Law schools roundup

  • “It’s time for the ABA to deregulate law schools” [Richard Painter, Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Curb schadenfreude please, it’s just class action entrepreneurship: “Law Schools Sued for Lying About Lawyering” [NY Magazine]
  • “AALS President: Law Professors Should Be ‘Cheerleaders’ for ‘Our Way of Life.'” [Instapundit]
  • “Widener Law settles with Prof. Lawrence Connell” [William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, earlier here, here, here, etc.] Sensitivity camp at U. of Idaho Law [ATL] Peter Wood on Teresa Wagner case [Chronicle]
  • Perspective of a practitioner turned professor [David Hricik] Claim: proliferation of “soft” curriculum really isn’t something to worry about [Brad Wendel] “Justice Scalia makes up with University of Chicago” [Chicago Sun-Times]
  • “The coming crash in legal education” [Richard Bourne, Creighton Law Review/University of Baltimore/SSRN via Caron] Could law schools recover from adversity the way dental schools did? [Eric Chiappinelli, Faculty Lounge] “Why Occam’s Razor cuts in favor of making law an undergraduate degree” [Russ Pearce, LEF]
  • US News changes rating methodology, and law schools’ part-time day programs suddenly dry up [Caron]
  • Attention New Yorkers: if you missed my talk Tuesday at Fordham on Schools for Misrule, I’ll be back in town next Wednesday (Feb. 22) for a 1 p.m. talk at Brooklyn Law School before that school’s Federalist Society chapter; also that evening at Yale with distinguished Prof. John Fabian Witt commenting.

Child support for adult college students, cont’d

Two years ago a public outcry helped defeat a Virginia proposal that would have required that divorced noncustodial parents continue to support children in college through age 23. (Our post at the time.) Now, as Hans Bader of CEI points out, Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill (up for hearing Feb. 23) to impose this obligation on parents. It doesn’t look as radical as the Virginia bill — the support obligation would only extend through age 21, not 23, for example — and it’s easy to see why it might appeal to the state university and its budgeters, as well as to pro-custodial-parent constituencies in family law. But it still raises some of the same questions of fairness and practicality, given that children past 18 are legally independent and need not be even on speaking terms with the estranged parents, who may be in no financial position to consider, say, finishing their own delayed college plans, yet are expected to foot college bills for their estranged offspring.

Annals of wage and hour law

New York’s notoriously stringent Department of Labor has fined a pizza shop owner $5,535 for not giving his employees enough polo shirts to wear — at least five for those who work five days a week, even if they work only a few hours a day. Owner Christian King

was told that an appeal would take years due to the backlog and the fine would accrue with interest….

“What happened to him is not unusual,” agreed Richard De Groot, a Syracuse consultant who advises businesses — including King’s — on human resource issues. He represents employers across much of the Eastern Seaboard and says New York is unusually demanding.
“There is so much in the way of state rules and laws,” he said, adding that he would advise some businesses, such as manufacturers, to simply look to elsewhere.

[Albany TImes-Union via Stoll]

“Indian court forces Facebook, Google to censor content”

“The Delhi High Court has ordered 21 companies, which have already been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, to present their plans for policing their services in the next 15 days.” A private complaint had charged the internet firms with permitting the dissemination of material offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians. [Emil Protalinski, ZDNet]

When federal defendants settle lawsuits

Jenna Greene reports in the National Law Journal (reg) on the Judgment Fund, an obscure entity within the federal government that last year paid to settle more than 5,000 lawsuits against federal agencies. For the most part, its payouts are not subtracted from agency budgets, and overall dollar figures tend to be dominated by a few special situations such as (most recently) lawsuits by utilities over alleged Energy Department breach of contract for nuclear fuel storage, and by Indian tribes against the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture over financial mismanagement and alleged discrimination. A smaller, but controversial, category of payouts that has attracted Congressional attention consists of settlements with “cause” organizations such as environmentalists that sue to force policy change.

“The strange thing is the lack of transparency,” said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. “Settlements deserve scrutiny.…There’s no reason why as a public process there shouldn’t be fine-grained disclosure.”

In April, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced the Judgment Fund Transparency Act of 2011, which would require Treasury (unless barred by a court order or law) to make public the names of plaintiffs and counsel, plus a brief description of the facts that gave rise to the payments and a breakdown of principal and attorney fees.

However, Greene reports, the Issa measure has attracted no co-sponsors and is stuck in House Judiciary with no apparent plans for action.

Bribing states to spend and regulate

In the earlier and sounder conception of federalism, local and national government were meant to check each other’s overweening power. Nowadays, unfortunately, the two often interact in a cooperative way to encourage bigger government at both levels, as Washington bribes the states to spend and regulate more. I explain at Cato at Liberty (& Damon Root, Reason).

February 14 roundup

  • “Brazil Sues Twitter in Bid to Ban Speed Trap and Roadblock Warnings” [ABA Journal]
  • Obama nominates Michigan trial lawyer Marietta Robinson to vacancy on Consumer Product Safety Commission, ensuring aggressively pro-regulatory majority [Bluey, Heritage]
  • “AMA reports show high cost of malpractice suits” [HCFN] “Average expense to defend against a medical liability claim in 2010 was $47,158” [American Medical News, more] Survey of 1,200 orthopedic surgeons finds defensive medicine rife, at cost of billions, accounting for 7 percent of all hospital admissions [MedPageToday]
  • “Sue us only in Delaware” bylaws would kill off forum-shopping and what fun is that? [Bainbridge, Reuters]
  • Trial by media: Lefty “SourceWatch” posts, then deletes, docs from Madison County pesticide suit [Madison County Record]
  • Think you’ve beaten FCPA rap? Meet the obscure “Travel Act” [Mike Emmick, Reuters] Federal court expands “honest services fraud” in lobbying case [Paul Enzinna, Point of Law]
  • “On the horrors of getting approval for an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco” [NYT via Doctorow/BoingBoing]