Labor and employment law roundup

  • Ohio vote looms on Wisconsin-style public labor reform [NRO Corner, Columbus Dispatch, Atlantic Wire, Buckeye Institute “S.B. 5”, Brian Bolduc/NRO]
  • Florida lawmaker proposes leave for some employees with domestically abused pets [Eric Meyer]
  • UK proposal: let employers have frank talks with underperforming workers without fear of liability [Telegraph]
  • “Wisconsin legislation could restrict punitive damages for job bias” [AP]
  • No, your mover can’t enter the building: a Chicago lawyer encounters union power [Howard Foster, Frum Forum] An insider’s game: “Two teachers union lobbyists teach for a day to qualify for hefty pensions” [Chicago Tribune]
  • Alternatively, we might just want to go back to freedom of contract: “An employer’s bill of rights” [Hyman]
  • Michael Fox on “Healthy Workplace Act” proposal creating rights to sue over on-job bullying [Jottings]
  • Feds put employer use of “independent contractors” under microscope [Omega HR] FLSA risks to employer of using unpaid interns [SmartHR]
  • A bit of health care deregulation from Obama [Tyler Cowen] Related on nurse practitioners: [Goodman]

Californians can’t get Dunkin’ Donuts coffee online

“When consumers in California visit the Dunkin’ Donuts website hoping to order a bag of their favorite java, they are met with the following message: ‘Important Notice: We are temporarily suspending the shipment of orders to California while we work to comply with Proposition 65 with the State of California. We apologize for any inconvenience.'” Acrylamide, a compound naturally present in many roasted or cooked foods, is among the hundreds of substances that must be warned against under Prop 65, which has led, as we noted in May, to a lawsuit against more than 40 coffee companies. [TechNewsWorld] Author Vivian Wagner quotes me:

“The law empowers private litigants to enforce its terms without having to show that any consumer has been exposed to any material or substantial risk, let alone harmed,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the E-Commerce Times. “As a result, entrepreneurial law firms roam the state identifying new, often far-fetched, unwarned-of risks and extracting cash settlements along with promises to warn from hapless defendants.”

Lawprof: D.C.’s 1:12 lawyer-resident ratio “not nearly enough”

One in twelve residents of the District of Columbia is an attorney, but if you think that seems ample, there are those who disagree:

“It sounds like a lot of lawyers, but it’s not nearly enough,” said Matthew Fraidin, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia. “There are just an immense number of people who go unrepresented every year. The need for legal service attorneys has increased and the funding for them has decreased.”

I’m quoted in the piece too. [Brian Hughes, Washington Examiner]

October 31 roundup

  • A pack of gum, e.g.: “What the Proceeds of a BlackBerry Class Action Could Buy” [Rebecca Greenfield, Atlantic Wire]
  • A million law firm ads later: “Pfizer’s Anti-Smoking Drug [Chantix] Isn’t Riskier Than Patches, FDA Says” [Bloomberg]
  • Over 9/11 attacks: “Court Recommends al-Qaida Pay $9 Billion to Insurers” [NYLJ]
  • Green alarmism over cosmetics — justified? [Dana Joel Gattuso, CEI; related here, here]
  • Arpaio-Thomas follies continue in Arizona courtroom [Coyote, earlier]
  • Upcoming: November 4 conference “Silenced” in D.C. on blasphemy laws and hate speech; Bruce Bawer, Nina Shea et al. [Federalist Society]
  • “I dreamed I swayed the jury… in my Maidenform bra” [Retronaut, scroll]

Upcoming Midwest speeches

Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’ll be on a lunchtime panel at Capital University Law School in Columbus to discuss Gov. John Kasich’s proposals for revamping public-employee labor law in Ohio. And next Tuesday, I’ll be in Chicago speaking at an Illinois Policy Institute breakfast on my new book on legal academia, Schools for Misrule (sign up here). Afterward, I’ll talk with students at Northwestern thanks to a kind invitation from the Federalist Society.

To book me for a speech at your group, contact Diane Morris at dmorris – at – cato – dot -org or contact me directly at editor – at – overlawyered – dot – com.

Wall Street protests roundup

With some help from Cato colleagues:

L.I.R.R. disability scandal

The abuse of disability claims by employees of the Long Island Rail Road, exposed by the New York Times’s Walt Bogdanich three years ago and noted in several items here at the time, has at last eventuated in indictments of eleven defendants, including doctors and “facilitators.” According to prosecutors, the bogus benefit claims could have exceeded $1 billion if paid out to completion. “The Times articles reported that virtually every career employee of the railroad was applying for and receiving disability payments, giving the Long Island Rail Road a disability rate three to four times that of the average railroad.” [NYT, NRO “Corner”]

Remembering Bill Niskanen, 1933-2011

The distinguished economist, who served the Cato Institute as its longtime chairman, was famous for his integrity, collegiality, and far-ranging scholarly interests, and in particular for his pathbreaking work in the field of “public choice” economics [Cato bio and announcement; NYT obituary]. His departure from Ford Motor’s chief economist post after declining to back the company’s push for auto import quotas came to symbolize an honesty and adherence to principle that set a sorely needed example in Washington. An expert on the economics of defense spending and professor at UCLA and Berkeley, he was later an architect of the Reagan economic program as a member of that president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Throughout his career, his personal warmth, approachability and unquenchable curiosity about the world made him an inspiration and mentor to generations of scholars. Some tributes: Lew Uhler, Ben Zycher, David Henderson, Randal O’Toole, Ian Vasquez, Fred Smith, Nick Gillespie, Stephen Moore, John Samples (audio podcast), William Poole. Bureaucracy and Representative Government, Niskanen’s pioneering public choice analysis of the incentives facing government agencies, appeared in 1971; a more recent essay collection, Reflections of a Political Economist, explores a range of current controversies in that and other areas.

Both before and since joining Cato in 2010, I had many chances to converse with Bill and get to know his enormous range of interests, extraordinary self-command, soft-spokenness and lack of pretense, and understated humor. Often, after hearing what I was working on, he would wait for a quiet moment to ask whether I was familiar with thus-and-such a scholarly paper that had appeared some while back. He then would summarize the paper’s findings, which typically would neither reinforce nor contradict the particular point I was pursuing, but instead approached the material from some entirely different perspective or pointed up an unexpected connection to what had seemed an unrelated set of issues. This is what graduate school is supposed to be like, I would think — and it was why, when the news came last week, I recalled what is said to be an African proverb: when a wise man dies, it is as if a library has burned down.