An Obama course correction on regulation?

I’ve got a post up at Cato at Liberty expressing some doubts about the President’s new talk of smarter regulation. Stuart Shapiro points out that the “only truly new thing in” the regulatory reform package, the greater publicity that will be given to enforcement records, “could be somewhat revolutionary in its ability to force regulatory compliance.” From a perspective diametrically opposed to mine, Rena Steinzor confirms that the only example Obama gave of actual excessive regulation reversed on his watch — the former classification of saccharin as hazardous waste — is of at most trivial significance (& welcome Matthew Continetti/Weekly Standard, Frum Forum, Aaron @ Patterico, Point of Law, AllahPundit, ShopFloor readers).

Schools for Misrule is off to the printer

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

I’m happy to report that my forthcoming book on bad ideas from the law schools, Schools for Misrule, just went off to the printer. Encounter Books commissioned a terrific jacket design (by Tamaye Perry) which you can preview here (PDF). Here’s the description from the book’s jacket:

Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America

By Walter Olson

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our national leaders today emerge from the rarefied air of the nation’s top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often wind up shaping national policy in the next.

The trouble is, as Walter Olson explains in this book, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. Rights to sue anyone over anything in class actions? Hatched in legal academia. Court orders mandating mass release of prison inmates? Ditto. The movement for slavery reparations? Court takeovers of school funding, at taxpayers’ expense? It’s not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools’ own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers. And the worst is yet to come, the book demonstrates, as a fast-rising movement in the law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts.

Some imagine that the law schools possess a finer, purer moral sensitivity than the everyday America outside their walls. (“Welcome to the Republic of Conscience!” Yale Law dean Harold Koh announced to incoming students.) But as this book shows, the pipe dream of training philosopher-monarchs not only leads to one policy disaster after another, but distracts law schools from the most useful function they can serve: training competent, ethical and suitably humble lawyers for tomorrow.

On the back of the jacket are wonderful blurbs from star law professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown (famous most recently for the ObamaCare court challenge), bestselling author and attorney Philip K. Howard (The Death of Common Sense), and perennial libertarian TV hero John Stossel.

You can pre-order the book at great prices from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite bookseller. Publication date is February 15, so copies should arrive before you know it.

“Lawyer advises foreclosed clients to break back into their homes”

Attorney Michael Pines “admits to breaking into homes at least half a dozen times… leaving the clients [most famously baseball legend Lenny Dykstra] to squat in their homes while he defends their legal right to possession.” More in an L.A. Times profile:

Although Pines advises his clients not to pay their lenders, he wants to be paid.

“I tell my clients that if you’re living in a house for free, you should be able to afford to pay a lawyer,” Pines said, adding that he usually charges an hourly rate of $650.

January 18 roundup

  • What, no more monkeys or snakes? Starting March 15 new federal regulation will restrict definition of “service animals” to dogs alone [Central Kitsap Reporter, earlier, more]
  • “Appeals court: SD prosecutor’s conduct denied man a fair trial” [San Diego Union-Tribune]
  • A tale of local regulation: “A septic system at the crossroads” [Roland Toy, American Thinker]
  • Firm sues Fark, Reddit, Yahoo, etc. etc. over 2002 patent on “structured news release generation and distribution,” draws rude reply from defendant TechCrunch;
  • UK schools minister: “no touching pupils” policy keeps music teachers from doing their job [Telegraph]
  • Legal ethicist Stephen Gillers hired at $950/hour to approve ethics of Ken Feinberg’s BP compensation fund work [two views: Andrew Perlman and Monroe Freedman; earlier, Byron Stier]. Per Ted at PoL, trial lawyers criticizing the arrangement “complain that BP is using the same tactic plaintiffs’ lawyers regularly use to prove their own ethics.”
  • Is WordPress’s quirky “Hello Dolly” plugin a copyright infringement? [TechDirt]
  • Congrats, you’re eligible for a job with the D.C. public school system [ten years ago on Overlawyered; more on criminal records and hiring, subject of a current EEOC crusade]

Salon yanks discredited RFK Jr. vaccine piece

Six years late, the online publication is throwing in the towel on a notorious venture into antiscientific claptrap by America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure®, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Meanwhile, Carter at Point of Law reports that the newly civility-aware celebrity environmentalist will be headlining a “Progressive Voices Cruise” of the Caribbean that by total coincidence will also feature attorney Michael Papantonio, with whose Levin Papantonio injury-law firm the hothead scion has long been associated, a connection curiously absent from his current Wikipedia page and most other coverage (& welcome Jonathan Adler readers).

Update: adult clubs to settle EEOC age-bias suit

“Two Houston adult entertainment clubs this week agreed to settle a federal age discrimination case with a former waitress who alleged younger, male managers called her ‘old’ and said she showed symptoms of memory loss. The owners of Centerfolds and Cover Girls agreed to pay $60,000 to Mary Bassi. She was 56 when she was fired in 2006 ‘without provocation or explanation,’ according to a lawsuit the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed on Bassi’s behalf.” [Houston Chronicle; earlier]