Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for May, 2013

Furor continues over federal campus speech code

George Will:

When the Education Department was created in 1980 (Jimmy Carter’s payment to the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, for its first presidential endorsement), conservatives warned that it would be used for ideological aggression to break state and local schools to the federal saddle. … Most of academia’s leadership is too invertebrate and too soggy with political correctness to fight the OCR-DOJ mischief. But someone will. And it is so patently unconstitutional that it will be swiftly swatted down by the courts.

Hans Bader in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In a guide to help colleges comply with Title IX, the Education Department has stated that “conduct of a sexual nature” includes many kinds of speech, such as “circulating or showing e-mails or Web sites of a sexual nature,” “displaying or distributing sexually explicit drawings, pictures, or written materials,” and “telling sexual or dirty jokes.” …

The government says the narrower definition of harassment laid down by the courts [i.e., liability only for failing to act against conduct that is “severe” and objectively offensive] applies only in sexual-harassment lawsuits, not in its Title IX investigations or the standard colleges must apply to their students or faculty. Colleges must declare “any unwelcome conduct” to be a reportable offense.

William Creeley, FIRE:

Unlike the 2001 Guidance [from OCR], the “blueprint” requires the broad definition to be adopted verbatim as university policy. …

Here’s why mandating this new distinction [between “hostile environment” and sexual harassment more generally] is important — and why it harms student and faculty rights. By separating “sexual harassment” from “hostile environment” harassment, OCR has also separated “sexual harassment” from the set of evaluative factors it uses to determine whether a hostile environment has been created. These factors include whether the conduct affected a student’s education, whether the conduct was part of a pattern of behavior, the identity of and relationship between the individuals involved, the context of the conduct, and more. By reviewing these and other factors to determine whether conduct created a hostile environment—and was thus sexual harassment—schools were able to separate truly harassing conduct from merely offensive or unwanted speech.

Earlier here and here.

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Food roundup

  • NYT op-ed: let’s pay folks to cook at home, they’ll never figure it out otherwise [Amy Alkon on Kristin Wartman attempt to revive old Wages for Housework campaign with foodie spin] “You don’t have a moral obligation to cook” [Maggie Koerth-Baker]
  • “The Making of the Obesity Epidemic: How Food Activism Led Public Health Astray” [Helen Lee, Breakthrough Institute via Julian Morris] Research suggesting benign effects of slight overweight slammed by public health profs who fear it might complicate desired policy narrative [Nature; more from Trevor Butterworth on Walter Willett vs. Katherine Flegal] Lessons of Denmark’s fat tax [Christopher Snowdon, IEA]
  • Will ‘elf-and-safety spell an end to Gloucestershire’s annual Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling event? [Telegraph]
  • Bloomberg’s NYC health dept. can’t find restaurateur to operate a cafe in its headquarters, too many rules [NY Post]
  • Curbs on Italian imports relaxed: “The war on salami finally ends” [David Frum]
  • Most senseless cheese ban ever? In the case of Mimolette, it mite be [Hans Bader, earlier]
  • Diversity in apple varieties has plunged in the past century, right? Maybe not [Alex Tabarrok]

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Colorado school funding found constitutional

The Colorado Supreme Court, wisely resisting a national campaign of school funding litigation, has turned down a lawsuit arguing that the state is obliged under its constitution to step up school spending. [Denver Post, KDVR, opinion in State v. Lobato]

I’ve got a post up at Cato at Liberty about the Colorado decision, noting that although school finance litigators make a lot of noise about educational quality, they are actually on a mission of “control —specifically, transferring control over spending from voters and their representatives to litigators whose loyalty is to a mix of ideologues and interest groups sharing a wish for higher spending.” I quote from a section on school finance litigation that I wound up cutting from my book Schools for Misrule about the enormous impact such suits have had in other states:

Vast sums have been redistributed as a result. Lawmakers in Kentucky enacted more than a billion dollars in tax hikes. New Jersey adopted its first income tax. Kansas lawmakers levied an additional $755 million in taxes after the state’s high court in peremptory fashion ordered them to double their spending on schools.

