“The rational basis test is hard to fail, says the Middle District of Tennessee, but Tennessee’s policy of rescinding the driver’s licenses of people who fail to pay criminal fines and fees is up — or maybe down — to the task.” [John K. Ross, IJ “Short Circuit,” on Robinson v. Purkey; Dave Boucher, Nashville Tennesseean]
First, a medical emergency — and then CPS takes your child
Diane Redleaf led a symposium at Cato Unbound in November in which I participated (more here and here) on the formidable power of Child Protective Services. And now The Atlantic has published an article in which Redleaf explores some of the themes of her newly published book They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families at Risk. Not surprisingly, there are horror stories galore:
After detecting a second possible rib fracture, Texas CPS authorities demanded that the family abide by a restrictive safety plan. The parents, in turn, pointed out that the fractures were quite possibly the result of birth trauma or a potential genetic condition, and asked the state for an independent evaluation, but their request was denied. The family was compelled to use its own resources to gather five medical opinions from a geneticist, an endocrinologist, an obstetrician, a maternal- and fetal-medicine specialist, and a neonatologist. All took the family’s side, but the CPS-affiliated pediatrician still pressed to keep the investigation open, until the family’s lawyer intervened. The CPS investigation against the family stayed open for 71 days, with round-the-clock supervision imposed on the family for 55 days.
As well as ideas for improving the system:
The CPS system needs some sensible checks to protect the innocent. “When in doubt, call the hotline” inevitably leads to unnecessary stress for wrongly accused families. Unless there’s reason to fear imminent harm to a child, a medical review for “reasonable suspicion” should precede rather than follow the decision to place a call. States need to use neutral decision makers. Relatedly, doctors who work directly with the state need to disclose their roles so that parents have a genuine and fair choice about how to respond to allegations against them; parents shouldn’t mistake physicians tasked with evaluating the merits of a hotline call for members of their child’s medical-care team.
Full piece here.
February 6 roundup
- Local crackdowns on home-sharing can do a lot of harm [Christina Sandefur, Federalist Society teleforum] Sandefur on laws banning working from home [Regulation mag, Cato Daily Podcast]
- “Apparently the ad [about a 9-year-old daughter willing to do household chores for neighbors] generated multiple phone calls from paranoid neighbors thinking I was using my child as a slave,” and next thing the sheriff called [Lenore Skenazy; Woodinville, Wash.]
- Seventh Circuit rules against “disparate impact” age discrimination claims for job applicants, and a Forbes columnist writes as if it had decided to abolish disparate treatment claims for them as well [my Twitter thread on botched coverage of Kleber v. CareFusion Corp.]
- “The Law Merchant and Private Justice. A Conversation with Professor Barry Weingast” [Kleros]
- “Disabilities Rights Group Files Lawsuit Against San Diego, Scooter Companies” [Rachel Kaufman, Next City]
- Ideology vs. kid placements: “Some 440,000 kids are in foster care in the U.S.; if we shut down [theologically conservative] faith-based foster agencies, those children will have a much harder time finding homes.” [Naomi Schaefer Riley, City Journal, earlier here, here, etc.]
San Francisco law requiring warnings in sugary-drink ads struck down
“A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked a San Francisco law requiring health warnings on advertisements for soda and other sugary drinks in a victory for beverage and retail groups that sued to block the ordinance.” The ruling, by a unanimous 11-member en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit, found that thelaw violates First Amendment rights of commercial speech. [AP/BakersfieldNow; American Beverage Association v. City and County of San Francisco]
Consent decrees: an exchange
My piece of two weeks ago for National Review about consent decrees, police, and the Jeff Sessions memo (briefly summarized here) drew a detailed response from Radley Balko in the Washington Post, whose writings on police misconduct I often link here. I’ve now responded in a second NR piece, arguing that while there is much common ground to be found on the issues here, I will stick with seeing the memo as generally on the right track in articulating proper limits to the feds’ constitutional role (especially under the post-Civil War Amendments) in restraining misconduct by lower levels of government. “The very real and sometimes dire failings of local governments do not change the most important fact about our federal government, which is that it is one of limited powers.”
