- Court rebukes EEOC in big sex harassment class action against trucking firm [Memphis Commercial Appeal]
- Union protects some dodgy educators: “Found to Have Misbehaved With Pupils, but Still Teaching” [New York Times]
- Spain changes its labor law [Global Post]
- Employment-law blogs debate employment at will [Jon Hyman]
- James Sherk of Heritage on proposed Employee Rights Act;
- Unlawful under Contracts Clause to alter public employee pensions? Really? [Secunda, Workplace Prof; Barnes v. Arizona State Ret. Sys., Ariz. Super. Ct., No. CV-2011-011638, 2/1/12]
- Coalition challenges Connecticut governor’s executive order aimed at unionizing home health aides [Michael Tremoglie, Legal NewsLine]
Posts Tagged ‘constitutional law’
April 11 roundup
- “Public pool owners struggle to meet chair-lift deadline” [Springfield, Ill. Journal-Register, earlier]
- Punitive damages aren’t vested entitlement/property, so why the surprise they’d be cut off in an administered Chrysler bankruptcy? [Adler]
- More on how Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization would chip away rights of accused [Bader, Heritage, earlier]
- Defending sale of raw milk on libertarian principle shouldn’t mean overlooking its real risks [Greg Conko/CEI; Mark Perry on one of many heavy-handed enforcement actions against milk vendors]
- More tributes to longtime Cato Institute chairman Bill Niskanen [Regulation magazine (PDF), earlier]
- Asbestos lawyers wrangle about alleged swiping of client files [Above the Law]
- “Nathan Chapman & Michael McConnell: Due Process as Separation of Powers” [SSRN via Rappaport, Liberty & Law]
Judicial activism for me, but not for thee
From Glenn Reynolds’s readers:
“Rather hilariously, David Dow, the author of the Newsweek piece calling for the impeachment of the Supreme Court if they overturn the health care law, is the author of America’s Prophets: How Judicial Activism Makes America Great.” Only the right sort of judicial activism. Impeach the rest!
More on the “MarburyGate” presidential gaffe from Thom Lambert and David Bernstein.
April 4 roundup
- N.Y. Times editorial flays Stand Your Ground, but dodges its (non)-application to Martin/Zimmerman case; Washington Post blasts same law, doesn’t seem to realize Florida homicide rate has gone down not up; chronology as of Sunday’s evidence [Frances Robles, Miami Herald] On the disputed facts of the case, it would be nice if NYT corrected its misreporting [Tom Maguire, more, yet more]
- Lawprof Michael Dorf vs. Jeffrey Toobin on president’s power not to enforce a statute [New Yorker letter]
- Israeli law bans underweight models [AP/Houston Chronicle]
- Is price-fixing OK? Depends on whether the government is helping arrange it [Mark Perry]
- Minnesota man arrested, jailed for neglecting to put siding on his house [KSTP via Alkon]
- Once lionized in press, former Ohio AG Dann now fights suspension of law license [Sue Reisinger, Corp Counsel, earlier]
- How California is that? “Killer got $30,000 in unemployment while in jail, officials say” [LAT]
February 22 roundup
- Florida courts allow probe of finances of MDs who treat many injury plaintiffs [Dolman Law Group; Crable v. State Farm]
- Booster clubs: “Does Title IX Reach Voluntary Donations?” [Joshua Thompson, PLF, earlier here, here]
- Freedom to Discriminate in Choice of Roommates: 9th Circuit case of Fair Housing Council v. Roommate.com [Eugene Volokh; related from David Bernstein h/t commenter wfjag]
- PI firm employee “disliked sending clients to [chiropractors] because insurers were more reluctant to settle those claims” [ABA Journal]
- “Bill introduced to de-criminalize the Lacey Act” [Paul Enzinna, PoL; earlier on Gibson Guitar and wood imports here, here] More: Reason.tv on the raids [Balko]
- “Australia: A Cautionary Tale of Litigation Financing?” [WSJ Law Blog]
- Constitutional law book review: Jay Wexler, “The Odd Clauses” [Greenfield, Lowering the Bar]
“Our Constitution Is Out of Step with the Rest of the World”
And thank goodness for that, observes my Cato colleague Roger Pilon. Promising more while in practice delivering less, other countries’ constitutions tend to be less careful in enumerating and limiting government powers, even as they promise all manner of (often unsustainable) entitlements. More: Mike Rappaport and relatedly, on the academic left, Mark Tushnet (among his colleagues “debate has ended over whether constitutions should include …rights” of the social/economic sort that depart from U.S. constitutional practice).
“Never let law profs near the Oval Office”
My Cato colleague Gene Healy points out that President Obama is the fourth chief executive who also taught constitutional law, joining William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton. “Taft did comparatively little damage, but the rest hardly inspire confidence that familiarity with constitutional scholarship encourages fidelity to the national charter.” [Washington Examiner] He lets me have a parting shot:
My Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson, author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America”, explains that “legal academia rewards cleverness in coming up with strained arguments for ideologically favored (or just expedient) positions; marginalizes as eccentric thinkers who favor original understanding as a guide” to the Constitution and often reduces law to “politics by other means.”
Unfortunately, that training has served Obama well.
Citizens United, two years out
In the Washington Post, Boston College lawprof Kent Greenfield clears up some misconceptions:
Citizens United did not hold corporations to be persons, and the court has never said corporations deserve all the constitutional rights of humans. The Fifth Amendment’s right to be free from self-incrimination, for example, does not extend to corporations. … Humans gather themselves in groups, for public and private ends, and sometimes it makes constitutional sense to protect the group as distinct from its constituent humans.
The question in any given case is whether protecting the association, group or, yes, corporation serves to protect the rights of actual people. Read fairly, Citizens United merely says that banning certain kinds of corporate expenditures infringes the constitutional interests of human beings. The court may have gotten the answer wrong, but it asked the right question.
Another reason to protect corporate rights is to guard against the arbitrary and deleterious exercise of government power. If, for example, the Fifth Amendment’s ban on government “takings” did not extend to corporations, the nationalization of entire industries would be constitutionally possible. The Fourth Amendment prohibits the FBI from barging into the offices of Google without a warrant and seizing the Internet history of its users. A freedom of the press that protected only “natural persons” would allow the Pentagon to, say, order the New York Times and CNN to cease reporting civilian deaths in Afghanistan.
The actual Citizens United case, as distinct from the later caricature, was over whether the government had a constitutional right to punish private actors for distributing a video critical of a prominent politician (Hillary Clinton) before an election, which helps explain why the ACLU and many other civil libertarians took the pro-free-speech side. More: Caleb Brown at Cato.
Constitutionality of class actions
Northwestern U. lawprof Martin Redish, a well respected academic, has marshaled a careful argument that important elements of the modern American class action lawsuit are unconstitutional. So why, Mark Herrmann wants to know, have defense lawyers not yet taken the opportunity to bring Redish’s theories to judges’ attention in an actual case?
New Liberty Fund law site — and an interview
The great people at Liberty Fund have just launched a new website called Library of Law and Liberty that promises to be of much interest. Among its debut features: a substantial audio interview in which Richard Reinsch, editor of the site, asks me about my book Schools for Misrule and law schools’ role in reform movements since the Progressive Era. Outstanding legal scholars Michael Greve (AEI) and Mike Rappoport (University of San Diego) will be blogging for the site. Other front-page attractions include Michael Greve discussing his new book The Upside Down Constitution, my Cato colleague John Samples reviewing Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s new book on executive power, Ilya Somin on federalism and individual freedom, and Philip Hamburger and commenters on judicial review.
You can listen to my audio interview on Schools for Misrule at this link.