Glenn Reynolds is updating a list of relief charities. There’s a Hurricane Katrina Help Wiki modeled on the one created after the Asian tsunami. Michelle Malkin rounds up other useful things that can be done. And Terry Teachout has compiled this comprehensive list of Katrina blogs.
Archive for August, 2005
“Law and lawyers post-Katrina”
Among its other horrific effects, the hurricane is going to pose a perhaps unprecedented challenge to the resilience of a state legal system, by inundating or otherwise destroying the records of many of Louisiana’s busiest courts, law firms and other participants in the legal process. Prof. Bainbridge has details (Aug. 31). More: Texas Lawyer reports that the administrators of the Fifth Circuit courthouse in New Orleans prudently had staffers bring some files up to the second floor as the storm approached.
“Supersized nanny state”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Debra Saunders is no admirer of California AG Lockyer’s new lawsuit (see Ted’s Aug. 29 post) charging that restaurants have broken the law by failing to post announcements that french fries and other common foods contain naturally occurring acrylamides (Aug. 30). More: Jonathan Wilson posts here and here.
“Doctors and nurses, your liability is covered…”
“…you can come here and practice.”
— Guest spokeswoman on New Orleans’s WWL-TV, this evening, urging volunteer medical personnel to report to emergency centers to tend to evacuees and hurricane victims (live broadcast, 8:47 p.m. Central)
PFAW vs. John Roberts
A People for the American Way report attacking the Supreme Court nominee is “something of a bore”, “lacks any nuance that would make it credible”, “scattershot”, a “less than compelling document” based on “utter dogmatism”, opines Richard Epstein. Ah, but don’t underestimate the group’s powers to stir up media trouble for Roberts, replies Stephen Presser as the two continue their featured discussion of the Supreme Court vacancy at Point of Law.
State Supreme Court races
Campaign spending on them soared in 2004 to $24.4 million, more than twice the previous record set in 2000. (Robert Tanner, “TV Spending for State Supreme Court Campaigns Soared in 2004”, AP/Law.com, Jun. 28).
RFK Jr. and Katrina
AEI Vioxx lawsuit panel
On September 7, the AEI Liability Project will be hosting a panel on the recent Ernst v. Merck case (Aug. 22, Aug. 19 and links therein) and its implications for pharmaceutical regulation and the justice system. I’ll be speaking, along with Jack Calfee of AEI; Dan Troy, former chief counsel of the FDA and currently at Sidley & Austin; and Evan Schaeffer, who, along with co-counsel from other firms, has a plaintiffs-side docket of Vioxx cases from his Madison County base of Schaeffer & Lamere.
Kutztown student “hacking” case
Kutztown issued laptops to its students, but installed an administrative program on the computers to prevent students from accessing “inappropriate” Internet sites and instant messaging and to allow remote monitoring of how students were using the computers. At the same time, the school posted the password to the administrative program on the back of the computer, and it was a matter of time before students figured it out. The school district has responded by having the police file felony hacking charges against thirteen of the students. Thankfully, the juvenile probation office recognized the difference between a mountain and a molehill, and cut a community-service deal. (Yvonne Lee, “Student Hackers Get Off With Community Service”, All Headline News, Aug. 26; pro-student site).
Religious disbelief and child custody
Eugene Volokh (Aug. 29) finds particularly egregious — and at odds with the First Amendment — the practice of courts in various states of “discrimination in favor of religious parents and against irreligious ones, or in favor of more religious parents and against less religious ones, in child custody cases, on the theory that it’s in the child’s ‘best interests’ (that’s the relevant legal test) to be raised with a religious education.” For more on civil disabilities of freethinkers, see Jan. 21-23, 2000.
P.S. Reader John Steele Gordon writes to say, “It seems to me that the ACLU could much more profitably direct its jihad against religion at these cases, which do a great deal of harm to real people, than at carvings of the Ten Commandments on public property, which do not.” And here’s quite a bit more from Eugene.
Yet more: Reader Carl Fink, in response to John Gordon’s comment above, defends the ACLU:
The ACLU is just as likely to assist a religious person whose right to practice has been denied, as a nonreligious person whose tax money is being spent to promote a religion. To name one recent case, in State of New Jersey v. Lloyd Fuller, an ACLU attorney submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing for the rights of potential jurors to wear traditional Muslim (or by extension other religious) dress without being excluded from juries (see link).
What we object to is government enforcement of any religious policy, including religious EXCLUSION.