- Peer-to-peer car sharing platforms could reduce the costs of car usage, unless elements of rental car industry manage to strangle it through regulation [Jonathan M. Gitlin, ArsTechnica on Illinois Gov. Rauner’s veto of a bill to cripple startups] Are we headed toward a legal requirement that cars be designed to sense that a driver has high blood alcohol and not function then? Does it matter whether the car is self-driving? [Nicole Gelinas]
- “11th Circuit rages against ‘incomprehensible’ shotgun complaint, concludes lawyer’s intent was delay” [ABA Journal]
- Quackery and bluster define the lawsuit filed by NY, MD, NJ, and CT attorneys general against Congress’s curtailment of state and local tax (SALT) deduction [Reilly Stephens; more, Howard Gleckman, Tax Policy Center]
- “Conservative/Libertarian Faculty Candidates Are Hired By Law Schools Ranked 12-13 Spots Lower Than Equally-Credentialed Liberal Applicants” [James Cleith Phillips via Paul Caron/TaxProf]
- Coming next week: I’m set to host and moderate a Sept. 20 forum at Cato in D.C. on the Indian Child Welfare Act. Featured are three lawyers who have been involved in high-profile ICWA litigation, Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute, Matthew McGill of Gibson Dunn, and Charles Rothfeld of Mayer Brown and Yale Law School [details and registration; event not livestreamed, but video to be posted later]
- And now for something completely different: “Charles Evans Hughes and Chevron Deference” [Gerard Magliocca]
Posts Tagged ‘law schools’
June 27 roundup
- Judge orders Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to take CLE lessons as sanction for disclosure and discovery missteps [Lowering the Bar, Jonathan Adler]
- In 7-2 decisions, Supreme Court of Canada finds it “proportionate and reasonable” limitation on religious liberty for Ontario and British Columbia to refuse rights of legal practice to grads of conservative Christian law school which requires students to agree to refrain from sex outside heterosexual marriage [Kathleen Harris, CBC, Caron/TaxProf, Trinity Western University v. Law Society of Upper Canada, Jonathan Kay/Quillette, earlier on Trinity Western]
- “Gratiot County, Mich. officials foreclose on 35-acre parcel worth $100k over unpaid $2k tax debt. They sell the property for $42k and keep $2k to cover the tax bill—and keep the other $40k as well. District court: ‘In some legal precincts that sort of behavior is called theft.’ Motion to dismiss denied.” [John Kenneth Ross, “Short Circuit” on Freed v. Thomas, United States District Court, E.D. Michigan]
- UK: “Obese people should be allowed to turn up for work an hour later, government adviser recommends” [Martin Bagot, Mirror]
- “Law Schools Need a New Governance Model” [Mark Pulliam, and thanks for mention]
- “Until 1950, U.S. Weathermen Were Forbidden From Talking About Tornados” [Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura]
Accreditation process pulls law schools leftward
Mark Pulliam at Liberty and Law explores a theme I raised in Schools for Misrule: the ABA accreditation process for law schools is ideologically fraught and pushes the schools toward certain prescribed views of social justice. Even for well-established, high-ranking schools the process can be an arduous one, propelled by “what the ABA euphemistically calls ‘site visits,’ but would more commonly be referred to as compliance inspections.” And the standards are not neutral — in particular not Standard 206, which establishes “diversity and inclusion” as one of the association’s accreditation desiderata. Under that standard, site visitors and reviewers investigate the institution’s “commitment” to diversity, evaluating that commitment in light of the “totality of the law school’s actions and the results achieved.”
Schools are required, for example, to “create a favorable environment for students from underrepresented groups” The vagueness and open-endedness of such standards — might it contribute to a less favorable environment, for example, for a school to be short on course offerings or visiting speakers in a given identity-related area? — is sure to “invite subjective application, prompting schools to ‘over-comply’ to avoid an adverse finding.” No wonder schools cluster at the safe end by maintaining well-staffed diversity and inclusion departments, prioritizing demographic over intellectual diversity in faculty hiring, and cultivating attention to identity categories in student life. The piece kicks off what Pulliam says will be a periodic series.
May 2 roundup
- Celebrity political defamation suits I: Stormy Daniels sues President Trump [Ken White and Marc Randazza at Popehat, strong language x2]
- Celebrity political defamation suits II: Roy Moore sues accusers [Paul Gattis/Al.com, Gabriel Malor on Twitter]
- Our knowledgeable readers have been having a discussion in comments about Wisconsin’s butter-grading rules and whether they have a rational basis, and Joshua Thompson of Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents Minerva Dairy, has written a post to explain more, which also has kind words we appreciate (“does a magnificent job pointing out and explaining the seen and unseen costs of our legal system”);
- USC lawprof Simkovic’s screed on campus-speech controversies ascribes sinister motives to Eugene Volokh and Prof. Josh Blackman, not to mention my own book Schools for Misrule [David Bernstein and more, Paul Horwitz, Popehat on Twitter, Rick Hills, William Jacobson/Legal Insurrection, Scott Greenfield]
- “Gabriel Over the White House,” Hollywood’s jarringly weird 1933 paean to one-man rule, aired on TCM April 27 [Jeff Greenfield, David Boaz, Gene Healy and Caleb Brown video]
- “Keep Facial Recognition Away From Body Cameras” [Matthew Feeney, Cato]
Campus puritanism, cont’d
If the WSJ paywall kept you from reading my piece last month on Yale admissions and social justice, an unpaywalled version is now up courtesy of the Cato Institute.
