Personally liable in Philadelphia: “A Pennsylvania lawyer has been ordered to pay nearly $1 million in attorney fees for allowing an expert witness to refer to a lung cancer victim’s history of smoking in a May 2012 medical malpractice trial. Defense lawyer Nancy Raynor of Malvern, Pennsylvnia, told the Legal Intelligencer that insurance would not pay the sanction and her personal assets are at risk.” [ABA Journal]
Archive for 2014
Catching up: John Oliver on asset forfeiture
I know I’m one of the last to catch up with this brilliant show from last month, which has had 3.8 million views, but if you still haven’t seen it, now’s your chance: it’s pricelessly funny and only too real. Cato has been inveighing against forfeiture laws for two decades or more and it’s tremendously satisfying to see the issue take off this year.
P.S. More forfeiture links: excellent Shaila Dewan piece in the New York Times the other day (“Put your valuables where I can see them!”), noting that police deciding to seize property sometimes check it against a department wish list; explosive videos from cop how-to-seize seminars and other government proceedings (“If in doubt…. take it”) tend to confirm a dark view [Nick Sibilla]; Institute for Justice report, Bad Apples or Bad Laws? Testing the Incentives of Civil Forfeiture [Bart J. Wilson and Michael Preciado, September]; “The IRS Has Been Holding This Guy’s $447,000 For 2 Years, And He’s Never Been Charged With A Crime” [Erin Fuchs, Business Insider, on Hirsch brothers case]
Blue-ribbon excuses: lawyer says he was hiding cash from wife, not law
A lawyer who resigned abruptly from the office handling BP oil spill claims has denied allegations he accepted kickbacks from lawyers with claims pending in the process, saying the money was paid for earlier work and that his aim was to hide it from his wife — who also happened to work at the claims office — rather than to conceal anything improper. [New Orleans Times-Picayune]
Schools roundup
- “Feds Punish Princeton For Liking Due Process Too Much” [Robby Soave, Reason; earlier]
- Despite outcome in California superintendent race, last week a major defeat for teachers’ union politics [RiShawn Biddle] UFT has outlasted school reform efforts in New York City, bad news for kids and parents there [Daniel DiSalvo]
- Global look at perceptions of risk and shrinking play opportunities for children [Blair Barrows, Common Good]
- Feds another step closer to clamping Title IX goals-and-quotas on collegiate club and intramural sports [American Sports Council]
- Link roundup: commenters who expressed doubts about this summer’s Vergara v. California decision on grounds other than actually liking the system of teacher tenure [Andrew Coulson, Orin Kerr, Will Baude, Larry Sand/City Journal, Eric Posner, Daniel Fisher, Richard Epstein]
- More cases spur criticism of zero-tolerance knife policies [WJBK, The Truth About Knives (Atiya Haynes, Dearborn Heights, Mich.); WOIO (Da’von Shaw, Bedford, Ohio]
- University of Oregon student government leader seeks to shut down critical blogs for being mean [Popehat]
Prohibition worked so well the first time
The town of Westminster, Mass. considers banning tobacco sales entirely, and the American Lung Association eggs them on [Boston Globe, AP]
P.S. David Boaz: “Does it surprise you to know that this town was founded by Puritans?”
Paul Krugman on the new Supreme Court ObamaCare case
[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty and expanded with a P.S.]
Even by his standards, Paul Krugman uses remarkably ugly and truculent language in challenging the good faith of those who take a view opposed to his on the case of King v. Burwell, just granted certiorari by the Supreme Court following a split among lower courts. Krugman claims that federal judges who rule against his own position on the case are “corrupt, willing to pervert the law to serve political masters.” Yes, that’s really what he writes – you can read it here.
A round of commentary on legal blogs this morning sheds light on whether Krugman knows what he’s talking about.
“Once upon a time,” Krugman claims, “this lawsuit would have been literally laughed out of court.” [Citation needed, as one commenter put it] The closest Krugman comes to acknowledging that a plain-language reading of the statute runs against him is in the following:
But if you look at the specific language authorizing those subsidies, it could be taken — by an incredibly hostile reader — to say that they’re available only to Americans using state-run exchanges, not to those using the federal exchanges.
New York City lawyer and legal blogger Scott Greenfield responds:
If by “incredibly hostile reader,” Krugman means someone with a basic familiarity with the English language, then he’s right. That’s what the law says. … There is such a thing as a “scrivener’s error,” that the guy who wrote it down made a mistake, left out a word or put in the wrong punctuation, and that the error was not substantive even though it has a disproportionate impact on meaning. A typo is such an error. I know typos. This was not a typo. This was not a word misspelled because the scribe erred. This was a structural error in the law enacted. Should it be corrected? Of course, but that’s a matter for Congress.
While some ObamaCare proponents may now portray the provision as a mere slip in need of correction, as I noted at Overlawyered in July, “ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber had delivered remarks on multiple 2012 occasions suggesting that the lack of subsidies for federally sponsored exchanges served the function (as critics had contended it did) of politically punishing states that refuse to set up exchanges.”
