I’ve got a new op-ed for Bloomberg View (first time I’ve appeared there) calling last week’s venture in presidential clemency “mingy and belated” and, if aimed at prison overcrowding, “like trying to bail out Lake Michigan with a paint can.” On Thursday President Obama commuted the sentences of eight inmates caught up in the crack cocaine sentencing fury, all of whom had already served at least 15 years for what were often relatively peripheral involvement in the drug trade. Clarence Aaron, for example, was serving three life sentences without possibility of parole for a first-time nonviolent offense. Many advocates from all political viewpoints pushed for Aaron’s release, among them Debra Saunders who wrote dozens of columns on his case in the San Francisco Chronicle over the past 12 years (Also in Minneapolis Star-Tribune and other papers, and AP roundup of opinion columns; & Scott Greenfield, Pardon Power).
Posts Tagged ‘WO writings’
New guest column: “SEC Unveils Expensive Rule on CEO Pay Ratio”
I’ve now got a guest column at PointOfLaw.com on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule (earlier) requiring public companies to calculate and make public the ratio between chief executive officer (CEO) pay and the pay of a median worker. For companies with international operations in particular, the calculation may be quite difficult (it might depend on assumed exchange rates, for example, to say nothing of noncash benefits) and it might also depend on the ability to gather in one place certain types of data whose export is forbidden by some privacy-sensitive foreign laws. And all for what, aside from stoking demagogy? Or was that the point of the Dodd-Frank mandate that the SEC is now implementing?
I have fond memories of launching Point of Law during my years at the Manhattan Institute, and I was its primary writer for many years, so it is especially rewarding to contribute a guest column there. Under the leadership of MI’s Jim Copland, the site (and MI in general) has become especially active in corporate governance, shareholder and SEC controversies.
New at Reason: “A step toward Facebook.gov?”
I’ve got a new piece at Reason.com expanding on my earlier reports on the new pilot program by which Facebook will give Maryland school officials a dedicated channel with which to seek takedown of posts and other material that in their view contributes to the problem of “cyber-bullying.” I think the program represents a disturbing step toward a wider government role as arbiter of what is allowed to be said in social media, the more so as it will be difficult or impossible to know whether takedown decisions at Facebook’s discretion are an entirely neutral application of the service’s “Community Standards” or are swayed in part by the wish to keep government bodies happy. I quote various press accounts, some affording additional insight into the existing and proposed takedown process, as well as commentary by Scott Greenfield, TechDirt, and the Daily Caller in which I’m quoted. Some additional commentary: Joy Pullmann/Heartland, Josh Blackman. More: Instalanched, thanks Glenn Reynolds.
“Can restaurants take your keys if you are intoxicated?”
The Maryland high court recently declined an invitation to discard the common-law rule against server liability in a case where a patron of a Gaithersburg craft brewery got on the road and caused a fatal accident. Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney wrote in favor of the wider liability rule, and I responded in a letter to the editor just posted at the newspaper.
Detroit’s decline, and Krugman’s explanation
Having to watch what bad government has done to my home city of Detroit is a bit like Princess Leia having to watch her home planet destroyed. The fate of the Motor City, writes John Steele Gordon, is America’s “greatest urban disaster that didn’t involve nature or war.” But wait: here’s distinguished New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to inform us that it’s not “fundamentally a tale of fiscal irresponsibility … For the most part, it’s just one of those things that happens now and then in an ever-changing economy.” Just one of those things! I reply — with a hat tip to Cole Porter — at Cato at Liberty. (& George Leef (“A tornado is ‘just one of those things’ because is has no human cause. When a city goes bankrupt, it has many human causes”), Ed Driscoll)
P.S. On the role of long-serving mayor Coleman Young, see pp. 12-13 of this Ed Glaeser/Andrei Shleifer paper (PDF). And here’s a HuffPo tag on Detroit corruption.
Protecting minorities by empowering prosecutors?
In my new CNN.com piece I argue that we shouldn’t let anger over the Zimmerman acquittal shred the rights of criminal defendants: “awarding new powers to prosecutors will likely mean that more black people will end up behind bars.” [CNN](& Steele; thanks for Instalanche to Glenn Reynolds)
P.S. Some may wonder whether a toughening of hate crime laws might be an exception to the general rule that minorities have much to fear from a broadening of grounds for prosecution. Leaving aside whether the hate crime issue has any relation to the Martin/Zimmerman case (few lawyers believe Zimmerman could be found guilty of a hate crime, and when the FBI investigated him last summer it found no evidence of racial motivation; more on this from Michelle Meyer), per FBI statistics for 2011, blacks are actually overrepresented among persons charged with hate crimes, at 21 percent compared with 14 percent of general U.S. population.
