“A court has ruled that a Hong Kong tycoon can sue Google over its autocomplete results suggesting he has links to organized crime.” [AP/Mashable]
Archive for 2014
Fake online personas troll for law firm clients
It did come across as curious when the Facebook acquaintance only seemed to be interested in side effects of medications and whether I had suffered death or injury in an accident. What kind of icebreaker is that? Daniel Fisher at Forbes investigates and finds traces of marketing efforts on behalf of the firm of Parker Waichman. Under New York rules for lawyers, law firm advertising is supposed to be clearly marked as such, nor are its contents supposed to be false or misleading.
P.S. From commenter wfjag: “She wanted to know if I’d died or was suffering a lingering fatal condition. Especial interest in effects on The Brain. No pictures of faces and no information on family lives. I thought I’d finally found Zombie Dating.”
Labor and employment roundup
- “The tie that binds public employee unions and Wall Street” [Daniel DiSalvo] “Unions Manipulate New York City’s Public Pension Funds To Punish Their Enemies” [NYT via Jim Epstein, Reason]
- Illinois latest state to pass “ban the box” law restricting employers’ inquiries on criminal records [Workplace Prof]
- Two ex-football pros file suit claiming union conspired with owners on concussions [Bloomberg]
- Average Illinois public retiree’s pension rapidly narrowing gap with average salary of worker still on job [Jake Griffin Daily Herald via Reboot Illinois] By 2006, 1,600 California prison guards were making $110K+, plus more on tendency of state/local government pay to outrun private [Lee Ohanian via Tyler Cowen]
- Great moments in employment law: Seventh Circuit says other employees’ having sex on complainant’s desk not hostile work environment when not targeted at gender [Eric B. Meyer]
- Next step signaled in SEIU fast food protest campaign: unlawful property occupations [AP, Chicago Tribune, arrests in May]
- Trial lawyer win: Obama federal-contractor fiat will forbid pre-dispute agreements to submit bias claims to binding arbitration [AP, AAJ jubilates]
Judge: Chesley on hook for damages to fen-phen clients
Former mass tort star Stanley Chesley “escaped criminal sanctions and so far has paid nothing for taking $7.55 million more than he was owed in Kentucky’s scandalous fen-phen case. But a Boone Circuit Court judge ruled this week that Chesley is liable for the uncollected portion of a $42 million judgment that former clients won in the diet drug case against three Lexington lawyers who defrauded them.” [Louisville Courier-Journal] Chesley “was disbarred in Kentucky but allowed to retire in Ohio.” [ABA Journal]
An execution, ten years after
First a house fire killed Cameron Todd Willingham’s three tiny daughters. Then the state of Texas killed him. Mistakes were made, notes the Washington Post. The forensics testimony on accelerants has long since been discredited, and now the jailhouse informant whose words sent Willingham to execution, who has wavered between recanting and not-recanting, has given a recantation with much more circumstantial detail about the lies he says he told on the stand.
Here’s a Texas Monthly article (linked a while back) on the unsettling history of arson forensics over many years, in which the use of accelerants was deduced from dubious evidence in such a way as to shift many fires from the “likely accidental” to the “deliberate” category, with dire legal consequences for family members and others on the scene. Earlier on the Willingham case, including pro-prosecution links, from five years ago. More: Jonathan Adler.
Intellectual property roundup
- “Kanye West Sues Coinye Altcoin into Oblivion” [CoinDesk]
- Not new, but new to me: animated riff on Hindu “Ramayana” saga winds up in public domain because of inability to clear copyright on songs of Jazz-Age vocalist Annette Hanshaw [Nina Paley, “Sita Sings the Blues”]
- “Update: Supreme Court Issues Two More Patent Law Rulings” [WLF; Limelight and Nautilis]
- On copyright, more litigious not always better: “The Authors Alliance vs. The Authors Guild” [Alex Tabarrok quoting Virginia Postrel]
- “Thwarting ‘patent trolls’: Not as easy as it sounds” [Michael Rosen, AEI] “Trolls and Trial Lawyers Should Curb Their Enthusiasm Over Patent Reform Timeout” [Cory Andrews, WLF]
- “I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit” – [Elon Musk, Tesla; Brad Greenburg, Concurring Opinions]
- Ready for Hillary is latest political campaign to fire off takedown demand against satirical product [Paul Alan Levy]
“The SEC as prosecutor and judge”
“The agency is dodging the courts by turning to its own administrative law judges to decide its cases.” [Russell Ryan (King & Spalding), WSJ op-ed, paywalled]
Citing lack of jurisdiction, judge tosses GreenTech suit against critics
Staten Island photographer nabbed in “known drug location”
Ramsey Orta, whose street video of Eric Garner’s chokehold death at the hands of NYC cops became a worldwide sensation, has only days later been nabbed by that same police force on grounds of an unlawful gun infraction in what the police describe as a known drug location. “To decipher some of the police jargon, every location in New York other than St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a ‘known drug location’ as far as the police are concerned,” writes Scott Greenfield [Simple Justice]
Gun control, by way of commercial speech restriction
Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) has introduced a bill, the “Childrens Firearms Marketing Safety Act,” that would restrict the content of gun advertising, ostensibly on the grounds of protecting children. Eugene Volokh analyzes its terms and doubts that they make much sense unless one assumes that the purpose of the bill is “is to reduce as much as possible parentally approved gun use by minors. And of course the effect of the law, if it would be at all effective, would thus be to reduce the number of children who grow up familiar with guns and open to gun ownership — thus making broader gun controls easier in the future.”