1962 country hit.
Exit Mr. Kruidbos
State’s attorney Angela Corey fires the IT director who testified critically regarding the state’s non-sharing of evidence with George Zimmerman’s counsel. [Florida Times-Union] And Jacob Sullum’s latest: “Prosecutor Says George Zimmerman Is Guilty No Matter What Happened in His Fight With Trayvon Martin” [Reason]
Does Silver tarnish if exposed to sunlight?
Last year New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s income from prominent personal injury firm Weitz & Luxenberg, where he is of counsel, was between $350,000 and $450,000, a disclosure eagerly awaited by some Gotham reporters since details about Silver’s financial arrangement with the firm have previously been kept under wraps. Silver also has a relationship with Counsel Financial, which lends money for the furtherance of lawsuits. “Critics have suggested that the two-year gap between the old and new reporting requirements gave Silver enough time to front-load his salary from Weitz & Luxenberg before the new rules went into effect, thus making it appear he has a smaller salary when he had to finally publicly disclose it. Those close to Silver have dismissed such speculation.” Silver’s Assembly salary is $122,500. [New York Daily News; Ira Stoll]
Cronyism in your school lunch
A manufacturer of Greek yogurt “paid $80,000 to Cornerstone Government Affairs to lobby Congress on its behalf, according to federal records.” And now Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York — upstate being a leading center of production for the premium product — has made sure it will be included in federally prescribed school lunches, even in places where local budgets and tastes might not have generated much demand for it. [The Hill; Ira Stoll]
P.S. And plenty of bad GOP behavior on the farm bill too, notes my colleague Mike Tanner.
Canada: prosecutor sacked over side payment to charity
Cy pres, public-sector style? “A veteran Manitoba Crown attorney has been fired after he dropped charges against a Winnipeg company involved in a workplace accident — only to have the company make a substantial financial donation to a charity he oversees.” The prosecutor has defended his actions on the grounds that he did not direct the donation and that “the company made its own decision to choose the charity he was connected to”; he is not alleged to have benefited from the charity. [Winnipeg Free Press]
Richard Epstein: “The Myth of a Pro-Business SCOTUS”
Left-leaning lawprofs like Erwin Chemerinsky and Arthur Miller regularly flog the idea that decisions they disagree with — such as Twombly and Iqbal on pleading, AT&T v. Concepcion and AmEx v. Italian Colors on arbitration, and Vance v. Ball State and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire on workplace liability — show the Supreme Court to be biased in favor of business defendants. Richard Epstein rebuts.
Nanny state roundup
- “Sneaky public-health messaging appears to be on the upswing across the country” [Baylen Linnekin, NY Post; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Scotland: “Parents warned they could face court for lighting up at home in front of kids” [The Sun] And Sweden: “Law professor calls for ban on parents drinking” (in presence of kids) [The Local via @FreeRangeKids]
- Speaking of tobacco: “Former German Chancellor Stays One Step Ahead of European Nannies, Hoards Cigarettes” [Matthew Feeney on Helmut Schmidt]
- Speaking of alcohol: ObamaCare slush fund bankrolling anti-booze advocacy in Pennsylvania [Mark Hemingway, earlier]
- To fix the nation’s weight problem, socially discourage processed foods. Right? Wrong [David Freedman, Atlantic]
- Mark Steyn on federal regulation requiring emergency bunny plan for magicians [NRO, more, earlier]
- Run for your life! It’s a falling toilet seat! [Free-Range Kids]
John Stossel “Trouble with Lawyers”
Coming up on TV tonight, including the winner announcement for the year’s Wacky Warning Label contest with Bob Dorigo Jones.
New Cato video: where next for same-sex marriage?
I talk with Caleb Brown about the legal implications of the Windsor and Perry decisions in this new Cato video, which also features an appearance by Ilya Shapiro.
P.S. A bit more detail in this Cato blog post (& SCOTUSblog).
Delaware: your escheating heart
All 50 states have escheat laws awarding to state governments ownership of unclaimed property in business hands, which can range from bank, insurance, and stock holdings whose proper owners cannot be found to retail gift cards never cashed in. The revenue looms peculiarly large for the state of Delaware, because it is the state of incorporation for so many businesses. In recent years friction has been growing between the state and its corporate citizens as the state government has taken an increasingly aggressive stance in auditing corporations for unreported escheatable property. [WSJ] So far, perhaps, so routine (except for the parties to the dispute), but some accounts omit one of the most salient angles, summed up by one critic [Douglas Lindholm, IBD via Volokh] as follows:
Last year alone, Delaware seized $319.5 million from liquidated property while returning only $18.9 million of unclaimed property to its rightful owners.
Delaware does this through an unfair, onerous and expensive audit system that “looks back” to 1981, and contrives unclaimed property if the company doesn’t have records for all those years. This process often costs companies millions of dollars, mires them in years of audits, and forces them to deal with third-party auditors who are motivated by contingent fees to invent unclaimed property where none exists.
Kelmar, which conducts most of the audits for the Delaware Department of Finance and works on a contingent fee, was paid more than $30 million in the second half of 2012 alone.
Again and again — whether in forfeiture laws entitling law enforcers to a share of the booty seized, or percentage awards for informants under whistleblower laws, or traffic camera systems in which the operators of the cameras get a share of ticket revenue, contingency fees for participants in law enforcement prove deeply problematic. In my chapter on contingency fees in The Litigation Explosion, I summed things up this way:
Contingency fees tend to be disfavored in professions to whom the interests of others are helplessly entrusted, where misconduct is hard to monitor…. Giving traffic cops contingency fees by hinging their bonuses on whether they make a ticket quota arouses widespread anger because it so obviously tempts the officer running under quota to be unfair to the motorist. The same is true of giving tax collectors contingency fees by hinging their bonuses on how many deductions they disallow or how many assets they seize. (“Tax farming,” the old system where private parties were deputized to collect taxes and keep some of the haul for themselves, was abolished long ago in well-run countries, not because it was the least bit inefficient — it was a favorite way for Roman emperors to extract revenue from conquered provinces — but because it encouraged brutality and trampling of due process in tax collection.)
Delaware seems to have gotten its image in trouble through a variant on tax farming. Let’s hope a lesson is being learned.