Labor and employment roundup

  • Seventh Circuit upholds Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s public sector labor law reform [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]
  • In theory, California workers fired for cause aren’t entitled to unemployment compensation. In practice… [Coyote]
  • Comstockery meets occupational licensure: how New York’s Cabaret Law tripped up Billie Holiday [Bryan Caplan]
  • New Jersey lawmakers move to cut nonunion workers out of Hurricane Sandy recovery jobs [Jersey Journal]
  • Cheer up, plaintiff’s bar, you’re doing very well these days out of FLSA wage-and-hour actions [Max Kennerly]
  • Back to “spiking”: “CalPERS planning to gut a key cost-control provision of new pension law” [Daniel Borenstein, Contra Costa Times] When government negotiates with public sector unions over pay, the process should be transparent to taxpayers and the public [Nick Dranias, Goldwater Institute]
  • Sacre bleu! Labor law reform reaches France [NYT]

Torts roundup

  • “City to pay $22.5 million to bipolar woman released in high-crime area” [Chicago Sun-Times, Greenfield]
  • On Medicaid settlement clawback evasion, Obama acts in line with wishes of both plaintiff’s and defense sides, though against interests of federal Treasury [Ted Frank] Michael Greve on Delia v. EMA, the Medicaid recoupment case before SCOTUS [Law and Liberty]
  • From Sasha Volokh, a Glee-ful Torts exam [Volokh]
  • Congrats to Abnormal Use, repeat winner in Torts category of ABA Journal Blawg 100;
  • UK: personal injury firms say they’ll need to lay off workers if government carries through on reform of civil suits [Law Gazette]
  • “How the First Amendment affects tort law” [Beck, Drug and Device Law]
  • Bummer: after involuntary pot brownie incident, lawsuit names club where incident took place [NJLRA]

“Gun control’s Potemkin village”

“The agenda includes mostly measures that will have little or no effect on the problems they are supposed to address. They are Potemkin remedies—presentable facades with empty space behind them. … The assault weapons ban was irrelevant to fighting crime before, which is no reason it can’t be irrelevant again.” [Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune/syndicated] The Washington Post interviews Bob Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute and a key mover of the Heller v. D.C. individual-rights litigation, on what types of gun controls he sees as consistent with the Second Amendment as explicated in Heller. And don’t assume the gun debate breaks down along lines of urban vs. rural, liberal vs. conservative, or individualist vs. communitarian; it often doesn’t [David Kopel, NYT “Room for Debate”]

More from Cato: Tim Lynch on what happened to gun crime in D.C. after Heller, and on the civil rights history of “Deacons for Defense”; Trevor Burrus on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s move to toughen the state’s already widely evaded gun laws; video with Tim Lynch and Caleb Brown on the Obama gun agenda. And from Damon Root, commenting on an Akhil Amar article, some surprising (and at times Cato-mediated) connections between gun rights and gay rights [Reason]

“A Risk of Relapse Is a Disability, Court Rules”

“A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that insurance companies can be required to pay long-term disability benefits to a recovering drug addict if the person would face a significant risk of relapse by returning to work.” The First Circuit parted company with the Fourth, which has ruled the opposite way. [Jacob Gershman, WSJ Law Blog, subscription; Colby v. Union Security Insurance, PDF]

January 20 roundup

  • I’m in today’s NYT Book Review reviewing “Foundation,” Peter Ackroyd’s new book on English history up to the Tudors [NYT]
  • Stanford Law School launches religious liberty clinic [Karen Sloan, NLJ] AALS panel on “The Freedom of the Church” [Rick Garnett, Prawfs]
  • Party in breach, nasssty thief, we hates it forever: lawyer parses Hobbit’s Bilbo-dwarves contract [James Daily, Wired]
  • To pay for roads, vehicle-mile fees > gas tax, but either > general sales tax, argues Randal O’Toole [Cato at Liberty]
  • Steven Teles on the high cost of opaque, complex and indirect government action [New America via Reihan Salam]
  • I’ve given a blurb to Mark White’s forthcoming nudging-back book on behavioral economics, “The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism” [Amazon]
  • “Internet-Use Disorder: The Newest Disability?” [Jon Hyman]

Lance Armstrong as litigant

The disgraced cyclist, like quite a few celebrities (and non-celebrities), had filed defamation actions against persons over statements he had good reason to know were true. That’s not just a violation of his adversaries’ rights, but an inherently sanctionable use of the courts [Michael McCann/Sports Illustrated via Turkewitz; Emily Bazelon/Slate (“Armstrong ‘sued so many people that by his own admission he can’t remember their names'”)]