“In a case of first impression, a New Jersey appeals court has held that a remote texter can be held liable to third parties for injuries caused when the distracted driver has an accident,” if the third party has reason to know that the text will be read while driving. The court upheld a lower court ruling finding that not enough proof of such knowledge had been offered to defeat a motion for summary judgment. [ABA Journal, earlier here and here; related, Stoll] A different view: Eugene Volokh.
How to beautify a fountain
All it takes are a few warnings for the benefit of visitors who might not otherwise realize watery surfaces are wet [Chevy Chase, Maryland; courtesy Carter Wood]
“NFL, players reach concussion deal”
“The NFL has reached a tentative $765 million settlement over concussion-related brain injuries among its 18,000 retired players, agreeing to compensate victims, pay for medical exams and underwrite research.” [ESPN (auto-plays video), Sports Illustrated, earlier] Plus: Chicago Tribune editorial (and thanks for quote); Daniel Fisher.
Supreme Court roundup
- Now with more detailed program descriptions: reserve your seat now for Cato’s 12th annual Constitution Day Sept. 17 in Washington, D.C.;
- White House keeps losing SCOTUS cases 9-0, and there might be a lesson in that [Ilya Somin/USA Today, more]
- “Another big term for amicus curiae briefs at the high court” [ABA Journal] “The Chief’s dissent reads over long stretches like something from the Cato Institute” [Michael Greve, Liberty Law Blog, on the administrative law case City of Arlington v. FCC, which was in fact one of the three cases where Cato’s amicus position lost last term]
- Ilya Shapiro on misconceptions about last term’s Shelby County case on voting rights [USA Today] and on the pending Schuette affirmative action case from Michigan [Cato]
- “I count myself an originalist too.” — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg [CAC] Evaluating Ginsburg’s claim that the present Court is unusually activist [Jonathan Adler]
- In Bond v. U.S., the treaty power case, Solicitor General urges high court not to overrule Missouri v. Holland [Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, more, earlier]
- Cato seeks certiorari in cy pres (class action slush fund) case involving Facebook [amicus brief filed in Marek v. Lane, Ilya Shapiro]
Merrill Lynch $160 million employee race settlement
Maybe the loose talk about the Supreme Court having done away with company-wide class actions in Wal-Mart v. Dukes was just so much loose talk. I explain at Cato at Liberty.
In which I take the Slate linkbait on private schools
Allison Benedikt is a bad person. Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like asking-actual-families-to-ignore-their-love-of-their-children-in-pursuit-of-her-ideology bad. So, pretty bad. I’m just judgmental.
Explanation here. To avoid sending more traffic to what is already shaping up as one of the year’s prime troll linkbait articles, here’s Benedikt’s already-notorious leadoff paragraph:
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
It has been proposed that this is all actually a brilliant Swiftian satire. I doubt it, though, since Benedikt is the managing editor of Slate’s DoubleX, which is to humorless leftism what rural Australia is to bauxite. As far as whether the view outlined here is on some unheard-of fringe, few contemporary writers on education have been as widely praised or assigned as Jonathan Kozol, whose views Benedikt appears to track pretty closely. See Alex Tabarrok’s very pertinent comparison to the question of whether it was moral to escape from the former East Germany.
My guess: all the mirthless laughs are unintended. More: Ken at Popehat, Jason Bedrick/Cato, Ross Douthat (“Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”).
ABA Journal on police forensic lab scandals
Mark Hansen in the ABA Journal with an overview of how crime labs have finally come under scrutiny following a “string of shoddy, suspect and fraudulent results” in Boston, New York, North Carolina, Nassau County, N.Y. and elsewhere.
In St. Paul, Minn., assistant public defender Lori Traub stumbled into her local lab’s problems and
says she was horrified by what she found: The lab, an old-fashioned “cop shop,” was run by a police sergeant with no scientific background, had no written operating procedures, didn’t clean instruments between testing, allowed technicians unlimited access to the drug vault, and didn’t have anyone checking anyone else’s work. Analysts didn’t know what a validity study was, used Wikipedia as a technical reference, and in their lab reports referred to “white junk” clogging an instrument.
It gets much worse. A West Virginia state serologist, following the DNA clearance of a man he had previously identified as a rapist, “was eventually found to have falsified test results in as many as 134 cases during a 10-year period.” Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab chemist Joyce Gilchrist
who testified as a prosecution expert in 23 death penalty cases, including those of 12 inmates who were later executed, was fired in 2001 for doing sloppy work and giving false or misleading testimony. Nicknamed “Black Magic” by detectives for her seeming ability to get lab results no other chemist could, Gilchrist was never prosecuted for her alleged misdeeds, though she reportedly was named a defendant in at least one lawsuit against the city by a convicted rapist who was later exonerated.
More: And according to a new paper, it turns out that many state police labs are actually paid per conviction, a practice that tends to incentive false-positive error.
August 29 roundup
- In-depth legal analysis of CPSC’s personal targeting of Buckyballs CEO, dangerous precedents it sets [Mark Chenoweth, WLF; paper by Sheila Millar and Kathryn Biszko of Keller and Heckman; earlier here, etc.]
- “She denies performing any ritual cleansing of gold coins, clearing of curses or consulting with Michael the Archangel” [Sun-Sentinel on fortune-teller prosecution]
- High moral ground? You must be kidding: U.S. Department of Justice, SPLC sue to keep poor kids in bad schools [Jason Bedrick and Andrew Coulson, Cato]
- At the intersection of business and religious liberty, Dahlia Lithwick sows confusion [Rick Garnett, Will Baude]
- Why infusing behavioral economics into regulation is likely to prove problematic [Christopher Koopman and Nita Ghei, Mercatus]
- Two views of ENDA [Hans Bader/CEI Open Market, Ken at Popehat]
- Disability Claimant Busted After Appearing on “The Price Is Right” [Lowering the Bar] Does Puerto Rico have an epidemic of mood disorders, or of intended SSDI eligibility? [Tad DeHaven, Cato]
“Did You Know MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech is Copyrighted?”
“The speech, which won’t be in the public domain until 2038, can only be used if a commercial entity pays the King estate a hefty fee,” writes Mark Leiser at The Drum. Nick Gillespie at Reason: “[Martin Luther] King had not copyrighted the text before delivering several versions of it or before his assassination; his family secured the copyright after his death.”
If you’ve ever thought, “Costco is like Wal-Mart except it pays high wages…”
…you need to read Megan McArdle’s column (via David Henderson). And Ira Stoll points out that some workers you see at Costco might be getting lower wages than you think.