After all, says the named Alabama plaintiff in a suit against AT&T Wireless, what if I save every penny and don’t want to spend the rebate money the way a debit card would make me do? [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
Archive for 2009
L.A. city council: no convenience for you
Paternalism under the palms [Future of Capitalism]:
The Los Angeles City Council, having already established “a moratorium on new openings of fast-food restaurants” within a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles, is now preparing a crackdown on convenience stores that “would prohibit such small neighborhood markets from being closer than one-half mile from one another unless they sold fresh fruit and vegetables,” reports the Los Angeles Times. Link via the American Council on Science and Health.
CPSIA and the new regulatory zeal
It looks rather as if the new management at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is trumpeting some of its rigid decisions in enforcing the horrendous 2008 law — its refusal to exempt the use of harmless rhinestones on kids’ clothing, for example — as if they were something to boast about. [Washington Post; Rick Woldenberg]
Birther lawyer fined $20,000
Vexatious political litigation does not sit well with a judge. [ABA Journal, Krauss/PoL]
“…what may well be the most oppressive motion ever presented to a superior court”
According to Paul Secunda at Workplace Prof Blog, a monstrously overgrown employment discrimination dispute recently ruled on by a California appellate court helps explain “why people like Walter Olson rightly believe in some cases that litigation is just plain overlawyered“.
October 14 roundup
- Uh-huh: new report from federal Legal Services program calls for gigantic new allocation of tax money to, well, legal services programs [ABA Journal]
- “Judge: Man’s a ‘vexatious litigator'” [Cincinnati.com]
- Wisconsin governor signs bill requiring prescription to buy mercury thermometer [Popehat]
- “Injured by art?” Woman sues Museum of Fine Arts Houston after fall in artist-designed light tunnel [Mary Flood, Houston Chronicle “Legal Trade”]
- On Carol Browner and the cry of “environmental racism” (a/k/a “green redlining”) [Coyote]
- New York: “Lawyers implicated in $9 million mortgage fraud” [Business Insider]
- In Canada, as in the U.S., medical privacy rules hamper police investigations [Calgary Herald]
- Stalin’s grandson loses lawsuit in Russia against newspaper that supposedly defamed the dictator [WSJ Law Blog, Lowering the Bar, Volokh]
Marc Dreier profiled
By Bryan Burrough, at Vanity Fair:
This wasn’t the case of a man who had everything going bad, Dreier makes clear. What no one understood is that everything Dreier owned — the cars, the mansions, the yacht, the sushi restaurant, even the law firm itself — was made possible by his crimes. This was a man who went bad to have everything.
Our earlier coverage here.
Suit against Wal-Mart: You arrested me just because I left the store with items without paying
“It was obvious from the facts that she did not intend to steal any items from Wal-Mart,” says Denise Macon’s St. Clair County Circuit Court lawsuit, which seeks $150,000 plus punitive damages. Macon left the store with two unpaid items underneath her purse in the shopping cart, and claims this was just forgetfulness, but Wal-Mart called police who charged her with misdemeanor shoplifting. Macon was acquitted after a two-day trial and says she never should have been charged. The Wal-Mart security officer is a co-defendant, presumably to keep the case in state court by defeating complete diversity. (Kelly Holleran, “Shopper who forgot to pay for pajamas sues Wal-Mart over her arrest”, Madison-St. Clair Record, Oct. 7).
“Trial Lawyers Inc.: Health Hazard”
New from the Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers Inc. project, on health care and the Litigation Lobby; a few of its highlights are summarized here, at Point of Law.
Breadth of FTC blogger regs
“PatHMV”, in the Volokh comments:
…make no mistake, these regulations are broad. It’s not just that Joe has to say “I got a free bottle of detergent to review,” when he reviews that detergent. No, the FTC will have the authority to fine Joe if P&G [Procter & Gamble] periodically sends him free bottles of detergent or whatever and he ever writes about ANYTHING that P&G produces, even if they didn’t actually give him that particular product for free and didn’t even ask him to write that specific review. How much free stuff before that obligation kicks in? The regulations don’t tell us; it’s up to a “case-by-case determination” by FTC officials.
I don’t know much about detergent-blogging, so let’s substitute a couple of fact patterns more relevant to news, opinion and public affairs blogging. It’s been much asserted of late that it’s no particular burden to disclose when mentioning a newly published book or quoting from a newsworthy speech that the publisher sent you a review copy or the conference-giver let you into the hall on a press pass or its equivalent. But the regulations clearly contemplate broader disclosures than that. At some point, acceptance of such benefits will be deemed to create a relationship that must be disclosed even on other occasions, when, say, you mention an author or a nonprofit institution in a different context six months later.
An editorial in today’s New York Times, despite a bit of concessionary fluff about not wanting “to hamstring the ability of bloggers and twitterers to report and comment about the world,” enthusiastically endorses the new rules. It says not one word about the dangers of overbreadth, de minimis triviality, chilling effects, or selective enforcement. Nor (unlike the L.A. Times’s far more nuanced editorial) does it inform readers that the FTC is proposing in some respects to regulate social media more stringently than traditional media outlets such as the Times itself. Here’s the analysis from Citizen Media Law:
As noted above, a particularly remarkable feature of the “material connections” disclosure requirement is that it apparently does not apply to traditional media to the same extent that it does to online media.
The FTC’s justifications for this distinction are not entirely clear, but they appear to rely on two assumptions. First, the FTC assumes that traditional media exercises “independent editorial responsibility” in writing reviews and that bloggers and social media users may not. The FTC even suggests that reviews published on “an Internet news website with independent editorial responsibility” would be treated like those published in a traditional brick-and-mortar periodical. Guides, at 47 n.101 (emphasis added). Second, the FTC seems to assume that freebies for traditional news reporters are “reasonably expected by the audience,” whereas freebies for bloggers and influential Twitterers are not. These assumptions may be justified when the comparison is between sleazy buzz marketers and much of the traditional press, but they’re less convincing when the comparison is between serious online commentators and the offline press.
Earlier coverage here and here (& welcome Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit, Jonathan Adler/Volokh readers).
World-turned-upside-down alert: Daily Kos is making sense on the topic of how book reviewing works.
And: Daniel Kalder of the Guardian Books Blog speculates on why the NY Times’ editorial “purred with approval” of the new regs in such an “impressively superficial” way.