- Big win for Ted Frank against cy pres slush funds [CCAF, Fisher, Zywicki, CL&P, @tedfrank (“Ninth Circuit rules in my favor … but I still think I’m right”.)]
- “Can the Vatican Be Subject to ICC Prosecution?” [Ku/OJ]
- “Tennessee: ATS Sues City Over Right Turn Ticket Money” [The Newspaper]
- “Law firms dominating campaign contributions to Obama” [WaPo]
- Does that mean it’s an entitlement? Punitive damage limits face constitutional challenges in Arkansas, Missouri [Cal Punitives]
- Businessman sues to silence critical blogger, case is dismissed, now files suit #2 [Scott Greenfield]
- Going Hollywood? “The Supreme Court should move to Los Angeles” [Conor Friedersdorf]
Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
October 12 roundup
- After President Obama’s Orlando photo-op with construction workers came the high-ticket fundraiser at the home of med-mal titan John Morgan [Orlando Sentinel]
- “Lawyer Sues Facebook, Says Tracking Cookie Violates Wiretap Laws” [ABA Journal]
- The bone-marrow bounty that could save a life — and the law that gets in the way [Virginia Postrel]
- New coalition to repeal New York’s unfair Scaffold Law;
- “How the FDA Could Cost You Your Life” [Scott Gottlieb on medical device lags, WSJ]
- Mississippi: new release of sealed Scruggs-scandal documents [YallPolitics, Freeland]
- What I learned (about false accusation) at Dartmouth [Gonzalo Lira]
June 20 roundup
Politics edition:
- Mother ship? White House staffers depart for Harvard Law School [Politico]
- New York: “Lawmakers consider lawyer-friendly med-mal bills,” even as many key legislators moonlight at personal injury firms [Reuters]
- David Brooks on explosive political potential of Fannie Mae scandal [NYTimes] After Kentucky bar panel’s vote to disbar Chesley, Ohio AG pulls him off Fannie Mae suit [Adler, Frank, Beth Musgrave/Lexington Herald-Leader]
- Alabama legislature removes Jim Crow language from state constitution — but black lawmakers oppose the idea [Constitutional Daily]
- AAJ lobbyist Andy Cochran works GOP turf, has convinced trial lawyers to sponsor Christian radio program [Mokhiber, “Seventh Amendment Advocate“]
- Centers for Disease Control funnels grants to allies for political advocacy on favored public-health causes [Jeff Stier, Daily Caller]
- Must have mistaken her for a jury: “John Edwards Sought Millions From Heiress” [ABC News] “One thing [worse than Edwards’s] conduct is the government’s effort to put him in jail for it.” [Steve Chapman]
Obama’s reluctant deregulation, cont’d
Last week the White House announced with some fanfare the results of federal agencies’ review of their operations to find outdated or unneeded regulations. At Cato at Liberty, I explain why many regulation-watchers are underwhelmed by the results. Mark Steyn at National Review is much funnier on the same topic, including EPA’s very belated recognition that dairy spills on farms are not actually “oil” spills, and also see his postscript on the lengths to which federal inspectors will go to catch out unlicensed use of rabbits in magic shows.
P.S. Much more from Richard Epstein at Hoover “Defining Ideas” (“Reform? What Reform?”).
The Economist on NLRB Boeing complaint
The newsmagazine reports on the “stunned” reaction of the business community to the complaint, and editorially calls on President Obama to condemn the “loony-left complaint against America’s biggest exporter.” Earlier here and here.
The U.N. vs. freedom of religion
While the campaign to ban “defamation of religion” appears to have lost some steam at the world body recently, continued efforts to curtail “religious hate speech” could restrict free expression in some of the same ways. [Nina Shea, NRO “Corner”; Ilya Somin, Volokh] Warns Nina Shea:
In 2009, the Obama administration had the U.S. co-sponsor with Egypt, which represented the OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference], a non-binding hate-speech resolution in the Human Rights Council. In contrast to U.S. constitutional law, that resolution urges states to take and to effectively implement “all necessary measures” to combat any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence. It thus encourages the worldwide criminalization of religious hate speech.
April 19 roundup
- Environmental milestone? “Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans.” [JoNova via Coyote]
- Add another to the list of judges who file suits over critical discussion of their rulings, in this case by the losing party, a newspaper [ABA Journal]
- “Obama on presidential signing statements then … and now” [Bainbridge, Outside the Beltway]
- “The never-ending stream of futile petitions suggests that habeas corpus is a wasteful nuisance.” [Joseph Hoffmann and Nancy King, NYT, via Lat, Frank] A different view: Scott Greenfield, The Briefcase.
- Global warming suits “a misuse of the judiciary branch” [Laurence Tribe, Boston Globe via WLF]
- Competing for the HuffPo reader? On link between chemical exposures and cancer, Salon.com perpetrates “utter nonsense” [Orac, Respectful Insolence]
- Iqbal/Twombly: “Reports of pleading’s demise may have been exaggerated” [Wasserman, Prawfs]
February 5 roundup
- Thomas Sowell on EPA dairy-spill regulations [NRO, earlier at Cato here and here] It’s the miracle federal agency: “What doesn’t the EPA do?” [ShopFloor]
- President’s State of the Union medical malpractice gesture, cont’d [PoL, more, Ted Frank/Examiner, NJLRA, related, earlier here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.]
- Fired minor-league Yankees mascot files wage-hour suit [ESPN]
- Ohio sheriff prepares criminal complaint against reporter for asking him questions [WHIO via Balko]
- It all happened so suddenly: Henry Waxman now disapproves of the use of subpoenas for fishing expeditions [Mark Tapscott, Examiner; earlier]
- Should hospitals ban cameras from childbirth? [NYT “Room for Debate” with contribution from Jim Harper, Cato Institute]
- Non-“flagrant” trespassing OK? Tort liability shift in Third Restatement [PoL]
- Nope: “At this time, I would like to formally accuse Walter Olson of having an intern or something.” [Ron Miller]
Undoing a tax paperwork mistake
Chris Edwards, Cato: The President in his speech last night “supported repealing an idiotic IRS requirement in the 2010 health care law that mandated hundreds of millions of additional 1099 tax forms. … Now it’s the GOP’s job to get him legislation to repeal this provision tomorrow.”
Litigation Lobby: president’s med-mal SOTU remarks “disgusting”
David Ingram, National Law Journal:
The New York-based Center for Justice and Democracy, which describes its mission as “protecting our civil justice system,” released a statement calling Obama’s remarks “disgusting” because many proposed changes would affect cases with merit. “The Republican proposals would weaken the legal rights of sick and injured patients and lessen the accountability of incompetent doctors and unsafe hospitals,” the statement said.
I haven’t seen a direct link to the “disgusting” statement yet, only the NLJ/Legal Times coverage, so I’ll try not to jump to conclusions. (Update: link here, h/t gitarcarver). But I’ve wondered before whether the tone taken by the misnamed Center for Justice and Democracy is so harshly abrasive and shrill that it actually alienates the sorts of centrists and moderate liberals that its trial-lawyer constituency should be trying to win over. Earlier on CJD here, here, here, here, etc.