- “Lawyer Who Spotted Broker Fraud Rewarded With SEC Ordeal” [Business Week via Bader]
- Reactions to the feds’ antitrust case against e-book publishers and Apple [Yglesias, Wright, Stoll, more]
- NYT retrospectively backs Nixon efforts to deny tax exemption to lefty groups, or maybe ire at tea party adversaries just makes the paper less than consistent [Caron, background, more]
- House Judiciary testimony on the evils of consent decrees binding the government to pursue regulation in certain ways [Andrew Grossman]
- “Law Firm Claims It Had No Control Over $464 Mln Fee Request” [WSJ Law Blog]
- “California’s ethnic identity police” [Mickey Kaus]
- Role, economic incentives of special masters in litigation overdue for reformist attention [Ted/PoL]
Archive for March, 2012
Iowa sued on charge of subconscious bias
Class action lawyers are suing the government of Iowa on an theory that “subconscious” bias resulted in employment discrimination against black employees and job-seekers. “The plaintiffs — up to 6,000 African-Americans passed over for state jobs and promotions dating back to 2003 — do not say they faced overt racism or discriminatory hiring tests.” Instead, they are relying on the work of an expert witness who is the developer of something called an Implicit Associations Test meant to measure subconscious bias. The controversy invites courts to revisit some issues of statistical and indirect proof that came up, without necessarily being resolved, in the landmark Supreme Court case of Wal-Mart v. Dukes. [AP via Justin Shubow, FedSoc Blog]
Regulating taxi competition out of existence
I’m quoted by Scott Reeder on the regulatory obstacles a Bloomington, Ill. woman faces in trying to start a taxi business. [Reason]
In Boston today
I’m speaking at 1 p.m. today at Boston University Law School to the school’s Federalist Society chapter about my book Schools for Misrule. The event is open to the public. See you there!
From comments: web accessibility trips up a state medical board
Thanks to reader Hugo Cunningham for spotting this in a new Boston Globe report on the failure of the Massachusetts state medical board to post physicians’ disciplinary problems and other performance issues online:
Another major omission has resulted from a Catch-22-like requirement in state law. Russell Aims, the … chief of staff
[of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine], said the board used to post digital copies of its disciplinary orders [for medical malpractice]. But an online accessibility law requires that documents be available in a text-to-speech format for the visually impaired.Because the PDF format of the disciplinary records is not compatible with text-to-speech software, Aims said, the law dictates that such records cannot appear in the database. If the visually impaired cannot access the information, then no one can.
Law school roundup
Many links that tend to harmonize with arguments made in Schools for Misrule, along with a few others:
- Judges criticize law reviews: “The high bench vs. the ivory tower” [Richard Brust, ABA Journal]
- “The fervor of the sixties penetrated law schools quite passionately” [Ann Althouse quoting an introduction to clinical legal education]
- More on forthcoming Brian Tamanaha book, Failing Law Schools [ABA Journal]
- “The Coming Crash in Legal Education: How We Got Here, and Where We Go Now” [Richard W. Bourne, SSRN via Kenneth Anderson/Volokh] How law, medicine and architectural schools joined the academy [Richard Neumann, Jr./SSRN via Caron]
- How lucrative are the sidelines a lawprof can develop, such as expert witness work? It varies greatly, but one star’s NYC condo is for sale for $15.9M [Julie Zeveloff, Business Insider]
- “Lawsuits against law schools weak: experts” [Reuters]
- “Obama hugging Derrick Bell” video: neither newsy nor likely to damage the President’s image, and why again is Prof. Bell supposed to be a more alarming connection than Prof. Ogletree himself? [Breitbart, Hinderaker, Cooke/NRO, and an HLS reminiscence from David French at NRO]
Great moments in law firm management?
According to the Sun-Sentinel, managers at the Deerfield Beach, Fla. real estate law firm of Elizabeth Wellborn fired 14 employees on Friday for wearing orange clothing. According to the report, an executive had been informed that the workers were wearing orange as a protest, but several employees told the newspaper that they knew of no protest and that they customarily wore orange on paydays so that they would appear as a group at a happy hour after work.
If the story checks out as reported — the law firm was recorded as having declined comment — expect to hear rumblings about how it refutes the American legal principle of “employment at will,” though it doesn’t actually refute that principle any more than the tale of a wastrel heir refutes the principle of inheritance.
“Trivializing hate”
David Link on the conviction of Rutgers student Dharun Ravi over his mistreatment of eventual suicide victim Tyler Clementi [Independent Gay Forum; earlier here, here, here, etc.] (& Greenfield)
P.S. James Jacobs and Tish Durkin were among contributors to a recent roundtable on hate crime laws at the NYT’s “Room for Debate”.
Clarifying Florida lawyers’ position
According to what seems to be the sense of many in the Florida legal profession, doctors and their patients should not have the right to enter enforceable arbitration agreements before the fact to resolve disputes, but lawyers and their clients should have the right to enter enforceable agreements before the fact to limit liability for excessive charging of legal fees. Thanks for clarifying! [White Coat, scroll; earlier]
Don’t
…break and enter into the house of your client’s husband to retrieve her possessions [Albuquerque lawyer Raymond Van Arnam, fined, sentenced to weekend jail time and ordered to pay restitution, but not deprived of his law license, on charges of misdemeanor criminal trespass and misdemeanor larceny; Above the Law]