- Consumer non-disparagement clauses lead weight-loss company down bumpy legal road [Adam Steinbaugh, Ken White/Popehat, and more]
- Police union defends St. Louis officer who called business in official capacity to say its employee was criticizing police on Twitter [Scott Greenfield; Elizabeth Nolan Brown]
- “The moral McCarthyism of the war on lads” [Brendan O’Neill, Spiked (U.K.), related]
- “Hey, liberals: Criminalizing hate speech will inevitably backfire” [Elizabeth Nolan Brown/The Week]
- Law professor: what it was like to be sued over what I wrote about someone’s case [Zachary Kramer, Prawfs, more]
- “EFF To NAACP: Trademark Isn’t For Censoring Your Critics” [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
- Judge Kane upholds right of Diana Hsieh’s Coalition for Secular Government to express opinion on ballot initiative without registering with state of Colorado [Ari Armstrong, The Objective Standard via Scott Greenfield]
Archive for October, 2014
Next Monday at Cato: Damon Root on Overruled
If you’re in D.C., RSVP and register for Cato’s luncheon event on the publication of Damon Root’s Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Description:
Featuring the author Damon Root, Senior Editor,
Reason magazine and Reason.com; with comments by Jeffrey Rosen, Professor of Law, George Washington University, and President & CEO, National Constitution Center; and Roger Pilon, Vice President for Legal Affairs, Cato Institute, and Director, Cato Center for Constitutional Studies; moderated by Walter Olson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.
What is the proper role of the Supreme Court under the Constitution? Should the Court be “active” or “restrained”? Or is that even the proper way to look at the question, however much we’ve heard it put that way for several decades now? In his new book, Damon Root traces this debate from the Constitution’s conception to the present. His central focus, however, is on the emergence of the modern libertarian approach, which cuts through the often sterile debate between liberals and conservatives and points to the Constitution itself by way of determining the proper role of the Court under it. Please join us for a refreshing account of this recent history.
It may already be too late
[John Farrier, “Alarming Signs from the Dresden Public Art Show,” Neatorama, more]
Speaking of warnings, Ted Frank’s observation on this…. exotic Hallowe’en costume is, “The warning is critical.”
Marc Andreessen on getting radicalized
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, quoted in New York magazine “Intelligencer”:
If you have been in an Uber car and gotten pulled over and had the car seized out from under the driver when you were like in the middle of a trip that you were otherwise having a good time on, you might be a little bit radicalized. You might all of a sudden think, Wait a minute, what just happened, and why did it happen? And then you might discover what the taxi companies did over the last 50 years to wire up city governments and all the corruption that’s taken place. And you might say, “Wait a minute.” There’s this myth that government regulation is well intentioned and benign, and implemented properly. That’s the myth. And then when people actually run into this in the real world, they’re, “Oh […] I didn’t realize.”
One of my favorite things of all time is George McGovern, who ran for president in ’72 as a hyperliberal. Of course Nixon [beat him badly]. And in 1992 he wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal which told the story of his life after he left politics, when he bought an inn in Connecticut. And he said, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize.” And the “Oh my God, I didn’t realize” was: I did not realize what a layered impact 50 or 100 years of regulations and laws applied on small-business owners actually meant.
Labor and employment roundup
- Operator of Jimmy John’s sandwich shops asked low-level employees to sign a noncompete. What would be the point? [Bainbridge, Hyman]
- GOP Congress might take aim at a range of current union and NLRB practices including political dues spending without member opt-out [Sean Higgins, Washington Examiner]
- Reminder: turning union activity into a protected category under the Civil Rights Act is one of the very worst ideas around [George Leef, earlier on Ellison-Lewis proposal here and here]
- Scrutiny of occupational licensure intensifies [Ira Stoll]
- “House Committee Examines EEOC Transparency and Accountability Legislation” [On Labor]
- “The Dawn of ‘Micro-Unions’: A Scary Proposition for Employers” [John G. Kruchko, Kevin B. McCoy, Ford Harrison, earlier here, etc.]
