April 20 roundup

  • Lawsuit claim: MERS mortgage system is just a racket to deprive court clerks of recording fees [Baton Rouge Advocate]
  • More reporting on hospital and community drug shortages [Washington Post; my post last summer]
  • Roger Pilon: How the “judicial activism” debate changed [Cato at Liberty]
  • Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, spoken of as a future national political figure, has rather a lot of ties to trial lawyers [Political Desk]
  • Problems with DOJ e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple [Declan McCullagh]
  • One bogus campaign feeds into another: “ALEC Unfairly Demonized Over ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws” [Bader, CEI “Open Market”]
  • New Point of Law discussion on class actions with Ted Frank and Brian Fitzpatrick;
  • Today’s best spam comment? “With all the thistledown floating almost on the net, it is rare to look over a locate like yours instead.”

One Comment

  • You know, the MERS thing has some facial plausibility: the whole use of MERS already makes a complete hash of traditional debtor-creditor relationships and facilitates the multifarious nonsense arising from repackaging of mortgage-backed notes. It’s easily plausible to posit that the system is designed to evade recording fees (though I’m not a RICO expert and am thus not sure if that suffices). Interesting claim.