In 2011, at the East River Plaza mall in East Harlem, two youngsters tossed a shopping cart “from a 79-foot-high landing outside a Target store,” nearly killing Marion Hedges below. Hedges and her family “sued Target, the mall and its security company for negligence in 2011, saying the businesses ignored past incidents involving kids fooling around with carts.” A jury has now awarded the family $45.2 million. “The Hedgeses previously settled with Target for a confidential sum. The six-person jury found the teens 10 percent responsible for Hedges’ injuries while assigning 65 percent of the fault to the mall and 25 percent to Planned Security Services.” [Julia Marsh and Kalah Siegel, New York Post] In 2015 the New York Post reported on the further extralegal adventures of one of the only-a-little-bit-responsible teen attackers, who had been sentenced to 6 to 16 months in a group home as punishment.
California water projects face legal slog
“Constant litigation, combined with years of legislation empowering unions and state agency bureaucrats to slow construction, have quadrupled the time required to build California’s water projects.” [Ed Ring, City Journal]
Meanwhile, on the national level: “It can take years to get a federal permit for a major infrastructure project. Congress has an opportunity to change that” [Philip Wallach and Nick Zaiac, Brookings]
Bail abolition, Google ads and holding without bond, cont’d
When I wrote last month about Google’s and Facebook’s ill-advised decision to turn away ads for bail bond services, I hadn’t seen Alex Tabarrok’s insightful post on the same topic, calling the tech giants’ decision “deeply disturbing and wrongheaded.” Excerpt:
Bail bonds are a legal service. Indeed, they are a necessary service for the legal system to function. It’s not surprising that bail bonds are used in communities of color and low income neighborhoods because it is in those neighborhoods that people most need to raise bail. We need not debate whether that is due to greater rates of crime or greater discrimination or both. Whatever the cause, preventing advertising doesn’t reduce the need to pay bail it simply makes it harder to find a lender. Restrictions on advertising in the bail industry, as elsewhere, are also likely to reduce competition and raise prices. Both of these effects mean that more people will find themselves in jail for longer….
Ian Ayres and Joel Waldfogel also found that the bail bond system can (modestly) ameliorate judicial racial bias. Ayres and Waldfogel found that in New Haven in the 1990s black and Hispanic males were assigned bail amounts that were systematically higher than equally-risky whites. The bail bondpersons, however, offered lower prices to minorities–meaning equal net prices for people of equal risk–exactly what one would expect from a competitive industry.
My own research found that defendants released on commercial bail were much more likely to show up for trial than statistical doppelgangers released by other methods. Bounty hunters were also much more likely than the police to capture and bring to justice people who did jump bail. The bail bond system thus provides an important public service at no cost to the public.
In addition to being wrongheaded, Google’s decision is disturbing because it is so obviously a political decision….[Every] time Google acts as a lawgiver instead of an open platform it invites regulation and political control.
Meanwhile, reports from Maryland confirm that (as I’ve warned in the past) that state’s unplanned experiment with curtailing cash bail, without due attention to developing alternative institutions, has led to the retaining in jail of many defendants who otherwise would have rejoined their families [Jayne Miller/WBAL, Scott Shackford/Reason] More links on bail controversies: Scott Greenfield; Daniel Dew, Buckeye Institute last year (pro-reform in Ohio).
Sixth Circuit: Stan Chesley played “shell game,” court did not err in freezing his assets
Onetime “king of torts” under siege: “Stan Chesley has defrauded hundreds of former clients through a ‘high-stakes shell game’ apparently orchestrated to avoid paying them a multimillion-dollar judgment, a federal appeals court said.” Following the settlement of a class action over diet drugs for $200 million, lawyers connived with a state judge, who has since been disbarred, to steer most of the proceeds into their own pockets. Clients have been pursuing recovery against Chesley for years, but he has dodged paying the resulting $42 million judgment. Thus far, five lawyers have been disbarred and two jailed in the saga. The Sixth Circuit has now ruled that a district court acted properly in freezing his assets. [Kevin Grasha, Cincinnati Enquirer; Daniel Gill, Bloomberg Law; McGirr v. Rehme] “All told, between his personal assets and the firm’s assets (of which he was sole owner), Chesley managed to lose over $90 million in assets over the course of a single year,” the court said. Of transfers raising “red flags,” some were made to Chesley’s wife, a federal judge; Judge Richard Suhrheinrich cited these in a footnote but said the court was not relying on them as a basis for its decision.
