- Cute: Outgoing Massachusetts Gov. Patrick shifts 500 managers to union status, now incoming GOP successor can’t touch ’em [Fox Boston]
- Despite opposition from police union, Montgomery County, Md. eventually managed to correct disability scam [Washington Post editorial, Ed Krayewski]
- “Retired CUNY professor gets $560K a year pension” [New York Post]
- “L.A. Cannot Afford Budget Busting Labor Agreements” [Jack Humphreville, CityWatch L.A.] Major changes needed to Nevada public collective bargaining laws [Las Vegas Review-Journal] “States And Cities Coming To Grips With Economic Reality” [Brett Joshpe, Forbes]
- “Public-Sector Unions and Government Policy: Reexamining the Effects of Political Contributions and Collective Bargaining Rights” [George Crowley/Scott Beaulier, Mercatus, PDF]
- “Newark forced to rehire tenured teacher despite new state law” [NJ.com]
- Time Magazine says not-especially-controversial things about tenure system, gets attacked by teachers unions [Weekly Standard] Throwing their money and influence around in elections [RiShawn Biddle on Democracy Alliance, same on AFT]
Posts Tagged ‘New Jersey’
Court dismisses suit by man who fell off chair in lawyer’s office
New Jersey: Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Dennis O’Brien has granted summary judgment to the defendant law firm of Wolff, Helies, Duggan Spaeth and Lucas and dismissed Thomas Hickey’s suit over his injuries in falling off a reclining chair in its office during a deposition. Hickey’s lawyers had argued that the law firm as owner and maintainer of the chair was negligent not to check its settings for safety before each use. The court found that whatever hazards might inhere in the chair’s low-tension setting, Hickey had been sitting in it for 90 minutes which was “sufficient time for him to learn the chair was designed to tilt and to appreciate its tension setting.” [Ashley Peskoe, NJ.com]
More chronicles of office-chair falls here (law office, Palm Beach, Fla.), here (law office, New York, N.Y.), here (NYC police detective shot by self in tippy chair), and here (U.K. law firm ad).
Nick Gillespie interviews Lenore Skenazy
For Reason TV. On a pending New Jersey case: “I think it’s the first case of letting a kid wait in a car that’s going to any state supreme court.” Lenore’s now-classic appearance at Cato, “Stop Bubble-Wrapping Our Kids!,” can be viewed here.
Why one New Jersey man doesn’t fight
A successful whistleblower, he’s featured on the reality-TV show “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and one can only commend his pacific spirit, at least as regards physical combat:
I don’t fight. I think it’s stupid. I’m trained as an attorney. If I want to hurt you, I’m going to sue you. I’m going to leverage your house. I’m gonna give you three years of hell in a courtroom. I’m going to bleed you dry financially, and I’m going to humiliate you as I depose you for eight hours and make you my bitch.
Torts roundup
- Celebrated as the “most insane amusement park ever,” New Jersey’s notorious Action Park reopens, minus some of its most extreme hazards [National Post]
- Insurance industry study finds attorneys getting into higher share of auto crash claims [IJ]
- Medical monitoring cases, once seen as wave of future, have not fared well in court [Steven Boranian, DDL]
- “Florida high court’s irrational ‘rational basis’ rejection of state tort reform undermines Rule of Law” [William W. Large, Washington Legal Foundation]
- For a sense of where tort pressure is being felt, list of litigation groups at AAJ (including newly formed groups) often provides clues;
- Los Angeles jury finds team partly liable in $14 million negligent security award for man beaten in Dodger Stadium parking lot [AP]
- “Perhaps this is the first of a wave of hose-entanglement cases” [Lowering the Bar, Louisiana]
Rush-hour traffic causes N.J. woman anxiety
She’s suing Fulton Financial, her employer, under New Jersey’s state equivalent of the ADA for its resistance to accommodating her by switching her to less stressful commuting hours [Courier-Post]
Schools roundup
- Put off by constant urine tests, eighth grader skips honor society [Duncannon, Pa.; my Cato post, PennLive]
- Wouldn’t you know when Mike Bloomberg does come out and say something excellent — about intellectual freedom in the university, as part of a Harvard commencement address — New York Times ignores him [John Leo/Minding the Campus, Dennis Saffran/City Journal]
- “Verbal or Written Permission Could be Required For College Sex” [L. A. Weekly]
- Hope for Camden students has come not from New Jersey’s massive Abbott school funding litigation, but from charters [Jim Epstein, Reason]
- “Schools have been getting less violent over the last 20 years,” much less violent in fact [Timothy Lee, Vox, Jesse Walker, Reason, Josh Blackman and Shelby Baird, SSRN, on the “shooting cycle”]
- Arnold Kling writes a commencement speech: “I am going to talk about community service … and why I am against it.”
- “Walking to School? Yeah, There’s a Federal Program for That” [David Boaz, Cato]
Food roundup
- The federal school lunch initiative as experienced by school districts in rural New York [Sarah Harris, North Country Public Radio]
- Europe’s Ugly Fruit movement wants to reclaim for consumers tons of food rejected for appearance, sometimes by marketers and sometimes by regulators [NYT]
- Expect uptick in food labeling suits after Supreme Court decision approving suit in Pom Wonderful v. Coca-Cola [Glenn Lammi, WLF; FedSoc Blog; more, Mayer Brown]
- “Biggest secret” of glutamic acid, of umami and MSG fame, “may be that there was never anything wrong with it at all” [BuzzFeed]
- Cottage food win: New Jersey lawmakers unanimously back right to sell homemade goodies [Institute for Justice]
- Celebrity-driven “Fed Up” film is “strident stalking-horse for a Bloombergian agenda” [Jeff Stier, Baylen Linnekin]
- Young persons, especially college students, drink much more than they used to. Right? Wrong [Michelle Minton, Andrew Stuttaford]
N.J.: “No disability pension for ex-officer who staged shooting”
In November 2010 Camden Sgt. Jeffrey Frett radioed for help after receiving a superficial gunshot wound in the leg. Police discovered his wife near the scene and the officer later admitted “that he and his wife had concocted the incident. Officers injured in the line of duty receive a pension that pays 66 percent of their salary tax-free for life.” In the mean time, however, Frett had applied for a disability pension on a separate basis, namely the aftereffects of a 2008 car accident while on duty. Now the state pension board has turned down his request, with one of its members publicly questioning why the officer was permitted to plead to a very minor charge to resolve the staged-shooting episode. [Philadelphia Daily News]
“Denial of Disabled Lawyer’s Request For ‘Shadow’ Assistant Wasn’t Bias”
How far can an employee go in ADA demands before finally going too far? [Charles Toutant, New Jersey Law Journal]
The lawyer, a deputy attorney general known as E.H. in court papers, made 30 requests for special treatment in the course of his first year on the job—ranging from reserved indoor parking, adjusted timing on elevator doors, a grab handle in the rest room and transportation to court appearances—all of which were granted.
He sued because his 31st request—for a personal assistant who would “function as his shadow”—was refused.
On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that the Attorney General’s Office did not violate laws against disability discrimination. The court said deference was due the findings of the Civil Service Commission that an assistant was not warranted because it would not help E.H. address his weak job performance.
When the Americans with Disabilities Act was new, there was hopeful talk among some disability advocates of what some wary employers nicknamed “two-for-one” hiring — demands that a second employee be put on payroll to assist the first. While courts have generally declined to go along with this idea, it is sobering to think the issue might be close enough that the worker’s very poor job evaluations might have mattered one way or the other.