Josh Blackman, meanwhile, points out something incidental yet revealing about Krugman’s column: its homespun introductory anecdote about how his parents discovered that they had been stuck with a mistaken deed to their property, fixed (“of course”) by the town clerk presumably with a few pen strokes and a smile, couldn’t possibly have happened the way Krugman said it did. Property law, much more so than statutory construction, is super-strict about these matters.
If your deed is incorrect, you cannot simply get the “town clerk” to “fix the language”. … Mistakes are enforced by courts. That’s why [everyone] should purchase title insurance. …
So this is the exact opposite example of what Krugman would want to use to illustrate why King is “frivolous.” If courts applied property doctrine to the construction of statutes, this case would be over in 5 seconds. The government loses.
To be sure, there may be better arguments with which to defend the Obama administration’s side of the King case. But do not look for them in Paul Krugman’s commentary, which instead seems almost designed to serve the function of pre-gaming a possible defeat in King by casting the federal judiciary itself as “corrupt” and illegitimate.
P.S. “Krugman’s column in today’s NYT on King is the liberal equivalent of a Rush Limbaugh tirade.” [Gerard Magliocca] Krugman not notably consistent on views of statutory interpretation [Simon Lester] ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber caught on camera saying “lack of transparency” key to passing the bill; he “may believe that American voters are stupid, but he was the one dumb enough to say all this on camera” [Peter Suderman, Mickey Kaus (“I am big. It’s the electorate that got small.”)] How to argue the administration side in a less unhinged way than Krugman does [David Ziff via Jonathan Adler]
Environment roundup
- In Utah prairie dog case, federal judge finds Endangered Species Act regulation of intra-state property impacts exceeds scope of enumerated federal powers [Jonathan Adler, Evan Bernick, Jonathan Wood/PLF] Certiorari petition on whether economic considerations should enter into ESA measures on behalf of delta smelt in California [Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus]
- “While Smart Growth as a whole is maligned by some advocates of the free market, many Smart Growth tenets are actually deregulatory.” [Emily Washington, Market Urbanism; related, obnoxious-yet-informative Grist]
- Economic logic should be enough to halt suburban Maryland Purple Line, but if not, says Chevy Chase, hey, let’s find a shrimp [Washington Post; Diana Furchtgott-Roth on economics of Purple Line]
- SCOTUS should review Florida-dock case in which lower courts held property rights not “fundamental” for scrutiny purposes [Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus]
- “The Problem of Water” [Gary Libecap, Cato Regulation]
- Paul Krugman and others hyped the rare earth crisis. Whatever happened to it? [Alex Tabarrok]
- Louisiana judge strikes down state law prohibiting levee boards’ erosion/subsidence suit against oil companies, appeal likely [New Orleans Times-Picayune]
Exotic botanical toxin, or exotic expert witness theory?
Following the unexplained death of a gardener at a millionaire’s estate in Hampshire, England, a coroner has been told that it is more likely than not that brushing against the poisonous common garden plant aconitum, known variously as wolfsbane or monkshood, must have caused the man’s decease. [Independent]
Maggie Bloom, who is representing the family, said in the pre-inquest hearing yesterday that the initial blood sample had been destroyed – despite being against hospital policy – and that later samples that were retained could be useless as the poison leaves the body within a day.
Woman snapped in skimpy top can collect from Google View
A judge in Quebec has told Google to pay C$2250 to a woman caught by a Google Street View camera on her front porch in revealing, though legal, attire [Syracuse.com via Stewart Baker]
Police and prosecution roundup
- New Cato paper finds little evidence that pot legalization in Colorado has much affected rates of use, traffic safety, violent crime, ER visits, health, education outcomes [Jeffrey Miron working paper via Jacob Sullum]
- Ferguson narrative changes as new evidence supports officer’s story on Michael Brown confrontation [Washington Post, Marc Ambinder/The Week, New Republic]
- Why Obama was smart to choose Loretta Lynch as AG rather than knocking Republicans’ cap off with a pick like Thomas Perez [Cato; Todd Gaziano on confirmation questions]
- Plea bargaining system: “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” [Judge Jed Rakoff, New York Review of Books]
- “There’s not much to do about catcalling, unless you’re willing to see a lot more minority men hassled by the police” [Kay Hymowitz, Time] Peer pressure seems to be a factor in restraining it [Andrew Sullivan] The “practice of catcalling is most taboo among members of the upper classes.” [Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, earlier]
- San Diego says it retains discretion over when to release cop camera footage [Radley Balko] How body cameras can vindicate cops [same]
- Elderly Wisconsin man “was never considered dangerous, [but] was known to be argumentative,” so send in the armored vehicle [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar, related] “The [SWAT-raided] Tibetan monks were here on a peace mission, for Christ’s sake. Well, not for Christ’s sake, but you know what I mean.” [same] Sen. Coburn quotes Madison: standing military force with overgrown executive will not long be safe companion to liberty [WSJ]