A lawprof wants to apply federal labor law to discourage reality-TV programming involving kids.
Posts Tagged ‘child protection’
U.K.: Better off institutionalized than with a parent who smokes?
“Smokers banned by Welsh council from adopting or fostering children“. At some cost, it should be noted: “critics have pointed out there are already not enough foster parents in Wales”.
Playground safety mat overheating, cont’d
As we noted around this time last summer, New York City “has spent large sums installing black rubber safety mats beneath the equipment on its 1,000 playgrounds, but the mats get hot in the summer, and some kids are suffering burns which have resulted in lawsuits.” Now the city is raising eyebrows in one such lawsuit by countersuing the grandmother of a toddler (at the time) burned on a mat. [WCBS via Reddit] On defendants’ tactic of dragging all possibly negligent parties into a suit, see Aug. 4.
Not an Onion headline
“Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes.” Seems that Britain believes this will encourage better parenting to have the full-fledged nanny state enforcing homework and child discipline. Worse: the opposition party is complaining that the Labour government’s plan isn’t ambitious enough.
July 23 roundup
- San Jose man says PlayStation online game network is public forum and sues Sony pro se for kicking him off it [Popehat] More: Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch.
- “Teacher lets kids climb hill, cops come calling” [Santa Barbara, Calif.; Free Range Kids]
- Tip for journalists covering trials: stalk the rest rooms [Genova]
- Lake Erie villages turn off street lights in summer to avoid attracting mayflies, town now sued over driver-jogger collision [Columbus Dispatch]
- Some lawyers anticipate “astronomical” municipal liability from West Portal train collision in San Francisco [SF Weekly]
- Radical notion: before filing lawsuit charging consumer fraud, maybe plaintiff should notify merchant and ask to have problem fixed [New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Watch]
- No jurisdiction: Eleventh Circuit overturns contempt finding against Scruggs in Rigsby case [Freeland]
- Successful trial lawyer campaign against arbitration is throwing credit card business into turmoil [ABA Journal, Wood @ Point of Law, Ambrogi/Legal Blog Watch (conflict of interests at one large arbitration supplier)]
Mom left two girls, 12, in charge of three younger ones at mall
And soon Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State in Bozeman, found herself fighting a child endangerment rap. [Free Range Kids via Amy Alkon; Judith Warner, NYT]
Don’t let your 8 year old play in the yard?
Per child protective services in Arlington, Va., parents should not let their eight-year-olds out to play in the yard unattended “for any period of time”. David Bernstein and many of his commenters dissent.
More: Interesting, related website: Free-Range Kids, by Lenore Skenazy (via Alkon).
“After Mom’s Wistful Remark, A Maternity Ward Inquisition”
New mom Karen Piper, groggy with medications, told her doctor she wished the baby had been a girl. And so came to be launched the investigation of whether she was an abuse risk who should not be allowed to take the baby home. (Marc Fisher, Washington Post, Apr. 23).
“These are just kids being irresponsible and careless; they are not criminals.”
The ACLU says a Pennsylvania D.A. has threatened to prosecute teenage girls over mildly naughty-sounding photos of themselves on their cellphones, which he has called “provocative”. The case could help provoke a legislative clarification of what laws apply to the teenage practice that has been called “sexting”; one law professor suggests excusing original senders and recipients of photos from liability in most circumstances, while leaving open the possibility of penalties for resending to others.
CPSIA: The children’s product safety “crisis” that wasn’t
Rick Woldenberg has been looking into it:
It’s certainly true that children have been checking books out of libraries for many, many years with only paper cuts to show for their reckless behavior. And thrift stores have sold children’s clothing and strollers for years without incident, but apparently no one knew the “dangers” that lurked within. Indeed, all of these items have been considered safe until February 10, when magically they will become unsafe unless proven otherwise.
According to reports from the field, zippers and snaps on kids’ garments are among the components most likely to flunk the new CPSIA standards. In all probability, millions of existing, already sold garments would flunk for similar reasons. Yet have CPSIA advocates pointed to even a single instance in which an American child has been poisoned by garment zippers or snaps? Could this be because kids do not as a rule detach and eat zippers and snaps? “Why aren’t we seeing many claims of injury from all the dangerous children’s products still legally available in the market?” Woldenberg asks. “Shouldn’t we be seeing outrageous injury statistics right now, currently”?
To put it differently, advocates seem to have taken a few genuine instances of injury from distinctive, atypical products (lead jewelry, powerful ball magnets) and used them to manufacture an imaginary crisis in the safety of children’s products generally. But there was never any general crisis of children’s product safety.
Following up, as part of a more general critique of CPSIA advocates’ misrepresentations — which should be read in its entirety, as it makes many other valuable points — Woldenberg analyzes the purportedly alarming data on product recalls involving children (Excel spreadsheet). Separately, Wacky Hermit has been looking at the recall figures as well. She concludes:
Of the 63 recalls that would have been prevented by CPSIA, only 1 resulted in an injury (a child ingested lead paint from a crib and had elevated blood levels of lead). This means that had CPSIA been in place for 2008, one child would have been helped.*
If we’re going to extrapolate one or a handful of injuries into a supposed national crisis, we might as well deduce a “children’s bathing crisis” from a bathtub drowning, a “children’s kitchen crisis” from a stovetop scalding or a “children’s transportation crisis” from a highway smashup. Common Room has a wrap-up which also should be read in full:
the majority of recalls (by an astronomical number) are not because a item has actually harmed anybody, but because the CPSC or the company determine that perhaps a particular item might possibly harm a child- and, while it flies against our intuitive, emotional reaction to the news that an item has lead, not all lead products are the same. The lead in a kid’s mini-bike tire valve is not as dangerous as the lead in paint on a toddler’s block. … The CPSIA treats real, imagined, and nonexistent threats exactly the same, and that is not sound policy.
*More: Jennifer Taggart writes to say that looking at past recalls does not make it possible to assess the law’s full effect since most items covered by CPSIA had not been subject to federal regulation (except under general catchall provisions). So the generalization quoted above should probably have included some limiting language to that effect.