June 20 roundup
- “Egregious” conduct: Fourth Circuit upholds $150,000 sanctions against attorneys who “challenged the authenticity of a loan agreement for two years before revealing that they possessed an identical copy, obtained from their client, before filing the complaint.” [Six v. Generations Federal Credit Union]
- Food bill: Congress seems intent on not letting the public find out how well grocers do from the SNAP program [Jonathan Ellis, USA Today]
- “Why Trump’s Higher Tariffs Now are Unlikely to Result in Lower Tariffs Later” [Coyote]
- After 10 years, Nathan Myhrvold’s patent assertion fund idea hasn’t done so well [Nathan Vardi, Forbes]
- Potential of “cottage food” laws remains unrealized [Baylen Linnekin]
- Why noted regulation critic David Schoenbrod is also critical of the regulatory reform proposal known as REINS [Philip Wallach, Real Clear Policy]
Courts and political logjams
What one observer sees as a logjam or political gridlock, of course, can look to another like the welcome avoidance of bad legislation. But that’s not the only reason the courts are reluctant to assume one or another new power on the logic that the political branches have wrongfully failed to act in some area. In a new Cato at Liberty post, I cite a notable passage addressing this point in Monday’s Gill v. Whitford decision on redistricting.
Medical roundup
- After malpractice caps, doctors ordered fewer invasive tests to diagnose heart attacks [Elizabeth Cooney, Stat]
- Product liability defense lawyer manages to survive peremptory challenge and make it onto a jury for a med-mal case, and here are his observations [Stephen McConnell, Drug & Device Law]
- “How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat” [Reason interview with Nina Teicholz]
- Suits against blood thinner Xarelto have done poorly. Can plaintiff’s lawyers keep plugging away till they get wins? [John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine]
- “Pharmacy Benefit Managers Are Not the Cause of High Prescription Drug Prices” [Ike Brannon]
- Advice for physicians: “5 ways to live through medical malpractice lawsuits” [Stacia Dearmin, KevinMD]
Court sidelines gerrymander cases
By February, clues were in plain sight that the Supreme Court was not inclined to hand down a “big” landmark decision this term on gerrymandering. That was confirmed yesterday when the Court got both cases off its plate without reaching the merits, instead disposing of them for now on issues of standing (Gill v. Whitford, Wisconsin) and timing (Benisek v. Lamone, Maryland). Strikingly, both decisions were unanimous as to result, a clue as to the carefully limited scope of what was decided, and both cases can continue in the courts below with their legal theories mostly intact. “The Court has kicked the issue of partisan gerrymandering down the road. States shouldn’t,” I write in a new Cato commentary on the decisions.
Labor and employment roundup
- Sens. Marco Rubio, Elizabeth Warren team up on federal bill to curb practice of yanking occupational licenses over unpaid student debt [Eric Boehm] “Pennsylvania’s Governor Calls for Abolishing 13 Occupational Licenses” [same] Licensing reform generally hasn’t been a partisan battle, but party-line vote in California legislative committee has derailed one promising bill [same] Nebraska gets out in front on the issue with a bill sponsored by libertarian state senator Laura Ebke [Platte Institute] “You Shouldn’t Need a License to Braid Hair” [Ilya Shapiro and Aaron Barnes on Cato amicus brief in Niang v. Tomblinson]
- Alone among states, California requires a “mandatory mediation and conciliation process” for agricultural employers. Arbitrary and open to constitutional challenge [Ilya Shapiro and Reilly Stephens on Cato amicus brief for California Supreme Court certiorari in Gerewan Farming Inc. v. Agricultural Labor Relations Board]
- “Lawsuits that compel sharing economy companies to treat their contractors as full-fledged employees will only forestall the inevitable transition towards a Tomorrow 3.0 economy.” [Pamela Hobart, Libertarianism.org reviewing Michael Munger’s new book “Tomorrow 3.0”] Plaintiffs in California Supreme Court ruling: “Uber Drivers Just Killed All the Parts of the Job They Supposedly Liked the Most” [Coyote]
- Or maybe the gig economy isn’t taking over after all [Ben Casselman, New York Times; Ben Gitis and Will Rinehart, American Action Forum, on new Bureau of Labor Statistics survey finding that prevalence of contingent work has declined, not risen, since 2005]
- “Original Meaning Should Decide Arbitration Act Case on Independent Contractors” [Andrew Grossman and Ilya Shapiro on Cato amicus in Supreme Court case of New Prime v. Oliviera]
- “Disability rates among working-age adults are shaped by race, place, and education” [Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman, Brookings]
Zen Magnets prevails in CPSC action
Six years into its battle, tiny-magnet maker Zen Magnets has won another key round against the Consumer Product Safety Commission in court, persuading a Colorado federal court to reverse a Commission order ordering a halt to its sales [Nancy Nord] A larger and at the time better known maker of tiny magnet sets, Buckyballs, folded under the Commission’s pressure. More on Zen Magnets’ fight here and here.