- Behind costly EPA crackdown on wood-burning stoves, a whiff of sweetheart lawsuits? [Larry Bell]
- Reminder: California’s Prop 65 doesn’t actually improve public health, makes lawyers rich, and harasses business [Michael Marlow, WSJ]
- “What I learned from six months of GMO research: None of it matters” [Nathanael Johnson, Grist]
- Eminent domain threatens store owner in Fire Island’s Saltaire [NYP]
- In case you haven’t seen this one: chemical content of all-natural foods [James Kennedy Monash]
- “The court ordered that the county pay the turtles’ attorneys fees.” [Dan Lewis, Now I Know]
- “On the government’s books, the switch [from steel to aluminum in Ford’s new F-150 pickup] is a winner because MPG goes up.” [William Baldwin, Forbes]
Posts Tagged ‘animal rights’
Environmental roundup
- “A Milestone to Celebrate: I Have Closed All My Businesses in Ventura County, California” [Coyote, earlier]
- “Louisiana Judge Ends Katrina Flooding Lawsuits Against Feds” [AP/Insurance Journal]
- “Some shoppers who reuse plastic bags to dispose of animal waste will miss them” [L.A. Times via Alkon]
- Alameda County, Calif. conscripts out-of-state drugmakers into product disposal program: public choice problem, constitutionality problem or both? [Glenn Lammi, WLF]
- “Connecticut, Drunk on Power, Uses Bottle Bill to Steal Money” [Ilya Shapiro]
- “If successful, the New York lawsuits would extend the scope of the [habeas corpus] writ to an undefined array of nonhuman creatures.” [Jim Huffman, Daily Caller]
- Clean Water Act citizen suits never intended to be race to courthouse between officialdom, bounty hunters [Lammi, WLF on Eleventh Circuit ruling]
- Let’s stop measuring congestion, it just makes our environmental plans look bad [Randal O’Toole, David Henderson on California policy]
“New York lawsuit seeks ‘legal personhood’ for chimpanzees”
On a practical level, corporate and organizational “personhood” has worked coherently for more than a century. Will this? [Reuters, Science; earlier on corporate personhood (“established and relatively uncontroversial,” and progressive in its legal implications)] A Twitter reaction: “If they get the right to air political ads they can only improve the discourse.” [@jacobgrier]
More seriously, Prof. Bainbridge provided an answer to the question both on Twitter (“We treat corporations as people because it is a useful fiction. Animals as persons is not useful.”) and then in a longer blog post, which concludes:
The problem, I believe, is that attempts to define the debate in moral or philosophical terms ignores the basic fact that the rationale for corporate personhood sounds in neither. Instead, it is based on practicality and utility. Put another way, we treat the corporation as a legal person because doing so has proven to be a highly efficient way for real people to organize their business activities and to vindicate their rights. Put yet another way, we treat the corporation as a legal person because it is a nexus of contracts between real persons. Which is something no animal can ever be.
Bans on farm-filming, cont’d
“Even though I was always on public property when I filmed the horrors I saw outside that slaughterhouse in February, I became the first person charged under one of these ‘ag-gag’ laws.” [Amy Meyer, Washington Post, Utah]
Environment roundup
- Can EPA use subregulatory guidance to dodge judicial review of formal notice-and-comment rulemaking? Appeals court says no [Allison Wood, WLF]
- “Outhouse blues: Salisbury Twp. tells 77-year-old to install $20,000 septic system he doesn’t want” [Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Online]
- Denying attorney fee in oil spill case, Texas judge questions authenticity of client signature [ABA Journal, Chamber-backed Southeast Texas Record]
- Why “climate justice” campaigns fail both the environment and the poor [Chris Foreman, The Breakthrough]
- Does the Yale Alumni Magazine often side with plaintiffs who sue to muzzle critics? [Neela Banerjee on Michael Mann lawsuit against National Review, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Mark Steyn, etc.]
