…and the next thing you know the SWAT team has shown up with their flash grenades [Evansville, Ind. Courier and Press]
Plastic bag bans: $87,000 per seagull saved?
Media coverage of a new Jonathan Klick-Joshua Wright study has focused mostly on the evidence that reusable grocery bags are high-bacteria environments and likely vectors for foodborne illness, but Robert Anderson notices another striking conclusion: “The authors estimate that the additional deaths from the plastic bag ban value each saved animal at $87,500.” That estimate includes only actual deaths from foodborne illness, and not the cost of nonfatal illnesses. [Witnesseth]
Schools roundup
- Disabled kids and their parents among chief losers in NYC school bus strike [Richard Epstein]
- “School District to Spend $2.4 MILLION on Guards? A Mom Protests” [Free-Range Kids, N.C.] “Our Schools Are Safe Enough: A Movement to Stop Overreacting to Sandy Hook” [same] Shame that NRA would decide to push big government mandate at taxpayer expense [Brian Doherty]
- LSAC challenges new California law banning flagging applicants’ extra time on LSAT [Karen Sloan, NLJ]
- One year on job, 13 years in rubber room for NYC teacher accused of sexually harassing students [NY Post]
- Missouri lawmaker introduces bill criminalizing failure to report gun ownership to child’s school [Caroline May, Daily Caller]
- Suing for edu-bucks: “Court says Kansas must increase school funding, slams tax cuts” [Reuters, Severino/NRO]
- “Yay for Recess: Pediatricians Say It’s as Important as Math or Reading” [Bonnie Rochman, Time]
Goodbye to Transportation Secretary LaHood
My Cato post is here. I’d wish him bon voyage, but somehow it’s hard to associate him with happy travels.
Update: I’ve now expanded my thoughts into a Daily Caller op-ed.
Law school applications plunge
As recently as 2004 law school applications numbered nearly 100,000, and three years ago the figure stood around the mid-80s. Now it’s plunged to a projected 53,000-54,000, with an especially sharp recent dropoff among the most sought-after students with the highest scores. Time for rethinking the model of an ever-expanding legal academia fed by unquenchable demand for lawyers and unlimited federal student loans [TaxProf] Incidentally, those who attended or watched our Cato seminar earlier this month on “Failing Law Schools” were among the first to hear the new numbers.
“How Newegg crushed the ‘shopping cart’ patent and saved online retail”
Backed by big-firm lawyers, a non-producing company that claimed its patents underlay the online shopping cart sued dozens of retailers and extracted tens of millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts in the Eastern District of Texas and elsewhere — until an appellate ruling declared its patents invalid. Despite its absence of products, the company’s website offered “tech support.” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica]
Great moments in unionized public employee tenure
Broward County, Fla. transit bus driver Larry Moore “was disciplined 19 times” and “was held responsible for nine accidents with other South Florida drivers.” After a so-called last-chance warning in 2008 he “went on to be disciplined seven more times, for five preventable accidents and two clashes with customers, county personnel records show.”
The Sun Sentinel reported earlier this month that one driver, Charles Butler, who cost taxpayers $73,005 in a lawsuit settlement, was involved in 21 accidents while driving a county bus. Twelve were deemed preventable, and 10 involved him hitting another driver. He is still driving, despite having reached the firing threshold. …
[Transit director Tim] Garling said the county follows the union contract, which calls for progressive levels of discipline.
[Sun-Sentinel, newspaper’s earlier coverage of Butler case here and here]
January 29 roundup
- In job bias dispute: “Federal Court Says Veganism Might Qualify As A Religion” [Religion Clause]
- Perennially credulous L.A. Times drops broad hints that Toyota settlement vindicates sudden acceleration theories, others know better [LA Times, NLJ earlier]
- “Cato Named America’s Most Effective Think Tank Per Dollar Spent” [Dan Mitchell, Nick Rosenkranz]
- Disappointing: Transportation Sec. LaHood said to be “sticking around for a while” [Roads and Bridges, earlier] That was quick: only hours later, he says he’s leaving after all [WaPo]
- It became necessary to destroy the sex workers in order to save them [Melissa Gira Grant/Reason]
- Profile of lefter-than-thou NY attorney general Eric Schneiderman [NY Mag]
- As rural pub tradition declines, Irish government rejects proposal to ease DUI laws [AP]
Sensational new fraud allegations in Chevron-Ecuador case
Roger Parloff at Fortune on eye-popping new allegations in a case we’ve been following for a long time (e.g.):
In Manhattan federal district court this morning, Chevron filed the declaration of a former Ecuadorian judge, Alberto Guerra, who describes how he and a second former judge, Nicolás Zambrano, allegedly allowed the plaintiffs lawyers to ghostwrite their entire 188-page, $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron [in the Lago Agrio environmental litigation] in exchange for a promise of $500,000 from the anticipated recovery.
The bribery charge is completely new, and the ghostwriting charge is more sweeping and better substantiated than before.
Since some readers may be having a hard time keeping all the case’s scandals straight, here’s a précis. Chevron has now presented evidence of two distinct, large-scale, ghostwriting frauds which, among other problems, it maintains, taint the Ecuadorian judgment.
Complicating Chevron’s claims of vindication — and opening an avenue for the plaintiff’s camp to argue against giving any credence to the new allegations — the oil company acknowledges that it has made and intends to go on making payments of “living expenses” to the former Ecuadorian judge, now resident with his family in the United States. Read the whole thing here.
More from Kevin Williamson at National Review Online:
Curious fact: As a senator, Barack Obama did see fit to intervene in the Chevron case — on the side of the Ecuadoran government. After meeting with an old basketball buddy — the abovementioned Mr. Donziger, who stands to make billions of dollars as the plaintiffs’ attorney in the case — Barack Obama wrote a letter to the U.S. trade representative arguing that Ecuador’s actions should not be held against the regime when negotiating trade privileges. Donziger, with the help of a $10,000-a-month lobbyist, also got Andrew Cuomo to threaten to intervene in the case, even though the jurisdiction of the Empire State stops well north of Ecuador.
Yet more: Daniel Fisher, Forbes.
How Massachusetts spends its tobacco money
You know, the money that was said to be so vital to fund “tobacco control” programs. What percentage of the state of Massachusetts’s haul (more than $250 million a year from legal settlement proceeds, aside from outright taxes) do you think actually gets spent on such things? Guess, then click through to my new Cato post.