The son of the former mayor had sued over being kicked off the university’s golf team. [“Campus Notes” News & Observer blog, WSJ Law Blog; earlier coverage]
Archive for March, 2010
U.K.: great moments in animal welfare law
“Great-grandmother given an electronic tag and curfew for selling a goldfish to a 14 year-old”, Telegraph:
Joan Higgins, a pet shop owner, was caught selling the fish to the teenager in a ‘sting’ operation by council officials. She was then prosecuted in an eight month court process estimated to have cost the taxpayer more than £20,000.
Under new animal welfare laws, passed in 2006, it is it illegal to sell goldfish to under 16s. Offenders can be punished with up to 12 months in prison.
Mrs Higgins, 66, who thought the boy was much older than 14, escaped jail but was instead ordered to wear an electronic tag and given a night time curfew. She was also fined £1,000 by Trafford Magistrates Court. … [Her son] said the punishment she had received would prevent her from attending her weekly bingo sessions as well babysitting her one month-old great grandchild.
Teen commits suicide, 9 classmates charged with felonies
“See if you can figure out how the shock and sorrow of the young girl’s death got processed into criminal charges against 9 teenagers and whether this reaction is helpful or just.” [Ann Althouse]
More: there’s not enough in the article to reach conclusions either way, says Scott Greenfield.
20,000 individual movie downloaders sued
Film biz follows RIAA path? “In what may be a sign of things to come, more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington D.C. federal court for copyright infringement. A handful of cases have already settled, and those that haven’t are creating some havoc for major ISPs.” [Eriq Gardner, THR Esq.]
March 31 roundup
- Funniest string cite ever? Judge Alex Kozinski has a field day [Lowering the Bar]
- Lawyer: panic attack explains why I settled my bias complaint for a mere $350K [ABA Journal]
- Curious EU heritage sign: “plants, wild animals and leprechauns (little people) are protected in this area” [SkyNews]
- “She asked me if she should go back to earning $25,000.” Caught in the poverty trap [Megan Cottrell, Urbanophile]
- Jury rejects claim that formaldehyde emissions from FEMA Katrina trailer caused man’s throat tumor [Courthouse News]
- Update: McDonald’s settles nude-photos-left-on-cellphone case [OnPoint News, earlier]
- Canadian psychiatrist accused of human rights violations in South Africa suppressed public discussion of his past for years by threatening to sue news organizations [Guardian]
- Judge throws out Texas law limiting quick solicitation of accident victims [Houston Chronicle]
Scotus140: Supreme Court Twitter competition
As part of a charity effort for the Connecticut bar foundation, Daniel Schwartz has invited Twitter users to summarize a single Supreme Court case of their choice in a single Tweet, that is, in 140 characters or less. Some of the more amusing results:
@gideonstrumpet Gideon v. Wainwright: helping poor people get convicted WITH the assistance of counsel since 1963.
@GoldnI Brown v. Board of Ed: “Hey Eisenhower, just kidding about the conservative thing. Love, Earl Warren.”
@conlawgeek Gonzales v. Raich: “Dude, but I have a valid prescription for… uh… medical… uh… what were we talking about?”
@Popehat Lawrence v. Texas: “….not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
@ThirdTierAmie Buck v. Bell: You’re dumb, your mama’s dumb, even your mama’s mama is dumb! Three generations of imbeciles are enough!
@AdamBonin Pleasant Grove City v Summum: Put up your wacky religious monument in your own damn park, freaks.
@david_m_wagner Wickard v. Filburn: Wheat. Wheat. The Constitution’s dead, they’re talkin’ about wheat.
@coolasmcqueen U.S. v. Nixon: We have the privilege of informing you that you ARE a crook
My own contribution:
@walterolson Bates v. State Bar of Ariz.: OK guys, go ahead and advertise for clients. Might boost our traffic down the road.
[cross-posted from Point of Law]
Sorry, locavores
We know you’re looking for small-scale, locally produced meat, but it’s been marginalized thanks to regulation among other causes:
The state [Vermont] has seven operating slaughterhouses, down from around 25 in the mid-1980s, [state meat inspection official Randy] Quenneville said. One is a state-inspected facility, meaning that meat inspected there cannot be sold over state lines. …
Mr. Quenneville said a number of small, family-owned slaughterhouses started closing when strict federal rules regarding health control went into effect in 1999.
Not entirely unrelatedly, here’s an article on underground restaurants in Boston, a trend that has spread from Portland, Ore.
Lawyer tampers with trial exhibit, dodges sanctions by pleading age
At first lawyer J. Kendall Few, trying a case against Kia Motors alleging seat belt failure, denied tampering with the seat belt in an exhibit car so as to produce an effect prejudicial to the automaker’s case. “Later he admitted he had moved the seat belt, but said he thought he had returned it to its original position. ‘I’m 70 years old, and I’d been through a fairly hard day. I went down there, and I don’t remember everything as good as I did when I was 25 or 30,’ Few said.” A federal judge said it was a “close call” but declined to levy sanctions, finding “there was no conclusive evidence that Few had acted in bad faith or committed intentional misconduct”. [ABA Journal]
Appalling ACTA: a treaty worth stopping
David Post at Volokh Conspiracy sounds the alarm over the many bad provisions in a new intellectual property pact, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” arrived at through a “truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf.” Margot Kaminski at Balkinization details how the measure if adopted would for the first time criminalize a wide swath of noncommercial personal copying behavior, mandate statutory damages that would grossly over-compensate many rights holders for infringements, and reduce de minimis thresholds under which border officers currently overlook small quantities of infringing material on travelers’ laptops and smartphones. And those are just a few highlights of a long and disturbing list of provisions. Earlier here.
P.S. Much more from Andrew Moshirnia at Citizen Media Law. And at the Mercatus Center’s Surprisingly Free, a podcast with Canadian ACTA critic Michael Geist.
EPA vs. older homes
New federal regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, aimed at curbing exposure to dust that might contain lead paint, will result in federal certification of many building-maintenance specialties and step up pressure against informal unlicensed suppliers of handyman and carpentry services:
On April 22, the Environmental Protection Agency is slated to enact rules requiring EPA certification for contractors working on homes built before lead paint was banned in 1978. The rule, aimed at limiting exposure to lead, applies to carpenters, plumbers, heating and air conditioning workers, window installers and others.
Two-thirds of U.S. homes and apartments (78 million out of 120 million) were built before 1978, says Calli Schmidt of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), citing Census Bureau data. She says half of the pre-1978 homes don’t contain lead but the rule, depending on implementation, might apply to all of them.
Making it unlawful to practice home renovation without federal certification will assuredly reduce the supply and raise the cost of renovations, the extent of the shift varying perhaps from one community to another depending on how professionalized the relevant markets already are. One result of shifting the cost curve will be to encourage teardowns of otherwise sound housing stock. Some other properties that remain occupied will simply go without renovations and repairs, with unpredictable (but probably not good) consequences for health and safety. [USA Today via Nick Gillespie, Reason] As for the prospect that the federal government will apply any sort of common-sense appraisal of the actual benefits of spending millions to avoid infinitesimal or nonexistent lead exposures, I’ll believe that when they fix CPSIA. More: WSJ (sub-only)