Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Food safety bill: big vs. small business

From the WSJ last month (Division of Labour) on the big federal food-safety bill sailing through Congress:

:…small farmers worry the measure’s fees and inspection requirements would be ruinously expensive and are pushing for exemptions.

“I know people who have been small farmers for 25 to 30 years who are looking to get out of the business because food safety is becoming so alarmist,” said Mary Alionis, whose eight-acre Whistling Duck Farm in Grants Pass, Ore., sells produce to farmers markets and restaurants.

Big food companies generally support the bill, judging the added expenses it would bring to be small compared with the potential financial damage of a vast product recall.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen before.

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Connecticut: “Lawsuit Verdict May Shut MDC Reservoirs to Cyclists”

As lawsuits advance, recreation retreats: the Hartford-area Metropolitan District Commission “is now looking at shutting access to its popular reservoir trails to cyclists” following a $2.9 million jury award to a bicyclist who crashed into a gate. “The controversial verdict came after rulings that the MDC — a nonprofit municipal corporation — was not immune to lawsuits, in this case from a cyclist who wasn’t paying enough attention as she rode the well-marked trails.” [Rick Green, Hartford Courant; background from 1999]

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Chasing the Toyota hobgoblin

The quest to do something about the imagined Toyota crisis may result in a federal mandate for all cars to include “brake-override” features that cut off power when the driver hits the brake. Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Fumento says many cars on the road do already have such a feature — but lawmakers don’t seem overly curious as to whether it’s made a difference.

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Kagan nomination latest

  • Sorry, guys, but being a law dean who treated conservative scholars with cordiality and fairness doesn’t mean you’ll either 1) be anything but a predictably liberal judge yourself, or 2) show any particular unusual persuasiveness with conservative colleagues on the bench. Jim Copland invites us to consider the example of Guido Calabresi;
  • As part of their job duties, persons who hold the office of Solicitor General sometimes sign their name to arguments they’d reject out of hand if hearing the case as a judge. We’d better hope this is the case with Kagan’s defense of the federal law on depictions of animal cruelty, in which she advanced what Chief Justice Roberts rightly called the “startling and dangerous” position that the protections of the First Amendment should be subject to case-by-case cost-benefit balancing. Jacob Sullum explains.
  • Mark Moller contributes some perspective worth considering on the military-recruitment issue. More: Roger Pilon.
  • Not my view alone: “We are seeing what government by the faculty lounge looks like,” writes Michael Barone. More: David Wagner. “My experience with Prof. Kagan” accounts: Elie Mystal, Above the Law, and Sasha Volokh, Volokh Conspiracy.
  • “Libertarians respond to the nomination” [Damon Root, Reason “Hit and Run”]. Views of Miguel Estrada and Stuart Taylor, Jr. [Moller, Cato] While in the Clinton administration, she took “pro-plaintiff” stances on liability reform [Mark Hofmann, Business Insurance quoting Victor Schwartz, via Ted at Point of Law] More from Jim Copland [City Journal] She helped beef up Harvard’s Berkman Center on intellectual property; does this mean she’s sympathetic to “fair use” concerns? [Cavanaugh, Reason “Hit and Run”]

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May 12 roundup

  • Charged $21K at purported “gentleman’s” club: “Plaintiff Has No Recollection of What Transpired in the Private Room” [Lowering the Bar]
  • Census Bureau sued for discriminating against applicants based on criminal, arrest records [Clegg, NRO] Class action against Accenture for screening job applicants based on criminal records [Jon Hyman]
  • Virtual indeed: “Virtual Freedom” author wants government to regulate Google’s search engine [ConcurOp]
  • Contingency fees for public sector lawyering could take California down dangerous path [CJAC]
  • “Harvard Law vs. free inquiry: Dean Martha Minow flunks the test” [Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard]
  • There’ll always be an AAJ: seminar for trial lawyers on “Injuries Without Evidence” [ShopFloor] More: The Briefcase.
  • Congress may expand law to enable more age-bias suits [BLT]
  • “FTC Closes First Blogger Endorsement Investigation” [Balasubramani, Spam Notes; Citizen Media Law]

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Marc Dann cops a plea

The disgraced Ohio Attorney General, a fixture in these columns through much of 2008, has pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count and declined to contest another. He’ll pay a fine and do community service. [Columbus Dispatch via Adler/Volokh] At one point Dann was lionized by the New York Times as a potential “next Eliot Spitzer,” at that time considered an enviable thing to be.

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More on the Kagan nomination

I’m one of the participants in a National Review Online symposium on how Republican senators should approach Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination (earlier). And I’ve got a big link roundup at Cato at Liberty this morning pulling together some highlights of what’s being said about her, including some not-especially-reassuring reports on her views of administrative/regulatory law and First Amendment law.

P.S. As for Left critics of Kagan, Ted at Point of Law thinks they’re being foolish: she’ll deliver a voting record as Justice very similar to what a more outspoken ideologue would have done, without exposing President Obama to as much flak in the confirmation process.

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