Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘WO writings’

“Whoppers with sleaze”

In today’s Washington Times: my take on the growing aggressiveness of “public health” officialdom in pushing scare campaigns about everyday consumption risks, including Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial new campaigns against sweetened drinks and (even more misleadingly) salty foods, as well as the FDA’s proposal to put corpse photos on cigarette packs. It begins:

The Puritans held that reminders of mortality had an edifying effect on the living, which is why they sometimes would illustrate even literature for young children with drawings of death’s-heads and skeletons. Something of the same spirit seems to animate our ever-advancing movement for mandatory public health. The Food and Drug Administration has just floated the idea of requiring cigarette packs to carry rotating pictures that would include corpses – yes, actual corpses – as well as close-ups of grotesque medical disorders that can afflict smokers.

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s superactivist Health Department has begun public ad campaigns about the health risks of everyday foods, including a controversial YouTube video portraying soda drinkers as pouring globs of shimmery yellow fat into their open mouths and – just out – an ad showing an innocent-looking can of chicken-with-rice soup as bursting with dangerous salt. Whether or not you live in New York, you’re likely to be seeing more of this sort of thing because the mayor’s crew tends to set the pace for activist public-health efforts nationwide; the Obama administration, for example, picked Bloomberg lieutenant Thomas R. Frieden to head the influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why should government use our own tax dollars to propagandize and hector us about the risks of salted snacks, chocolate milk or the other temptations of today’s supermarket aisle? The Bloomberg-Obama camp seems to feel that government dietary advice is superior to other sources of information we might draw on because (1) it’s more objective, independent and pure of motive and (2) it can draw on better science.

Whole thing here, and more on Bloomberg’s anti-soup crusade at the New York Post, Reason, and ACSH. More: My Food My Choice.

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The egg and I

The New York Times invited me to contribute to its “Room for Debate” feature on the big egg recall and here is an excerpt from my reply:

…Advocates cite the current outbreak, at last report limited to two related Iowa egg farms, as reason to enact pending legislation that would intensify federal regulation of food-making in the name of safety. Large food and agribusiness companies have generally signed off on most of the new proposals as acceptable. Many smaller producers, on the other hand, suspect there will be less room for them, and for local variety generally, in this reassuring new world of business and government cooperation.

I go on to cite the CPSIA debacle, in which a safety enactment devastated small producers of children’s goods while entrenching some of the dominant industry players. Read the full post here. Some other perspectives worth checking out: Ronald Bailey, Ira Stoll, Ann Althouse. (cross-posted from Cato at Liberty; and welcome Nick Gillespie/Reason “Hit and Run” readers).

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June 3 roundup

  • I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty tying together prosecutors’ demands for business forfeiture for immigration violations with proposals to criminalize employee misclassification;
  • I can’t believe it’s not a lawsuit: margarine class action melts away [Cal Biz Lit]
  • Guess what, your asbestos trial is scheduled in 11 days [Korris, MC Record]
  • “This website has to be removed”: mayor of Bordentown, N.J. wants to shut down online critic [Citizen Media Law]
  • What is a think tank and what does it do? I and others contribute answers at Allen McDuffee’s Think Tanked blog;
  • No surprise here: Insurer offers policy to cover things that go wrong in medical tourism, but won’t cover USA residents or facilities [Treatment Abroad via White Coat]
  • Pennsylvania law curbing med-mal forum-shopping disappoints lawyers who used to head for Philly or Wilkes-Barre [Sunbury, Pa. Daily Item via, again, White Coat]
  • New Haven pizzeria busted: owners let their kids work at restaurant [Amy Alkon]

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“Spano’s Suicide: Housing Plan Doomed County Exec”

The New York Post has now picked up a slightly shortened version of my City Journal piece on the housing lawsuit that contributed to a voter revolt in Westchester (cross-posted from Point of Law).

P.S. The Weekly Standard “Scrapbook” feature discusses the piece, as do John Derbyshire and Ron Coleman. And reader Paul Rath writes: “We face the same issue at the other end of the state, near Buffalo. Unfortunately, we have the same race-baiting and over-simplified arguments in our press here as well.” For more on how towns expose themselves to litigation if they attempt to earmark sub-market-rate housing for local residents or workers, see this Oct. 23 New York Times report on Connecticut.

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“Where did you get that keychain?”

[Bumped Monday a.m. with added links for readers who missed it on Friday]

My new article on the Federal Trade Commission’s very bad new rules on endorsements and social media is now up at City Journal.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the FTC held a conference call for reporters to dismiss concerns as unfounded. “They are not rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law,” said Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection — which may be narrowly true but is hollow reassurance at best, since the guidelines plainly are meant to signal where the commission intends to aim its future enforcement efforts, and since not all bloggers will be willing to defy the guidelines on the assumption that courts will refuse to go along with the FTC’s interpretations.

“We are not going to be patrolling the blogosphere,” Engle also claimed. “We are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.” And: “We’re not interested in playing gotcha in the gray areas.” And yet the guidelines are again and again written in such a way as to reserve the Commission’s discretion to do any and all of these things. Ann Althouse, as before, is rightly scornful:

Oh, good. You’re not planning…

I’m so relieved.

“We’re not interested in playing gotcha in the gray areas.”

Not yet. But once the law is on the books, will you never feel tempted? Nothing will motivate you to venture into the gray?

Of course the FTC, like other regulatory agencies, is frequently drawn into enforcement not because it has been patrolling some area as such, but because some interested party (a competitor, a disgruntled employee, an ideological critic, a litigation opponent) calls the attention of enforcement staff (or the press) to the purported violation. Is the FTC really saying, “Yes, we’ve declared blogging in such-and-such a manner to be illegal, but we’re planning to look the other way?”

More on the rules: New York Times (reactions in world of online fashion journalism); Dear Author (new rules “will be rife with abuse and misuse and uneven application”); David Johnson/Digital Media Lawyer; BNA TechLaw (endorsing agency reassurances); Robert Siegel, Mind Your Own Damn Business Politics (guidelines “might bite traditional media after all”).

P.S. Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group, notes that in recent days “the FTC has been furiously backtracking about their implications, in an apparent attempt to soothe the blogosphere”, but calls the reassurances “disingenuous”. More: PaidContent.org (IAB considers the rules constitutionally dubious under First Amendment); Ars Technica. And some more new links:

  • According to one report from a children’s literature conference, the FTC’s Engle says Amazon bookstore arrangements must be re-disclosed anew with each linked post, but — in a seeming departure from what colleague Cleland said a week ago — otherwise “independent” book reviewers need not disclose free review copies [A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy]
  • Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s WSJ (FTC backtracking in face of reaction; “Do employees of a company have to disclose the fact of their employment every time they comment on its products through their personal Facebook accounts?”)

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Now at Forbes.com: “Inside the Health Care Bill”

Forbes is just up with a new, improved version of my piece on the amazing trial lawyer bonanza that someone quietly tucked into last week’s draft of the health care bill. An earlier version of the piece ran at Overlawyered on Friday. The Forbes version takes note of the names of the House members who were pushing for and against the idea on the Ways & Means panel. Michelle Malkin gives it a recommendation here.

P.S. Some kind words, as well as a link, from Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog (calling us “the granddaddy of legal blogs”). Plus: Don Surber, Charleston (W.V.) Daily Mail, Bainbridge, Wood/ShopFloor, Riehl World View, Bader/CEI “Open Market”.

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