The results have been at best mixed: while some states to come under court order have improved their educational performance, many others have stagnated or fallen into new crisis. Colorado is fortunate not to join their ranks. (& reprint: Complete Colorado)

P.S. From a Colorado Springs Gazette report, Jul. 31, 2011:

“Putting more money into a broken system won’t get a better results. There are improvements that could be made without money,” says Deputy Attorney General Geoffrey Blue. …

He points to a Cato Institute study that showed spending on education across the country has skyrocketed but test scores didn’t improve.

“That would mean that potentially every cent of the state budget would be shifted over to K-12 education,” says Blue, who heads the office’s legal policy and government affairs.

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“Dairy farmer acquitted on three of four charges in raw milk trial”

“Dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger was acquitted on three of four criminal charges early Saturday morning in a trial that drew national attention from supporters of the raw, unpasteurized milk movement.” Hershberger sold his products through what he characterized as a consumer buying club, but prosecutors charged that the set-up was too much like a retail store, with price stickers and a cash register; Wisconsin law bans the sale of raw milk products through a retail store. “‘This is as close to Prohibition as anything I have ever seen, but this time it’s milk and an Amish farmer, rather than liquor and gangsters,’ [defense attorney Glenn] Reynolds said.” [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; Ryan Ekvall, Reason]

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N.J.: student kicked off track team, father sues

Ervin Mears Jr. has sued in Camden County, claiming his son Mawusimensah Mears, a sophomore, was kicked off the track team on the grounds of unexcused absences from practice. “‘Participation in extracurricular activities is a right,’ Mears said. Not allowing his son to participate constitutes bullying, harassment, and an ‘abusive school environment’ in which the sophomore’s rights to due process and freedom of speech were impeded, the suit says.” He wants $40 million. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

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IRS scandal roundup

  • List of times IRS officials misled public [FactCheck.org] Ongoing link roundups by Paul Caron at TaxProf;
  • Four agencies piled onto Texas tea partier’s business. Happenstance? [Jillian Kay Melchior] Some Tea Party groups seeking (c)4 status pursued electioneering; unnamed former IRS officials defend agency’s practice [Confessore, NYT] IRS denial of non-profit status to Free State Project [Atlas]
  • “Maybe one side of an issue is considered more political than the other.” [Tim Carney] “To me, the real story is the low status of the Tea Party.” [Arnold Kling]
  • “Too Hard to Fire Misbehaving Bureaucrats?” [Conor Friedersdorf, Chris Edwards, Hans Bader]
  • President is lucky he’s not CEO of big company, or he’d need to seek legal advice re: “Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine.” [Daniel Dew, Heritage]
  • IRS also drawing fire for flagging high share of families taking adoption tax credit; abuse rate proved low [USA Today]
  • Do federal agencies treat FOIA requests even-handedly? [Examiner/CEI on EPA, Daily Caller on FCC]

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ADA vs. school choice programs, cont’d

Patrick Wolf at Education Next and my Cato colleague Jason Bedrick have more on the Department of Justice’s aggressive interpretation of federal disabled-rights law to go after the successful Milwaukee school-choice program (earlier). Private schools that accept vouchers, Bedrick writes, do not become government contractors “any more than grocery stores become ‘government contractors’ when citizens use their EBT cards to purchase food there.”

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Trademark asserted over nines, sixes in beer labeling

An international brewing company that uses a red-and-orange “#9” mark on one of its brands is suing Lexington, Ky. craft brewer West Sixth Brewing Co., which uses a black-and-green “6.” “If it was on a coaster, and the person across the table was colorblind and fairly stupid, I suppose there might be some initial confusion. … there might be a problem if somebody is holding their beer upside down.” [Lowering the Bar; Kentucky.com]

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