Annals of European employment law: “The Irish arm of supermarket giant Tesco has been ordered to pay a convicted drug dealer €11,500 for unfair dismissal.” The Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) found that the market should have considered sanctions less severe than dismissal given that the employee had cooperated with its process and that a manager admitted there was no evidence of public awareness of the employee’s legal troubles, which eventuated in a guilty plea and a suspended jail sentence. [Evening Herald (Ireland)]
Archive for 2014
Study: politically connected firms less likely to be hit with SEC penalties
Are you surprised? Study finds “that politically connected firms on average are less likely to be involved in SEC enforcement actions and face lower penalties if they are prosecuted by the SEC.” [Maria Correia, SSRN via Jeffrey Miron, Cato]
Environment roundup
- Coming to other towns soon: new stormwater regs ban car wash fundraisers at schools in Arlington, Va. [ArlNow]
- Krugman hides the ball on coal-fired utility regs [David Henderson]
- Coming in September: book on Chevron/Ecuador case by Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Paul M. Barrett [Business Roundtable]
- Simplified narrative of “business versus environmental regulation” obscures so much [Tim Carney, Washington Examiner]
- Environmental disclosure panel from Vermont Law School “Disclosure Debates” [video, summary by Caitlin Stanton for VLR’s Environmental Health, links to all videos, background]
- California: “Attorney General Posts 2013 Proposition 65 Settlement Numbers” [Cal Biz Lit]
- “Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” [Cato panel with Andrew Morriss, Richard Tren]
Feds to control driving navigation apps?
The urge to regulate distracted driving could reach down into your smartphone [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason; Marc Scribner, CEI]
Argentina strikes out in Supreme Court sovereign debt cases
If they’d kept their promise, we wouldn’t keep our distance. [Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Cato; Stephen Bainbridge, earlier]
Science bloggers vs. Food Babe
David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine and Trevor Butterworth at Forbes take a dim view of Food Babe, “a young, telegenic, clever but scientifically ignorant blogger” who’s turned her campaign sights from Subway to beer makers.
IRS: computer crash ate two years’ worth of Lerner emails
Paul Caron at the justly admired TaxProf blog has been patiently documenting the IRS scandal since the start and his daily link roundups are now as relevant as they have ever been. More: CNN, John Hinderaker/PowerLine, A. Barton Hinkle (finger of responsibility points at Congress), Peter Suderman. Earlier here, etc.
Update: IRS said on Tuesday that computer crashes swallowed without a trace the emails of several other employees central to the nonprofit-targeting probe, and admitted it waited months to tell congressional investigators that it did not expect to produce Lois Lerner’s emails.
Schools roundup
- Put off by constant urine tests, eighth grader skips honor society [Duncannon, Pa.; my Cato post, PennLive]
- Wouldn’t you know when Mike Bloomberg does come out and say something excellent — about intellectual freedom in the university, as part of a Harvard commencement address — New York Times ignores him [John Leo/Minding the Campus, Dennis Saffran/City Journal]
- “Verbal or Written Permission Could be Required For College Sex” [L. A. Weekly]
- Hope for Camden students has come not from New Jersey’s massive Abbott school funding litigation, but from charters [Jim Epstein, Reason]
- “Schools have been getting less violent over the last 20 years,” much less violent in fact [Timothy Lee, Vox, Jesse Walker, Reason, Josh Blackman and Shelby Baird, SSRN, on the “shooting cycle”]
- Arnold Kling writes a commencement speech: “I am going to talk about community service … and why I am against it.”
- “Walking to School? Yeah, There’s a Federal Program for That” [David Boaz, Cato]
SCOTUS OKs challenge to Ohio law banning campaign untruths
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled this morning in Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus that a lower court challenge can proceed against Ohio’s law purporting to ban untruthful campaign speech. [decision, SCOTUSBlog, earlier Overlawyered coverage] The ruling was widely expected: “not a single amicus brief was filed on behalf of the state of Ohio, and even liberal groups conceded that allowing the state to arbitrate truth or falsity in political campaigns was troubling. During oral argument, the Justices seemed profoundly skeptical of the law’s underlying constitutionality.” [MSNBC]
The Court did not decide the First Amendment merits. Its ruling instead turns on the cluster of issues relating to standing: was there injury in fact from the law sufficient to support a challenge even though the original complaint had been dropped? While the two wings of the Court often divide on standing, they united in taking an expansive view this time. Here and there Justice Thomas’s opinion for the 9-0 Court does brush up against the underlying First Amendment problem of the chilling of speech, which will now move front and center as the lower court again takes up the case. A passage of particular interest from pp. 15-16 (footnotes omitted):
As the Ohio Attorney General himself notes, the “practical effect” of the Ohio false statement scheme is “to permit a private complainant . . . to gain a campaign advantage without ever having to prove the falsity of a statement.” “[C]omplainants may time their submissions to achieve maximum disruption of their political opponents while calculating that an ultimate decision on the merits will be deferred until after the relevant election.” Moreover, the target of a false statement complaint may be forced to divert significant time and resources to hire legal counsel and respond to discovery requests in the crucial days leading up to an election.
Here’s the entertaining and hilarious amicus brief (what a concept) filed by my Cato colleagues Trevor Burrus, Ilya Shapiro, and Gabriel Latner on behalf of humorist and Cato fellow P.J. O’Rourke (who explains his involvement; more from Ilya and Trevor). And Ilya has a reaction to the opinion at Cato at Liberty (“Chilling speech is no laughing matter… today was a banner morning for free speech and judicial engagement.”)
How not to market legal services
“Law firm apologizes to truckers for ‘serial killer’ ad” [ABA Journal] The San Antonio law firm of Villarreal & Begum had placed the ad in Maxim, but the reaction from truckers was so negative that some sellers yanked the magazine off the stands.