- Immigrant status and national origin discrimination: “DOJ Brings Issue of Hiring Documentation to Forefront” [Daniel Schwartz]
New Hampshire Supreme Court restricts jury nullification law
Tending to confirm the predictions of those who hoped or feared, as the case may be, that the legal system would not actually be willing to encourage juries to take into consideration the justice of the outcome as well as the facts of the case in deciding whether to acquit. [Tuccille, our post two years ago when the law passed]
“Alabama man gets $1K in police settlement, his lawyers get $459K”
“An Alabama man who sued over being hit and kicked by police after leading them on a high-speed chase will get $1,000 in a settlement with the city of Birmingham, while his attorneys will take in $459,000, officials said Wednesday.” [Reuters/Yahoo] Readers may argue about whether this kind of outcome is fair, but note that it seems to happen more often, rather than less, in this country (with its putative “American Rule” that each side pays its own fees) than in other industrialized countries which tend more to follow “loser-pays” or “costs follow the event” fee principles. One reason for that is that the U.S. does not actually hew consistently to the so-called American Rule; across wide areas of litigation, including civil rights suits, it follows “one-way shift” principles in which prevailing plaintiffs but not prevailing defendants are entitled to fees, and whose encouragement to litigation is greater than either the American Rule or the loser-pays principle.
Related: The Pennsylvania legislature is moving to adopt a rule adopting one-way fees for some cases in which municipalities trample rights protected by the Bill of Rights’ Second Amendment, provoking peals of outrage (“dangerous,” “outrageous,” “threatens municipalities’ financial stability,” etc.) from elected officials few of whom seem to be on record objecting to one-way fee shifts when plaintiffs they like better are doing the suing. [Free Beacon]
Jury finds unlawful bias against one-armed security guard
“MIAMI – In a verdict in favor of U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a jury has found that a licensed security guard with only one arm was unlawfully discriminated against based on his limb loss when his employer removed him from his post following a customer complaint about his disability, the federal agency announced today.” The agency said it was well-settled under federal anti-discrimination law that employers cannot act on the basis of discriminatory consumer preferences. [EEOC press release]
George Will: the Wisconsin John Doe raids and the system’s legitimacy
George Will, hard-hitting but on target, on what happened to people who took the wrong side of the Wisconsin public-employee wars:
The early-morning paramilitary-style raids on citizens’ homes were conducted by law enforcement officers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests and lugging battering rams, pounding on doors and issuing threats. Spouses were separated as the police seized computers, including those of children still in pajamas. Clothes drawers, including the children’s, were ransacked, cellphones were confiscated and the citizens were told that it would be a crime to tell anyone of the raids.
Earlier on the Wisconsin John Doe raids, including this Cato piece. More Will:
Chisholm’s aim — to have a chilling effect on conservative speech — has been achieved by bombarding Walker supporters with raids and subpoenas: Instead of raising money to disseminate their political speech, conservative individuals and groups, harassed and intimidated, have gone into a defensive crouch, raising little money and spending much money on defensive litigation. Liberal groups have not been targeted for their activities that are indistinguishable from those of their conservative counterparts.
Such misbehavior takes a toll on something that already is in short supply: belief in government’s legitimacy. The federal government’s most intrusive and potentially punitive institution, the IRS, unquestionably worked for Barack Obama’s reelection by suppressing activities by conservative groups. … Would the race between Walker and Democrat Mary Burke be as close as it is if a process susceptible to abuse had not been so flagrantly abused to silence groups on one side of Wisconsin’s debate? Surely not.
“Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required”
“’How can this happen?’ [Arnolds Park, Iowa restaurant owner Carole] Hinders said in a recent interview. ‘Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?’
The federal government does.”
For years I’ve been writing about the injustice of federal deposit-structuring law, from the South Mountain Creamery case in Maryland on up, and more recently the Institute for Justice has embraced the issue. Now that the New York Times has put a reporter on the case [Shaila Dewan, Oct. 25], the IRS says it will roll back its enforcement of the law to cases where there is other criminality — an excellent first step, although only a first step, since other federal agencies can also generate cases that result in seizures and prosecutions under structuring law.
As always, if you’re a small merchant fearful of this law, don’t go to your bank expecting helpful advice:
In May 2012, the bank branch Ms. Hinders used was acquired by Northwest Banker. JoLynn Van Steenwyk, the fraud and security manager for Northwest, said she could not discuss individual clients, but explained that the bank did not have access to past account histories after it acquired Ms. Hinders’s branch.
Banks are not permitted to advise customers that their deposit habits may be illegal or educate them about structuring unless they ask, in which case they are given a federal pamphlet, Ms. Van Steenwyk said. “We’re not allowed to tell them anything,” she said.