [IP for the Little Guy] Resistance by Newegg, RackSpace, Hyundai, etc. [WLF]
  • Re: copyright terms, US government shouldn’t endorse view that longer always means better [Simon Lester, Cato]
  • Legal tiff over use of hotel carpet patterns in costumes [Io9]

Nomination filibusters and the Senate “nuclear option”

Comments from my Cato Institute colleagues Roger Pilon and Ilya Shapiro, as well as CEI’s Hans Bader. A “totally risk-free strategy for Democrats, as long as they are never again in the minority.” [Lowering the Bar] Patterico on the elegant consistency of the New York Times editorial page over the years (it is consistent, once you know to look for the pattern) and an unheeded 2005 prayer (YouTube, auto-plays) from then-Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). And some further observations from Jonathan Adler.

P.S. Further thoughts from Roger Pilon regarding the immediate focal point of the struggle, the three nominations to the D.C. Circuit:

…a second point, too little noted, concerns the implications from there being numerous “judicial emergencies” in the other circuits — vacancies in seriously overworked circuits for which the president hasn’t even named anyone. Judicial emergencies have increased 90 percent since 2006, and the vacancies with nominees have declined from 60 percent to 47 percent. Yet rather than attend to filling those vacancies, Obama and Reid are focused on adding three more judges to the already seriously underworked and overstaffed DC Circuit. That speaks volumes, of course, about what their agenda is. As I wrote yesterday, the DC Circuit’s docket is mostly about challenges to administrative decisions. Judges in such cases have considerable discretion about whether or not to defer to the judgment of those agencies. If you want to rule by executive diktat, as Obama plainly does, you’ll want “your people” on that court, deferring to “your people” at EPA, HHS, OSHA, the FEC, the IRS, and so on down the line. Let the folks out in the country wait a little longer to get justice.

P.P.S. And relatedly from Mickey Kaus:

Regulation is D.C.’s economic substructure, its mode of production, as Marx might say – even more so than legislation. Those big gleaming office buildings aren’t filled with Congressional lobbyists! They’re filled with administrative lawyers. Now, with a full 11 member court stacked to favor Democrats, there will be even more rules to litigate, more counsel to hire, more mansions to house them and restaurants to feed them. Whatever happens in the rest of America, the capital’s economic future is secure.

They should erect a statue of Harry Reid outside the Mazza Gallerie.

ACLU on wrong side of wedding photographer case

I’ve got a new post at Cato asking how that could have come to be. Earlier on Elane Photography v. Willock here, here, etc.

Reacting to my Cato post, a couple of readers have responded, in effect: Isn’t the ACLU just a doctrinaire Left-liberal organization these days, rather than a bulwark of civil liberties? To which my answer is: I’d describe it as an organization with lively internal divisions, some factions of which push it in a doctrinaire Left direction, others of which want it to be more of a robust civil liberties organization. (As witness last year’s “Mayors vs. Chick-Fil-A” controversy, in which the ACLU of Illinois took a strong and clear civil libertarian stand while the ACLU of Massachusetts seemed to lean more toward a doctrinaire-Left position.) Some speak ironically of the “civil liberties caucus” that soldiers on thanklessly within the ACLU. I want to encourage that caucus and let it know it is appreciated. (& Stephen Richer/Purple Elephant, Coyote).

Update: “Feds Back Away from New Campus Speech Restrictions”

From FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), on a controversy we’ve followed closely over the course of the year:

The federal government is backing away from the nationwide “blueprint” for campus speech restrictions issued this May by the Departments of Education and Justice. The agencies’ settlement with the University of Montana sought to impose new, unconstitutional speech restrictions, due process abuses, and an overbroad definition of sexual harassment and proclaimed the agreement to be “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.”

But in a letter sent last week to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the new head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Catherine Lhamon, said that “the agreement in the Montana case represents the resolution of that particular case and not OCR or DOJ policy.”

FIRE adds that the Department’s recent actions in cases involving public colleges no longer insist on “the worst features of the Montana settlement.”

Police and prosecution roundup

  • Why license plate scanning is an up-and-coming front in the surveillance wars [Radley Balko]
  • Prosecutor whose lapse sent innocent man to prison for 25 years will go to jail — for ten days [Adler, Shackford]
  • “Nurse fights charges she helped father commit suicide” [Phil. Inq., Barbara Mancini case, via @maxkennerly]
  • California inmates released, crime rates jump: a Brown v. Plata trainwreck? [Tamara Tabo, Heather Mac Donald/City Journal]
  • Driver arrested under Ohio’s new law banning hidden compartments in cars even though he had nothing illicit in the compartment [Shackford] Tenaha, Tex. traffic stops, cont’d: “Give Us Cash or Lose Your Kids and Face Felony Charges: Don’t Cops Have Better Things to Do?” [Ted Balaker/Reason, earlier]
  • Arizona Republic series on prosecutorial misconduct [4-parter]
  • Few act as if they care about Mr. Martin-Oguike’s fate at hands of a false accuser [Scott Greenfield]

Vancouver bans doorknobs

In the name of so-called universal design — a much-promoted theory that disabled-accessibility features should be designed into all structures, public or private, from the start — Vancouver is adopting building code changes that prohibit use of doorknobs in favor of levers and other mechanisms that are more easily used by the handicapped and elderly. While the ban will apply only to new construction, the city has already deferred to the new thinking by replacing the ornate doorknobs in its Art Deco-era City Hall. Building experts see doorknob bans in private housing construction as likely to spread in the years ahead. [Vancouver Sun] Perennial Overlawyered bete noire Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) has in recent Congresses introduced something called the Inclusive Home Design Act which would mandate some accessibility features in all federally assisted newly constructed housing units.

More: “Vancouver Banned Doorknobs. Good,” writes Colin Lecher at Popular Science. Because the less diversity and private choice and historical continuity, the better.