“Health privacy” was a feel-good, no-downside issue for politicos, but expect the arrival of more serious mass outbreaks of communicable disease to change that [Arthur Caplan, Wired]
Archive for 2014
October 3 roundup
- Posner smacks lawyers, vindicates objectors in Radio Shack coupon settlement [CCAF, Fisher, more]
- “Germany To Consider Ban On Late-Night Work Emails” [Alexander Kaufman, Huffington Post]
- 7th Circuit overturns Wisconsin John Doe ruling, sends back to state judges [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, ruling; more, Vox] John Doe case prosecutor John Chisholm, via columnist Dan Bice, strikes back against source in office who talked to Stuart Taylor, Jr. [Taylor, Althouse]
- Trial lawyer/massive Democratic donor Steve Mostyn also dabbles in Texas Republican primaries [Robert T. Garrett, Dallas Morning News; Mostyn’s national spending from Florida and Arizona to New Hampshire and Minnesota]
- Sad: immigration lawyer known for Iraqi Christian advocacy faces asylum fraud charges [Chicago Tribune]
- Might have been entertaining had Bruce Braley opponent Joni Ernst in Iowa argued in favor of nullification, but that’s not what evidence shows [Ramesh Ponnuru]
- California hobbles insurers with diverse-procurement regulations [Ian Adams, Insurance Journal]
More on that California college sex law
Hans Bader has some clarification on one issue on which there’s been widespread confusion, on which the California law does not go to the extreme some would have liked [San Francisco Chronicle letter to the editor; earlier]:
“New law redefines consent at college” (Sept. 29) claimed that California’s new “affirmative consent” law regulating college sex “says that a person cannot give consent if they are intoxicated.” But it does not say this. What it actually says is that “consent” is absent when “the complainant was incapacitated” due to alcohol.
Most intoxicated people are not legally deemed “incapacitated” and can consent, as law professor Anne Coughlin and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have noted.
Many happily married people have sex after drinking. While some liberal Democrats who sponsored SB967 wanted to ban sex between intoxicated people, the final version of the bill does not do so.
Admittedly, the new law is disturbingly vague in other ways. Its co-sponsor, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), said, “Your guess is as good as mine,” when asked how an innocent person could prove “affirmative” consent.
Hans Bader, Washington, D.C.
If you celebrate Banned Books Week…
…yet deplore the Citizens United decision, you might have a consistency problem [A. Barton Hinkle, syndicated]
Judge: No, there is no right to free Detroit water
A bankruptcy judge has dismissed a purported human-rights theory outré enough to have drawn interest from both the United Nations and American legal academia, saying the law guarantees no right to draw water from the Detroit municipal system for free or at rates dependent on ability to pay [Detroit News; Aaron Renn/City Journal and more]
Intellectual property roundup
- “Our mangled patent system,” Cato podcast [with Eli Dourado of the Mercatus Center] Critique of federal circuit [Dourado at Cato Unbound]
- Since SCOTUS’s June decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, many courts have struck down software patents as too-abstract [Timothy Lee, Vox]
- Iqbal-Twombly principles as remedy for patent trollery? [Daniel Fisher]
- ISP resists mass copyright enforcement enterprise’s demand for customer list [DSL Reports]
- Win for Personal Audio in E.D. Tex.: “Jury finds CBS infringes podcasting patent, awards $1.3 million” [ArsTechnica]
- “Premier League Uses Copyright To Pull Down YouTube Video Of Professor Advocating For Stronger Copyright For Premier League” [Mike Masnick, Techdirt]
- A new leaf? “Silicon Valley’s Most Hated Patent Troll Stops Suing and Starts Making” [Business Week]
Three more courtroom defeats for EEOC
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is used to getting its way since most employers would rather settle rather than face the expense and publicity risk of litigating against it. But sometimes, as I note in my new post at Cato, judges get a close look at just how weak the commission’s position is. And then…
More from Bob in comments: “Here’s the problem… major employers have made changes to their severance agreements to comport with the EEOC’s position in CVS. They EEOC has lost the case and still gotten the change they wanted. That’s all they care about. Much like the new Pregnancy Discrimination Act guidance which turns prior guidance and case law on its head. Major employers have already reacted in order to avoid costly litigation though the chances of a neutral court agreeing with the guidance are pretty low.”
“Woman suing Disney, claims ‘Frozen’ is my life story”
“…a list of motifs Tanikumi claims were taken from her book like: two sisters, open doors or gates, and a moon setting….A Disney spokeswoman responded to her claim, saying, ‘This is beyond ridiculous, she needs to let it go.'” [WAFF]
Labor and employment roundup
- Court dismisses case against CVS in which EEOC had sought to redefine standard severance confidentiality provisions as unlawful retaliation [Jon Hyman, Daniel Schwartz, earlier here and here]
- Temp-agency jobs brought in-house: “The NLRB Forces CNN to Rehire Workers Terminated Over a Decade Ago” [Alex Bolt, Workplace Choice]
- “NLRB may encourage your employees to file OSHA, FLSA claims too” [Eric B. Meyer, Employer Handbook] “You’re NOT Paranoid — The Agencies ARE Ganging Up” [Dabney Ware, Foley & Lardner]
- “The U.S. Department of Labor claims it can’t come up with the cash to fully reimburse Oregon farmers for the $220,000 it unlawfully coerced from them.” [Capital Press, Oregon] House committee flays department over use of “hot goods” orders to arm-twist growers of perishables on labor issues [committee, CQ via Dunn Carney, The Grower]
- Sauce for gander: if left can push labor ordinances at county and municipal level, supporters of right-to-work laws might do the same thing [James Sherk and Andrew Kloster, Heritage]
- “I wonder how large the overlap is between people who want Ray Rice banished from NFL forever and those who want to ‘ban the box'” — @Toirtap
- Jacob Huebert on the Harris v. Quinn decision [new edition of Cato Supreme Court Review]
“Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity…”
California regulates college sex, in a law just signed by Gov. Brown and applying to campuses that accept state money. Key passages:
It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. … Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.
Earlier here. More: K.C. Johnson on the very bad coverage in the New York Times, and less bad coverage in The Nation. And it’s totally reassuring that a Slate writer who won fame insisting on the guilt of the Duke lacrosse guys is being cited as an authority on why there’s no need to worry about the new California law.