Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Nader’

March 7 roundup

  • What’s worse than undermining Section 230, charter of Internet freedom? Turning it all into a pinata for trial lawyers [No go, NRO; earlier on SESTA and FOSTA] Carve-out to Section 230 in name of fighting sex trafficking could erode protection for other businesses against being sued [WSJ editorial] More: Karol Markowicz;
  • “If You Owe the IRS Over $51,000, It Can Trap You in the United States” [Brian Doherty, Reason]
  • How far can a theft ring go in stealing a rental vehicle before the police step in? [related Twitter threads, Sharky Laguana and Noah Lehmann-Haupt]
  • “Federalism as a Check on Executive Authority,” panel at Federalist Society 2017 Annual Texas Chapters Conference with Caitlin Halligan, Scott Keller, Ernest Young, moderated by Hon. Jeff Brown [video]
  • Revisiting an auto scare: “Will the Corvair Kill You?” [Larry Webster, Hagerty, earlier here and here]
  • No, peacocks-in-the-airline-cabin isn’t really some failure of “fetishizing [individualism over] communal well-being.” It’s a failure of collectivized legal compulsion overriding contract and choice [David Leonhardt, New York Times; Elizabeth Preske, Travel and Leisure on underlying episode; earlier on emotional-support and other service animals]

Ralph Nader’s scheme for a Connecticut tort law museum

We have occasionally posted (here, here, and here) about the lawyer advocate’s longstanding plan for a museum in his home town of Winsted, Connecticut, dedicated to the praise and glorification of the American tort law system. The project has now dragged on fitfully through many years of economic stagnation, unexpectedly costly environmental remediation, changes of venue, and community suspicion (“a lot of empty promises”, one resident puts it), which may function as some kind of metaphor, no? [Torrington Register Citizen, Connecticut Law Tribune]

October 22 roundup

  • Unsafe at any read: new Ralph Nader novel panned by Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation [Barnes and Noble Review via Suderman, Reason]
  • Microsoft says “most, if not all” customer data from T-Mobile Sidekick smartphones has been recovered, but class action lawyers say they’re undeterred [Seattle P-I]
  • Sue them all and sort things out later? Lawsuit over Air France Airbus crash off coast of Brazil names long list of aerospace suppliers as defendants [Reuters]
  • “No cash for this clunker”: opposition mounts to proposal for Massachusetts public law school [Boston Herald editorial via Legal Blog Watch, earlier link roundup at Point of Law]
  • Ralph Lauren experiences Streisand Effect over skinny-model nastygram [Althouse, earlier]
  • High-profile L.A. plaintiff’s lawyer Walter Lack speaks under questioning about role in Nicaraguan banana-worker suit against Dole [Recorder, earlier, background] And: “Dole on a Roll: Court Declines to Enforce $97M Judgment” [WSJ Law Blog, Bloomberg]
  • Miller-Jenkins lesbian custody case, much meddled in by conservative religious groups, recalls the ways divorced dads get cut out of their kids’ lives [Glenn Sacks/Ned Holstein via Amy Alkon, background]
  • Daniel Kalder speculates on why the New York Times editorially “purred with approval” of the new FTC blogger regulations in such an “impressively superficial” way [Guardian Books Blog]. More on FTC’s semi-backtracking on the controversy: Media Bistro “Galleycat”, Publisher’s Weekly, Galleysmith. And having been hoping for ages to get a link some day from blogging legend Jason Kottke, this one will go in the souvenir file [Kottke.org]

HR 875 and local food: is Rep. DeLauro backtracking?

[Third in a series on the possible effects of proposed federal food safety legislation on small/local foodmakers and farmers. Earlier coverage is here and here; and see related post on animal-tracking proposals]

  • Could the outcry be having an effect? Until now, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Ct.) has repeatedly insisted that backyard and kitchen-table producers have nothing to fear from her bill, H.R. 875, the proposed Food Safety Modernization Act, because they do not engage in “interstate commerce”. jaybirdyamsMany observers pointed out that under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, an exceedingly broad range of agricultural and food activity (right down to the growing of grain with which to feed oneself or one’s animals) has counted as within the bounds of “interstate commerce” reachable by federal regulation.* Now, at the end of a Huffington Post piece sympathetically relaying DeLauro’s views, there comes an “Update” nodding toward the courts’ practical application of the “interstate commerce” concept and reporting that DeLauro’s staff is promising “clarifications” of the bill’s reach, perhaps even “technical corrections”, to be ready “in the next few weeks”.
  • When those corrections and clarifications appear, one crucial question will be whether they include any de minimis provisions exempting small, local, or informal producers and sellers (of course, these entities might continue to face stringent state or local regulation). As it stands now FSMA, like CPSIA before it, is notable for its lack of de minimis exclusions, as well as its failure to prescribe “scale-appropriate” principles (“tiering”, streamlined reporting, etc.) by which entities that deal in less than industrial volumes might be given the benefit of simpler and less onerous rules.
  • Given the stated views of the advocacy groups behind FSMA, I very much doubt that a revised version will in fact exempt producers of food intended for consumption within one state only. Even if it does, however, the law will still cover many persons like Harold Gundersen, who sells food from his Southwest Michigan farm at two suburban-Chicago farmer’s markets and in doing so manages to have legal contact with three states in all:

    “We’re highly regulated by state government and federal government,” he said. … [Gundersen] pays $65 twice a year to an inspector from DuPage County, who comes up to Michigan to inspect the apple butter and cider that he sells.

    Gundersen is indignant at that last requirement because he doesn’t even process the apple butter and apple cider — he takes his apples down to an Amish man in Indiana who seals them in cans and jugs. Because that facility is already visited by Indiana inspectors, Gundersen sees no reason for a DuPage inspector to take a second look.

