Posts Tagged ‘WO writings’

“Ban the Box” laws don’t work. So why do lawmakers love them so?

Elected officials across the aisle agree in applauding “ban the box” laws. Too bad they don’t work, I argue in my new piece at Cato. Earlier research found the laws didn’t improve employment of ex-offenders and actually harmed some groups. Now a new study finds no benefit for recidivism — and once again, harm to some groups.

With studies finding such laws ineffective even as to government hiring, “how much less justification is there for using them to constrain the freedom of private employers that have never incarcerated anyone”? Especially when directed at non-government employers, such laws “are a triumph of feel-good sentiment over economic rationality, practicality, and in the end the interests of the intended beneficiaries.” Whole piece here.

L.A. official’s tweets help NRA win First Amendment case

Last month a court struck down Los Angeles’s ordinance intended to discourage city contractors from dealing with the National Rifle Association (NRA), ruling it a First Amendment violation intended to chill speech and association. An amusing feature: the bill’s sponsor just couldn’t help grandstanding on Twitter and elsewhere about taking down the NRA, which provided the court with valuable evidence of the city’s intent. Moreover, the gun rights group has been making headway against similar efforts in San Francisco and New York state (led there by Gov. Andrew Cuomo) to target its pocketbook. I explain in a new piece at National Review.

The downfall of #ExxonKnew

It was a hashtag prosecution, a social media campaign posing as a legal case: #ExxonKnew. And like yesterday’s media balloon become today’s litter, its deflated remains floated back down to earth last week in a New York courtroom.

National Review asked me to write a longer piece on last week’s Exxon acquittal (earlier, and previously):

In a 2003 case called Nike v. Kasky, no less a liberal authority than Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer warned that it was dangerous to freedom of speech to arm ideological adversaries with legal power to bring fraud charges against businesses based on those businesses’ public statements about contentious issues….

In his full, scathing opinion, Judge Ostrager rejected each of the state’s themes. “ExxonMobil’s public disclosures were not misleading.”…

New York’s prosecution of Exxon — a legal vendetta against a target chosen for essentially political reasons — deserves to be studied in law schools for years to come. But not for the reasons its authors once hoped.

Whole thing here.

Exxon beats the New York rap

“If a state like New York can bend and twist legal concepts like that of securities fraud to carry on an essentially political vendetta against a corporate enemy, how safe are other businesses?” My new Cato post reports on a judge’s scathing rejection of a case that should never have been brought, the New York Attorney General’s attempt to hang fraud charges on Exxon over its statements on climate change.

Appeals court strikes down Maryland law regulating online political ads

I’m in the Baltimore Sun discussing a bad Maryland law passed in response to the furor over Russian trolling on social media. I wrote about it earlier when a federal district court struck the law down, and now a Fourth Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, has agreed that it is unconstitutional. Excerpt:

Exposing foreign governments’ meddling in U.S. politics is a worthy goal. Infringing on First Amendment freedoms is no way to go about it….

[After the law passed] Google immediately stopped hosting political ads in Maryland, a step particularly unhelpful to newcomer candidates, for whom advertising may be one of the few effective ways to boost name recognition. Other platforms, including some Maryland newspapers, also faced a tough position as the effective date of the law drew near. Rather than publish disclosures that might expose to competitors’ eyes confidential information about their ad rates and viewer reach, they might prefer just to immunize themselves by turning down political and issue ads in the future as a category.

Whole thing here.

Nevada’s antitrust deal sheds light on Elizabeth Warren’s big plan

T-Mobile and Sprint, the #3 and #4 wireless carriers, would like to combine so as to more effectively compete with Verizon and AT&T, the two dominant players in the cellular service market. Various states went to court against the merger, arguing (dubiously) that the combination would harm consumers and drive up prices. And now, via Reuters, this:

Also on Monday, Nevada said it would withdraw from the lawsuit in exchange for early deployment of the next generation of wireless in the state, creation of 450 jobs for six years and a $30 million donation to be distributed by Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and aimed at helping women and minorities, Ford’s office said.

How blatant can you get? The best touch, of course, is the $30 million fund with which to ingratiate lucky beneficiaries around the state. (“The recipients of these grants for the use of the charitable contribution will be at the discretion of Nevada’s attorney general” — that is, the same AG Ford who filed and settled the state’s case, and from whose press release is excerpted that sentence.) It looks a lot like the familiar cozytown set-up in many cities in which permission to build a large development or win a public contract just might call for a hefty donation to a local nonprofit with ties to the mayor and council.

