I’ll be speaking at lunchtime Wednesday, Sept. 25 to the University of Michigan Law School’s Federalist Society chapter, on my book Schools for Misrule. Details here.
Archive for September, 2013
Great moments in NYC teacher tenure
Whether or not the Drug War counts as an irresistible force, it seems to have run into an immovable object in the form of New York City teacher tenure [New York Law Journal]:
Termination was too harsh a penalty for a tenured teacher who created a spurt of news stories after he was found with bags of heroin when trying to enter Manhattan Supreme Court, where he was serving on jury duty….
“There is no evidence that the conduct with which petitioner was charged affects his performance as a teacher or that any publicity would impair his capacity to discharge his responsibilities as a teacher,” [Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Manuel] Mendez wrote in Matter of Esteban v. Department of Education of the City School District of the City of New York, 651904/13.
September 23 roundup
- Drunk driver leaves road, hits power pole, Washington high court allows suit against property owner to proceed [Lowman v. Wilbur, PDF]
- State attorneys general pressure clothing maker to drop t-shirts with drug names [ABA Journal, related earlier]
- More transparency needed in Child Protective Services [Reason TV] One lawyer’s critique of CPS [Laurel Dietz, Straight (Vancouver)]
- While aspiring to nudge us into more farsighted financial practices, government has trouble staying out of dumb bond deals itself [Coyote, and more (Detroit)]
- You can care about safety but still think some speed limits are set too low [Canadian video on Jalopnik]
- Trial lawyers aim to extend to Indiana their Idaho victory over “Baseball Rule” on spectator liability [NWIT, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
- New “fair-housing” assessment and planning process propels federal government into social engineering [IBD editorial via AEI Ideas, HUD]
Stock analysts and the expansion of insider trading law
Roger Parloff makes the story clearer and more understandable than I’ve seen it anywhere else. [Fortune cover story]
Undocumented = unmentionable?
“An Indiana lawyer has been suspended for 30 days for a comment about the immigration status of his divorce client’s spouse in a letter sent to opposing counsel and the judge in the case.” [ABA Journal]
Parents may sue ex-NFLer for saying their kids trashed his house
Over Labor Day weekend, hundreds of teenagers held an illegal party in the upstate New York home of former NFL star Brian Holloway. They left a wide swath of photos on social media, and Holloway put up a website identifying more than 100 of the 300 partiers. “But rather than apologize to Holloway for their children’s behavior, some parents have contacted their lawyers to see what legal action they can take” against him. [New York Daily News; response from radio personalities Chuck and Kelly, WGY]
73 federal agencies now have armed police divisions
Some serve essentially as security guards for federal installations and lack much of an outside presence, but others — quite a few others, in fact — are capable of engaging in antics like SWAT-style environmental raids on rural settlements.
“Everyone’s so damn afraid of coming forward”
— against patent trolls. But Kevin O’Connor, CEO of a startup named FindTheBest, went ahead and did so [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Exploding and escalating-on-response demands, threats of criminal prosecution, demands for “sequestration” (removal from service) of his company’s computers to prevent evidence spoliation, and promises of burdensome discovery are all part of the story.
Department of Labor: at-home companions must be paid overtime
Had you heard that disabled-rights activists have staged demonstrations in Washington, D.C. to protest a new Obama administration initiative? Not only that, but the disabled-rights activists are right.
At issue is an awful scheme by the Obama Labor Department, newly headed by Secretary Thomas Perez, to abolish most of the “companionship exemption” to federal wage and hour laws, which has up to now reasonably recognized that serving as a live-in or semi-live-in paid attendant to a sick, elderly or disabled person is not really the same sort of thing as working twelve-hour days on a factory assembly line. I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty looking at some of the consequences we can expect from making it far more expensive to provide a kind of round-the-clock care that often keeps people out of nursing homes. More: Bloomberg.
Some background on the controversy, beyond the links in the Cato post: National Council on Disability (a federal disability-advocacy agency that was not entirely prepared to toe the line in favor of the new regs); Stephen Miller, Society for Human Resource Management; Kaiser Health News; Disability Law (“disability rights groups… fear that substantially raising the cost of personal assistance services without increasing Medicaid reimbursements will force people with disabilities into nursing homes”); PHI and Direct Care Alliance (promoting regs); National Association for Home Care and Hospice and more (commercial group opposed); ADAPT (disability rights group opposed).
More reactions: Bill McMorris/Free Beacon, Jon Hyman, Trey Kovacs/Workplace Choice.
JP Morgan’s $920 million fine
Matt Levine concludes that a large share of it was for making dumb trades, as opposed to intentional malfeasance. (Earlier on whether regulators had taken a bead on Morgan because of chief Jamie Dimon’s perceived bad attitude.) Will Morgan’s admissions materially help plaintiff’s lawyers in the inevitable shareholder class action? Don’t be so sure [Alison Frankel, Reuters] More: WSJ (sees politics), Hank Greenberg via FedSocBlog, Iain Murray.