Now available: “Sentence First, Verdict Afterward”
Commentary has un-paywalled my July article on the feds’ “blueprint” for how colleges and universities must deal with charges of sexual misconduct. I explain why despite a retreat to a seemingly less extreme interpretation of the law, the dangers remain that the Department of Education and Department of Justice will arm-twist academic institutions into stacked disciplinary methods and new curbs on speech. Read it here (and also consider subscribing to Commentary, gates aside). Earlier here, here, etc.
Two points worth noting: first, while the Obama administration has pushed the new plan hard, the wider trend of gradually stepped-up federal supervision over university life has been going on for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. There is not much resistance: university officials and organized professors themselves are relatively half-hearted about sticking up for their own institutional autonomy. Indeed, the federal prescriptions represent in some ways a consolidation of power by already-powerful elements within the academy, as opposed to a perceived hostile takeover from the outside. In the same July issue of Commentary, Philip Hamburger has an excellent article outlining how university researchers have for decades now tamely submitted to federally prescribed controls — overseen by so-called IRBs, or institutional review boards — over such relatively innocuous forms of “human-subjects research” as interviewing politicians and observing passersby in public places. In 2007, David Hyman wrote for Cato’s Regulation magazine on “The Pathologies of Institutional Review Boards.”
P.S. Much more on IRBs from George Mason’s Zachary Schrag (book, another interview, more, blog).
A Supreme Court “libertarian moment”?
And with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the pivot? It just might have happened this term, or so I conclude in a new Cato post.
Campus sex “blueprint”: a convenient typo?
Defending the Obama administration’s new rules governing discipline at colleges and universities, ThinkProgress makes it all sound more reasonable by erroneously reporting that the crackdown is on “unwanted contact”; the actual phrase is “unwanted conduct,” with “verbal conduct,” i.e. speech, very much part of that [Will Creeley, FIRE]
In the July Commentary I have an article on the controversy over the new blueprint (“Sentence First, Verdict Afterward“). It’s behind a paywall, but you can purchase it individually, or better yet subscribe to Commentary which is full of other great articles as well.
Maryland v. King: Scalia and the genetic panopticon
Yesterday the Supreme Court decided it was okay to require arrested persons to submit to DNA testing meant to match them to unsolved crimes. [Maryland v. King; Robert Kaiser, Washington Post; Nina Totenberg, NPR] In an impassioned dissent joined by liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that an important civil liberties line is being crossed as the Court now approves suspicion-less searches of persons at a stage at which the law presumes them innocent, without any primary motivation except to gather evidence of unrelated crime.
I’ve got an article in The Daily Beast this morning on the Scalia dissent and its warnings that lawmakers may soon embrace a genetic surveillance state in the name of security. Excerpt:
In his dissent, Scalia warns of such a “genetic panopticon.” (The reference is to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison laid out so that inmates could be watched at every moment.) And it’s closer than you may think. Already fingerprint requirements have multiplied, as the dissent points out, “from convicted criminals, to arrestees, to civil servants, to immigrants, to everyone with a driver’s license” in some states. DNA sample requirements are now following a similar path, starting reasonably enough with convicts before expanding, under laws passed by more than half the states as well as Maryland, to arrestees. (“Nearly one-third of Americans will be arrested for some offense by age 23.”) Soon will come wider circles. How long before you’ll be asked to give a DNA swab before you can board a plane, work as a lawn contractor, join the football team at your high school, or drive?
With the confidence that once characterized liberals of the Earl Warren–William Brennan school, Scalia says we can’t make catching more bad guys the be-all and end-all of criminal process:
“Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail. … I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”
More: I’ve got this related piece in Newsweek on the Justices’ shifting Fourth Amendment alignments. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the Instalanche. And other commentaries from Daniel Fisher, Lowering the Bar (on the Jeremy Bentham angle; Scalia’s dissent mentions Bentham twice; Scott Greenfield; Julian Sanchez; Jacob Sullum). And Mississippi has just announced plans to match offspring of underage mothers to responsible fathers through DNA database checks based on umbilical cord blood. [NPR]