Related: “Then, he asked me what my ‘exit plan’ was. He explained that there were certain safe ways to exit the building.” Later: “‘A student shouted out “F–k the law.” This comment stunned me. I replied, “F–k the law? That’s a very odd thing. You are all in law school.”‘” Josh Blackman speaks at CUNY Law School, the city-sponsored law school dedicated to one particular and controversial ideology, that of “public interest law.” [Blackman’s blog post; Robby Soave, Reason; William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection; Eugene Volokh (“seems like an organized attempt to keep Blackman from speaking…The protesters’ standing on the same stage as the speaker, I think, would also not be tolerated for other events”); Eric Turkewitz (“Is their training so shoddy that they don’t grasp there are differences of opinion on how a law or the constitution is read?…Why are they afraid of words?”)]
Also related: Keith Whittington of Princeton speaks at Cato on his new book, “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech” [Ilya Somin, Jonathan Adler]
April 11 roundup
- For best effect, read it aloud: “Do YOU appear in the form of water droplets? Are YOU found on grass and windows in the morning? If so you MAY be dew condensation.” [Andy Ryan]
- “Bezos could get out of Trump’s kitchen by telling the editors and reporters at his newspaper to shut up about the President.” [John Samples]
- Wave of ADA web-accessibility suits hit banks: “N.Y. lawyers sue 40-plus companies on behalf of blind man in a month” [Justin Stoltzfus, Legal NewsLine] More: Jonathan Berr, CBS MoneyWatch;
- “Law schools should not continue hiring faculty with little to no practical experience, little to no record of scholarship, and little to no teaching experience. ” [Allen Mendenhall, Law and Liberty]
- U.K.: “Couple claiming compensation for food poisoning exposed by holiday selfies” [Zoe Drewett, Metro]
- Federal judge: “every indication” that prominent Philadelphia personal injury firm “essentially rented out its name in exchange for referral fees” [ABA Journal]
April 4 roundup
- “Former employee of red light camera company that bribed Chicago official (who is now serving 10 years) turns informant, seeks sizable cut of the $20 mil the company paid to settle the city’s suit. Seventh Circuit: The chutzpah!” [John K. Ross, Short Circuit, on City of Chicago ex rel. Rosenberg v. Redflex Traffic Systems Inc.]
- “Why Religious Organizations Shouldn’t Lose Tax-Exempt Status Based on Public Policy, Post-Obergefell” [Sally Wagenmaker via Caron/TaxProf]
- The regulated American truck operator: “For the liberty minded professional driver, the situation looks bleak.” [“Gordilocks,” Glibertarians]
- Practice pointer: don’t make closing argument in a condition that could score .337 on a Breathalyzer afterward [Mike Frisch, Legal Profession Prof; Jefferson County, Ky.]
- Not a total shocker: study finds student editors at law reviews tend to accept articles matching their own ideologies [Prof. Bainbridge]
- Per a United Nations expert, 1) adopting fiscal austerity programs may put countries out of compliance with international human rights; 2) to remain in compliance, countries may be obliged to undertake crackdowns on financial privacy meant to extract more taxes. Oh, international human rights, how elastic thou art [Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.N.]
Free speech roundup
- Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky: SCOTUS considers state ban on political apparel at polling places [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- Under American law governments cannot sue persons for defamation, and “slander of title” won’t do as substitute ploy for lawyer representing city of Sibley, Iowa [Jacob Sullum]
- “Someone Trying to Vanish My Post About Someone Trying to Vanish Another Post” [Eugene Volokh]
- “Free Speech and the Administrative State”, George Mason/Scalia Law Center for the Study of the Administrative State conference with videos;
- “Influencer Marketing Remains in FTC’s Crosshairs” [M. Sean Royall, Richard H. Cunningham, and Andrew B. Blumberg, WLF]
- Worth recalling: it was legal academia’s Critical Race movement that helped reinvigorate Left support for censorship and speech repression [Alan Dershowitz]
March 21 roundup
- Popehat’s Patrick tells the story of how, representing a bank, he resisted a serial litigant rather than pay her off [Twitter thread]
- News of suits motivated by attorneys’ fees may be slow to reach Harvard [“Bill of Health”, dismissing “idea of opportunistic lawsuits to enforce the ADA” as “somewhat farfetched” since federal law does not grant damages]
- Tim Sandefur on the Indian Child Welfare Act [Cato Regulation magazine, earlier]
- $3.5 million gift from leading trial lawyer Elizabeth Cabraser launches new Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice [Berkeley Law School]
- “The South African government will soon discover the extremely complex technical headache of expropriating land without compensation.” [Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo, Quartz]
- Speak not of trolls: “Lawyer who filed 500-plus copyright cases in federal court calls $10K sanction ‘judicial error'” [ABA Journal]
Higher education roundup
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “There’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing.” Jeffrey Rosen: “Are some of those criticisms of the college codes valid?” Ginsburg: “Do I think they are? Yes.” [Atlantic] Related: Stuart Taylor Jr. & KC Johnson, Real Clear Politics; Linda LeFauve & Stuart Taylor Jr. on the long-deflated yet still influential Lisak campus rape study;
- “Forcing Students to Apply to College Is a Bad Idea” [George Leef, Martin Center, earlier]
- “Congress Should Deregulate Private Universities, Not Regulate Them More” [John McGinnis, Liberty and Law on bill to restrain colleges from applying discipline for membership in a fraternity or sorority]
- “What’s more, any program proposed by a Maryland university must be reviewed by the monitor to ensure it will not harm the historically black schools.” [Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, Washington Post]
- 88-year-old NYU psychology professor denounced to bias cops for curricular choices on gender politics, not using students’ preferred pronouns [Dean Balsamini/New York Post, Alex Domb, Washington Square News on case of Prof. Edgar Coons] Ideological state of the law schools not good [Mark Pulliam/Misrule of Law, and thanks for mention]
- “No one should be entitled, though, to a particular mix of holiday celebrations.” [Eugene Volokh on Loyola (Chicago) controversy]