    “There is nothing for her to look at,” Gundersen said. “She looks at my jars and says, ‘OK, I’ll sign this stuff.'”

    Through much of the country — in most of the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, for example — food grown within a radius of (say) 100 miles will often have crossed state lines.

  • FactCheck’s lullaby of reassurance on the subject contains the following passage aimed at readers who might be perceiving FSMA as a far-reaching power grab by the federal government, or something like that:

    The bill has 41 cosponsors** and has been endorsed by major food and consumer safety organizations, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Food & Water Watch, and The Pew Charitable Trusts. Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit organization that advocates for clean water and safe food and is headed by a woman who used to work for Public Citizen, the consumer group founded by Ralph Nader.

    twinslettuceWell! If a bill has 41 cosponsors, it must have been well vetted, right? (CPSIA had 106). And its backers include not only Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America — both instrumental in bringing us the CPSIA debacle — but also a group headed by an alum of Nader-founded Public Citizen. It’s not as if Public Citizen was the acknowledged leader of the Washington coalition that pushed for CPSIA and has defended it ever since, right? Oh wait.

    Center for Science in the Public Interest? That’s the outfit that’s called for federal regulation of the use of salt in foods, and its busybody litigiousness has long furnished copious material for this site. Pew Charitable Trusts (is it now OK for charitable foundations to support legislation?) has long had its hand in a hundred activist causes. And so forth. This is not reassurance; to coin a phrase, it’s de-assurance.

  • Deputy Headmistress: “I would believe these consequences were ‘unintended’ if I didn’t see the same consequences from government action over and over again.”
  • No, I don’t agree with the chain-email theories that insist that Monsanto, the giant agribusiness firm, is masterminding the push for this law. (Or the counter-push against it, depending on who you talk to. Maybe both!). Since the company’s name is always coming up, however, here’s a link to what the company’s own spokesman had to say on the lefty site Crooks and Liars, which was not quite what I expected (though I’m not sure what I did expect).
  • Brian Doherty writes about the furor at Reason (with comments here) and John Schwenkler also weighs in at his blog. And in the comments section of our initial post, check out what “Pelly” has to say about yogurt in Nova Scotia.

*Of course, it’s possible that a statute might not grant the federal regulator as much authority as courts would be willing to uphold as constitutional. HR 875 incorporates by reference the FDA’s current definition of “interstate commerce”. I’m not an expert in this area, but various documents suggest that the FDA already asserts much authority over items and processes whose production or use does not cross state lines.

**Among the 41 co-sponsors are such figures as Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who as a co-sponsor and defender of CPSIA has been ferociously unsympathetic to distress cries from small businesses arising from that law.

Microblog 2008-11-05

End of an error?

Ralph Nader’s “big campaign stop at Dartmouth College on Monday drew an audience of eight. The Connecticut Valley Spectator reported the news on its obituaries page.” (Mark Steyn, NRO “Corner”, Oct. 9). But note: other coverage of what was presumably the same event gives the total attendance at 40, specifying that under ten persons “appeared to be Dartmouth students”, which may be where the “eight” came from.

Lerach: “Everybody was paying plaintiffs”

“A prominent class-action lawyer facing sentencing today for secretly paying plaintiffs to file securities lawsuits, William Lerach, is suggesting that the under-the-table practice was widespread and was not isolated to the firm he helped run for decades, Milberg Weiss. … Despite the highly publicized travails of what was once America’s leading class-action law firm, there has been little public discussion of whether other firms may have emulated the secret payment scheme Lerach and other Milberg lawyers devised.” Notwithstanding a request by Lerach’s lawyers that the letters from his friends and supporters asking clemency be sealed from public inspection, most of the letters have become public, revealing the identities of such entirely unsurprising Lerach backers as Ralph Nader (who in this one particular case did not favor prison for white-collar criminality) and Ben Stein, known to readers of these pages (though apparently not to many readers of his New York Times column) as an expert witness hired repeatedly by Lerach to help portray sued companies’ conduct in the harshest possible light. (Josh Gerstein, “Lerach Says Payoffs Were Widespread”, New York Sun, Feb. 11). Another letter writer: Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) And the list of letter-writers (PDF) includes “two redacted names in between Gordon Churchill and Charles Cohen”, leading to speculation that one or both surnames might be “Clinton”. It seems unlikely, though, that either prominent ex-White House resident would have risked the sort of negative publicity involved even as a gesture to acknowledge Lerach’s past favors. (CalLaw “Legal Pad”, Feb. 8)(corrected shortly after posting to reflect release of most letters by stipulation of parties, not judicial order). Update 4 p.m. EST: sentence is 24 months.

Class-action suit against New England Patriots

By reader acclaim: “A New York Jets season-ticket holder filed a class-action lawsuit Friday against the New England Patriots and coach Bill Belichick for ‘deceiving customers.'” Carl Mayer of Princeton Township, N.J., is suing over revelations that the Patriots unlawfully videotaped signals from Jets coaches in a Sept. 9 game. Mayer and his attorney, Bruce Afran,

calculated that because customers paid $61.6 million to watch eight “fraudulent” games, they’re entitled to triple that amount — or $184.8 million — in compensation under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act and the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.

Mayer and Afran, who consider themselves public interest lawyers, have been thorns in the side of New Jersey politicians for years, filing lawsuits and demanding investigations to advance their grievances. They are well known in the state but generally have had little success in their causes.

Both have lost bids for elected offices, and Mayer once served as a presidential campaign adviser to Ralph Nader.

(Dennis Waszak Jr., “Jets fan sues Pats, seeks $184 million”, AP/Boston Globe, Sept. 28; ProFootballTalk “Rumor Mill”, Sept. 28). More: Sadly, No!.