Following the law wherever it leads in Maryland: “Prince George’s County filed a legal case against a Laurel couple in their 90s over a wheelchair ramp in their own home. To avoid legal trouble, the elderly couple’s son tore down the ramp, trapping the woman in her own home. The county permitting department said the family had no permit to build a wheelchair ramp in front of their own home.” [WJLA]
Free speech roundup
- Getting together to do a national We’re-Not-The-Enemy-Of-The-People Day might not play to the strengths of an independent press [Jack Shafer; New York Post on why it did join, and L.A. Times on why it didn’t] Kevin Williamson wishes that many in the institutional press were more than just fair-weather friends of free speech values [NRO]
- ““Racial Ridicule” Is a Crime in Connecticut — and People Are Being Prosecuted” [Eugene Volokh]
- “Can Fake News Be Regulated?” Federalist Society policy brief video with Thomas Arnold;
- Once you get past the headline, Adam Liptak’s NYT account of First Amendment differences at the Supreme Court is well done [Roger Pilon]
- Is Internet freedom failing? [Knight Institute symposium with Jack Goldsmith et al.] How does moderation actually work at leading social media firms? [Kate Klonick, Harvard Law Review]
- The ABA’s Model Rule 8.4(g), in the name of combating harassment and discrimination, encourages states to regulate many expressions of speech and association by lawyers that have incidental professional implications. The Supreme Court in its recent NIFLA v. Becerra decision cast a shadow on that [Josh Blackman, Scott Greenfield]
“Right to be forgotten” making its way into American courts?
New Jersey court orders Google to take down newsworthy photo Chicago Tribune had run of plaintiff [Eugene Volokh; note that plaintiff subsequently voluntarily dropped the case] And courts can’t order private media outlets to expunge truthful coverage of charges against someone, can they? [Volokh on Houston judge’s order against website of broadcaster KTRK]
Sen. Warren: make American business more European
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a new scheme to impose employee co-determination and an assortment of other forcible corporate governance alterations on American business. My new Cato post argues that it would expropriate huge sums in shareholder value while undercutting incentives for economic dynamism. Alternatives to the U.S. corporate governance system, “European or otherwise, simply do not have as good a track record of supporting a dynamic economy that generates world-beating enterprises across a wide range of business sectors.” Other views: Donald Boudreaux (“deeply truly scary”), Matt Yglesias/Vox (taking favorable view of scheme, including its destruction of perhaps 25 percent of current shareholder value). More on the “stakeholder” and co-determination angles: Samuel Hammond, and Megan McArdle on the latter.
Medical roundup
- “Researchers from Duke and MIT… found that the possibility of a lawsuit increased the intensity of health care that patients received in the hospital by about 5 percent — and that those patients who got the extra care were no better off.” [Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times]
- Cato Policy Analysis and podcasts (with Caleb Brown) by Terence Kealey: “The Feds’ Demonization of Dietary Fat” and “Why Does the Federal Government Issue Damaging Dietary Guidelines?” Related: Britain’s “food supply is being taxed, regulated and reformulated – on the pretext of a lie” [Christopher Snowdon, Spectator (U.K.)]
- New Jersey, a key state because of its volume of pharmaceutical liability litigation, joins national trend by adopting Daubert standard on expert evidence [Colleen O’Dea/N.J. Spotlight, Beck, John O’Brien/Legal NewsLine]
- “Criminal prosecution for violating HIPAA: an emerging threat to health care professionals” [Anne M. Murphy, Laura B. Angelini, and Jared Shwartz, STAT]
- Do-it-yourself workarounds for obtaining compounds blocked or restricted by FDA/pharma regulation, albeit entangled with IP issues. With bonus code-as-speech angle [Daniel Oberhaus, Vice Motherboard]
- “Hotels do want to tell you the real price. Until hospitals do too, they will find their way around disclosure regulations” [John Cochrane; related Cochrane on lack of price competition among air ambulances]
Heed the sign!
Via TortsProf. You do follow Overlawyered on Twitter and Facebook, don’t you? You can also follow my personal Twitter and professional Facebook if you like, which have mostly different content.
Poppy seed bagel triggers drug test (again), CPS gets involved (again)
Sitcom plots come to life: mom of newborn reported to state after poppy seed bagel triggers positive opiate test, baby kept in hospital for five days [Zuri Davis, Reason; Chaunie Brusie, Everyday Family; Baltimore County, Md.]
Longtime readers of Overlawyered know that this is not the first time around for this fact pattern. See “Mom ate poppy seed dressing, state holds baby for 75 days” and earlier; Radley Balko reported in 2014 that two lawsuits involving the same western Pennsylvania hospital and county children’s services department were both settled for substantial sums and a third case had been filed against another hospital in the same region. See also re-jailing of halfway house inmate from 2010 (Florida), as well as Dubai airport madness.
August 15 roundup
- “Lawmakers are doing nothing to stop wheelchair ramp scams: businesses” [Julia Marsh and Yoav Gonen, New York Post, earlier on NYC ADA shakedowns]
- Not a flattering picture: inside the politicized office of one state’s (Minnesota’s) attorney general [Rachel M. Cohen, The Intercept, Briana Bierschbach, Minnesota Public Radio, J. Patrick Coolican and Jessie Van Berkel, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Swanson releases criminal record of aide-turned-critic]
- Remembering when the U.S. went through its first moral panic about plastic guns, in 1986 [Dave Kopel]
- Until 2012, after 60 Minutes did an exposé, “it was perfectly legal for members of Congress to trade on inside information. Not for you, of course. You’d go to jail. But for some strange reason, mystifying to all, that law simply did not apply to Congress.” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar]
- “Federal Court: Miami Taxi Companies Have ‘No Right To Block Competition’ From Uber” [Nick Sibilla, Forbes]
- “Not even consumer law professors routinely read consumer contracts and disclosures” [Jeff Sovern, CL&P]
Creator royalties on art in public spaces
Creators of art displayed in parks and other public spaces have been using assertions of copyright to demand cash from, or play favorites among, private persons and groups seeking to carry on video or photography in those spaces. Aaron Renn: “Any city installing public art should ensure that the agreement with the artist provides for unconditional royalty free pictures and videos, or the art shouldn’t be installed.”
“Defendants File Non-Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Leave to File Surreply to Motion for Leave to File Surreply”
“As is so often the case, the first sign of approaching disaster was a motion asking for leave to exceed the page limit….As part of the public service I provide, I have counted up the number of pages that were written, rewritten, printed, scanned, and/or filed by the lawyers during this titanic struggle, and, including exhibits, that number is 1,749. Not a single page of which will be considered by the Court or, in all likelihood, ever viewed again by any human being during the remainder of our species’ time on this planet. Perhaps eons hence some member of an alien race picking through our ruined archives will come upon it, and hurt its brain parts trying to figure it out.” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar, on E.D. Nev. class action discovery dispute]