Wage and hour roundup
- Decision time coming up for administration on whether to reverse one of Obama’s worst initiatives, overtime for junior managers [Veronique de Rugy; Robin Shea]
- California observes different rule on overtime for offshore oil workers than does federal government, exposing employers to huge retroactive back pay liability [Washington Legal Foundation, Supreme Court granted certiorari last month in Newton v. Parker Drilling]
- Today in bad ideas: Philadelphia becomes latest jurisdiction to regulate shifts and scheduling in retail, hospitality [Juliana Feliciano Reyes, Philadelphia Inquirer/WHYY, Drinker Biddle/National Law Review, Max Marin/BillyPenn]
- “I’m a restaurant employee in a city with a $15 minimum wage; here’s how it’s hurt me” [Simone Barron, Washington Examiner] Virginia could wind up with a $15 minimum law before long, tough luck for rural parts of state [Hans Bader]
- “Nurses allege Corona, Calif. underpaid them, rounding down their time to the nearest quarter hour. Ninth Circuit: This can proceed as a class action. Five judges, dissenting from denial of en banc review: The only evidence in support of the nurses’ claim is a declaration from plaintiffs’ lawyers’ paralegal, which is plainly not admissible. ‘This doesn’t pass the straight-face test.'” [Short Circuit on Sali v. Corona Regional Medical Center, Ninth Circuit panel, denial of en banc rehearing]
- “The Impact of The New German Minimum Wage” [Ryan Bourne]
Asset forfeiture: Philly, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi
Investigation of asset forfeiture outrages in Philadelphia, where the D.A. “pursued nearly door-to-door confiscation of real estate” on some blocks [Ryan Briggs, Plan Philly] Texas police made more than $50 million in 2017 from seizing people’s property, but not everyone was guilty of a crime [Texas Tribune] How police departments in South Carolina make millions by seizing property [Anna Lee, Nathaniel Cary and Mike Ellis, Greenville News] “Civil Asset Forfeiture: An Overview & Conversation”, short video featuring Stefan Cassella and Darpana Sheth [Federalist Society] And this is how the Governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, defends forfeiture [@PhilBryantMS on Twitter]
Nathan Glazer, R.I.P.
My obituary for the great sociologist is up at the Washington Examiner magazine. “Because of his long association with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, at which I was a fellow, I got to spend time with him on many occasions and he formed my model of the character of a public intellectual: benevolent, wise, curious, kind, and unassuming, his mind well-stocked with knowledge of all sorts, always taking the long view…..Rather than bicker about theory with his former progressive colleagues, Glazer simply showed again and again that their prescriptions had failed to work on behalf of the intended beneficiaries.”
International free speech roundup
- “30 Years After the Rushdie Fatwa, Europe Is Moving Backward” on speech that gives religious offense [Jacob Mchangama and Sarah McLaughlin, Foreign Policy] Whether you call it blasphemy or hate speech, chilling effects on expression are the same [Helen Dale, Unherd]
- British writer faces police inquiry after “deadnaming” transgender activist online [Katie Herzog, The Stranger; Sophie Law, Daily Mail on Graham Linehan case] Social media “like” contributes to another police call [James Kirkup, The Spectator]
- How American law came to recognize hate speech as part of the zone of protected free speech: a look at the history [Flemming Rose, Cato Institute]
- Labour MP introduces bill to ban private Facebook groups [Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner]
- Far-right French politico Marine Le Pen, prosecuted over speech on Twitter, “ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation.” Say what? [Jacob Sullum]
- The U.K.’s new anti-terrorism efforts should be terrifying to anyone who cares about free speech [J.D. Tuccille, Reason]
Canada: nurse who stole opioids wins reinstatement, damages
Over a period of two years at a nursing home in Waterloo, Ontario, a nurse identified in legal papers as DS “[stole] opioids for her own use and [falsified] medical records in order to conceal the thefts.” Now “a labor arbitrator has ordered the Regional Municipality of Waterloo to give DS her job back, and to compensate her financially for her unfair dismissal, including general damages for ‘injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect.’ The care home had a duty to accommodate the nurse’s unquestioned diagnosis of severe opioid use disorder and mild to moderate sedative-hypnotic use disorder, ruled arbitrator Larry Steinberg. This disease had left her with ‘a complete inability or a diminished capacity’ to resist the urge to feed her addiction.” [National Post]