Notwithstanding the best efforts from some quarters to develop per se rules in hopes of generating clear and predictable legal outcomes, antitrust law remains a world of subjective interpretation in which government office-holders are left with great discretion regarding how and against whom to wield enforcement power. Whether you want to call it logrolling or use a less flattering term like “extortion,” the temptation is to trade off antitrust leniency for some of the other sorts of favors business might be able to render government actors.

All of which brings us to presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s and other candidates’ new proposals for antitrust, which a CNBC headline accurately reports (as to Warren’s) “would dramatically enhance government control over the biggest U.S. companies.” In particular, the proposals would invite the government far more deeply into oversight of business practices, including refusal to share “essential” facilities with competitors, pricing goods below the cost of production, and much more, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

It’s hard to know whether Sen. Warren sees all this new arbitrary discretion as a bug, or a feature, in her enormous plan. Either way, an accumulation of power that tempting will sooner or later attract appointees seeking either a political whip hand over the U.S. corporate sector, a source of payouts like that in Nevada, or both. [cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

Great moments in media concentration law

This is just absurd: to comply with federal regulations barring owners of daily newspapers from also owning local broadcast stations, the owner of the venerable Dayton Daily News in Ohio may knock it down to three-times-a-week publication so that it won’t count as a daily anymore. Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post spotted the story, Cox Media Group outlined the plan in a press release a few weeks ago, and Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab has more:

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily….

Did you get that? To strengthen the local news ecosystem in Dayton, the government is making its biggest newspaper publish less.

The rules date back to 1975 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted regulations barring cross-ownership of local broadcast and newspaper properties while grandfathering in existing arrangements. It was never a good rule, but progressive social critics then as now traced countless social ills to media concentration and for-profit ownership of the press (what’s new these days is that populist conservatives crusade against the corporate media too).

Don’t blame today’s FCC. Two years ago the agency voted to scrap the decades-old newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules, recognizing that the local news market had gone through convulsive changes in the meantime, with new media sources cutting deeply into ad revenues and the economics of newspaper publishing taking one deep hit after another. (Local broadcasting economics has suffered too, even if not as badly.) But opponents sued, and in September a Third Circuit panel struck down the deregulatory effort, a move that immediately called into question the terms of a pending deal transferring partial control of the large Cox Media Group, which got its start long ago with the venerable Dayton paper.

Others, such as Jonathan Rauch, have pointed out that antitrust laws may need easing anyway if newspapers are to organize successful ways to finance journalism in the online economy. And as we’ve warned before, there are special dangers in unleashing antitrust law on the media sector, where it can leave government with a corrupting influence over whether opposition papers are profitable and who gets to own them. But does anyone really think Dayton residents are better off if their local newspaper stops publishing every day?

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

SCOTUS declines to intervene in Sandy Hook gunmaker case for now

I joined the Lars Larson Show on Tuesday to talk about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing a suit against Remington over the Sandy Hook massacre to proceed for now [earlier]. The current suit, as green-lighted by the Connecticut Supreme Court earlier this year over a dissent from three of its seven justices, claims that Remington violated the broad provisions on deceptive marketing of a state consumer protection law, the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA). It should be emphasized that the case is still at an early stage and that the Justices will probably be presented with further opportunities to pronounce on its compatibility with the federal law that pre-empts most gun suits, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).

I’ve got a new post up at Cato at Liberty taking a more extended look at the ruling and what lies ahead for gunmaker litigation.

Hate speech laws? No thanks, we’ll stick with the First Amendment

Watch out when Establishment figures “declare that they’ve changed their mind on free speech and now think there should be less of it,” I write in my new piece at Cato:

This new Washington Post opinion piece (“Why America needs a hate speech law”) is by Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine and the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016. In that post, he was charged with representing America’s values to the world.

Honestly, could Stengel’s argument be any weaker? “Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. … it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.”

If the prospect of violence by offended groups is what causes us to censor, we are well on the way toward closing down speech at the whim of whichever mobs, here or abroad, decide to be violent….

Whole thing here.