- Anti-science, anti-humanity: Milan animal rights action trashes years of psychiatric research [Nature]
- Parody Tom-Friedman-bot must be at it again: “best place to start” response to Boston attack “is with a carbon tax” [Tim Blair] Too darn hot: “Dems warn climate change could drive women to ‘transactional sex'” [The Hill]
- Some California lawmakers seek to curb shakedown lawsuits under notorious Prop 65 chemical-labeling law [Sacramento Bee; Gov. Brown proposes reform]
Scales of justice: lawyer represented fish after its demise
A noted Swiss animal rights lawyer who’s campaigning for wider assignment of lawyers to represent animals’ interests “once represented a dead fish that had been caught, killed, and eaten” [Global Legal Post via John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum; title courtesy @KenParish1]
P.S. From last year (but new to us), this Jon Stewart segment on the unsuccessful PETA lawsuit against Sea World for holding whales in “involuntary servitude.”
Environment roundup
- Judge Kozinski, writing for Ninth Circuit panel, declares Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s harassment of whaling ships to fall under piracy law as covered by international treaty [Trial Insider, Julian Ku, Kevin Jon Heller, Eugene Kontorovich and more and yet more, SSCS’s black skull flag via Wikipedia]
- California Assemblyman Mike Gatto [D-Silver Lake] introduces AB 227, which would reform notorious Prop 65 by giving business 14 days to fix lack of warning before entitling lawyer to bounty [his blog, Dem caucus, Burbank Leader]
- Unintended, unsanitary consequences of plastic bag bans (Ramesh Ponnuru/ Bloomberg) And theft too? [Seattle Times]
- Writer who joined the circus for several days reports on Ringling Bros. elephant controversy: [Bill McMorris/Washington Free Beacon (quotes me), earlier]
- Study finds new CAFE fuel economy standards far less efficient than taxes in promoting conservation [Alex Tabarrok]
- Now Mark Bittman is being alarmist about cosmetics [ACSH, background]
- Overcriminalization looms large for Gulf Coast outdoor businesses, says TPPF’s Vikrant Reddy [FoxNews]
ASPCA reactions
The head of the ASPCA writes to the New York Post about my op-ed piece. To recap the particular assertion to which he’s responding, if you want to support local shelter and rescue work, you’re much better off giving locally than you are writing a check to this national group and hoping a little trickles down through grants, special projects and the like.
Another reaction: Andy Vance, Farm Progress.
Food roundup
- New thinner-isn’t-healthier study should give pause [Paul Campos, NYT]
- Inspectors order Minnesota soda shop to yank candy cigarettes, bubble gum cigars [Daily Caller]
- Cleveland might have its own version of Pike Place or Reading Terminal Market, if not for… [Nick Gillespie]
- Regulators took it down: “San Francisco’s Libertarian Food Market Is Closing” [Baylen Linnekin]
- How brutal is vegetarianism to animals? [Mike Archer via Tyler Cowen]
- Crazy: S.F. mulls zoning ban on new restaurants to protect existing ones [Linnekin] How Chicago suppresses food trucks [Katherine Mangu-Ward]
- Federal calorie labeling rules will burden restaurants [Wash. Times]
The ASPCA’s lawsuit debacle
I’m in this morning’s New York Post with an opinion piece about the thoroughgoing debacle the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) got itself into with a decade-long lawsuit charging mistreatment of elephants at the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circuses (earlier). Last month ASPCA agreed to pay Ringling’s owner $9.3 million to settle charges of litigation abuse. Other defendants in the countersuit, including the Humane Society of the U.S., have declined to settle and remain in the litigation.
Later in the piece I draw a parallel to the recently dismissed Hudson Farm litigation in Maryland, in which a judge lambasted Waterkeeper Alliance for shoddy litigation conduct in a Clean Water Act suit. Is it worth rethinking the whole policy, which dates back to 1970, of broad tax deductibility for suing people in “cause litigation”? Related from Ted Frank at Point of Law.
P.S. The comments section on the Post piece is more substantive than most, and includes a statement from HSUS. (& response from ASPCA head)