Regulators, lawsuits attack Uber and Lyft

Taxi regulators and taxi operators join to conspire against the consumer interest [Glenn Reynolds, USA Today; Matthew Feeney, Cato (including link to Cato podcast), more (Illinois, Maryland, Australia, and an ADA complaint in Texas)] “Austin, Texas, Impounds Cars Because Their Drivers Were Giving People Lifts” [Brian Doherty, Reason]

Update June 11: Demanding a stop to consumer-driven Uber — but inadvertently making the most eloquent case for it — London black cab drivers are barricading key intersections today, and Paris taximen are deliberately driving airport fares at snail’s pace. [Lara Prendergast, The Spectator]

Filed under: competition through regulation, transit

Banking and finance roundup

Payday lenders sue federal agencies over Operation Choke Point [Bloomberg News, Business Journals, earlier; more, Funnell]
Speaking of those lenders: “California Supreme Court to review ‘rent-a-tribe’ arrangement for payday lenders” [CL&P, more]
“If someone starts trying to blame the Global Financial Crisis on ‘de-regulation’, you can stop reading…” [Lorenzo via Arnold Kling]
Can we just admit that the feds’ real target in the Credit Suisse case was the bank’s customers? [ABA Journal]
Maryland does not approve of Bitcoin [my Free State Notes via Kevin Funnell]
Behind Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, SCOTUS’s big case on securities class actions, two lawprofs are jousting [Alison Frankel, Reuters, and there’s a Cato connection; earlier]
For expats, FATCA raises “prospect of being discriminated against as an American for all things financial” [Peter Spiro/OJ; Sophia Yan, Money] More renounce U.S. citizenship [Yahoo] A Canada-based FATCA resource [Isaac Brock Society] Earlier here, etc.

Filed under: banks, Canada, Crisis of 2008, FATCA, Indian tribes, Operation Choke Point, taxes

FDA moves to ban cheese aging on wooden boards

We warned at the time that the ill-conceived Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) of 2011 would tend to choke off many non-industrial food sources. Now the FDA, interpreting FSMA as part of its regulatory process, is moving to ban the aging of cheese on wooden boards, a process that dates back thousands of years and has been practiced safely by many of the world’s finest cheese makers. The agency apparently intends to apply the same standard to imported cheese as well, which means that in addition to devastating artisanal cheese producers in this country, the move would cut off Americans’ access to large numbers of classic European cheeses, many of which, like Comte and Reblochon, “are required to be aged on wood by their standard of identity.” [Jeanne Carpenter, Cheese Underground (Wisconsin); Matt Spiegler, Cheese Notes]

Our coverage of FSMA, including its many-sided impact on traditional and artisanal farm and food practice, is here.

More: “Old guy in the cell: What are you in for? New guy in the cell: I aged cheese on wooden boards.” [Scott Greenfield] Plus: William Watson, Cato; Greg McNeal, Forbes, on the legalities including an apparent shift in the FDA’s earlier stance approving wood board aging]

Update June 11: agency backs down.

Filed under: eat drink and be merry, FDA, food safety, FSMA

“I’ve talked to a lot of business people and they’re very afraid”

California law provides unusually favorable financial rewards for ADA complaints, and the state’s legislature has largely ignored years’ worth of pleas from small businesses for relief from serial complainants. So John Perez is no longer taking walk-in customers [Manteca Bulletin]:

Ever since Carmichael-based lawyer Scott Johnson slapped civil rights lawsuits against at least 21 Manteca businesses seeking punitive damages for allegedly being out of compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act access rules he’s been locking the front door to his South Main Street cabinet shop, Perez & Sons.

Johnson (earlier on him here and here) has announced his intent to sue The Hair Company for at least $68,000 although owner Janice Ward says none of her handicapped customers have ever complained. “A good number of the targets of Johnson’s 3,000 lawsuits throughout Northern California over the years have been forced out of business.”

Filed under: ADA filing mills, California

Medical roundup

Alarming: “2,500 Georgia Doctors Lack Malpractice Insurance: Report” [Insurance Journal]
Improper FDA contact with trial lawyers behind closed doors? [DDLaw, Ed Silverman, WSJ CorpInt]
AFGE fights efforts to refer patients at troubled VA hospitals to civilian specialists [Betsy McCaughey, Investors] Civil service rules entrench bad VA managers [Rep. Jeff Miller, Time mag]
Improved understanding of brain damage in newborns could have litigation implications [New York Times “Well”]
Budget measure widens Medicaid program rights to recoup medical outlays by grabbing part of plaintiff tort recoveries [King & Spalding]
“Ronald Reagan and AIDS: Correcting the Record” [Carl Cannon]
Rating the FDA’s various drug review divisions [Manhattan Institute, The Hill, more]

Filed under: AIDS, FDA, Georgia, hospitals, medical malpractice insurance, Medicare

“You could be liable for $150,000 in penalties…”

“…settle instead for $20 per song.” Rightscorp, a new for-profit copyright cop, “is now preparing technology that could flood the Internet with ‘hundreds of millions of notices’ to alleged copyright infringers.” [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]

Filed under: copyright, RIAA and file sharing

Stephen Carter on the Laycock affair

Yale Law’s Stephen Carter lacks patience for the start-a-conversation-by-FOIAing-someone’s-emails approach to academic controversy:

Laycock’s approach to the constitutional issue [underlying Hobby Lobby and the Arizona version of RFRA] may be right or wrong, but it’s well within the mainstream conversation of legal scholarship. The late Ronald Dworkin, often tagged as the greatest defender of liberal theory in the legal academy, argued last year in his final book that Catholic adoption agencies with religious objections to adoption by same-sex couples should have a constitutional right to disobey laws requiring them to violate their convictions.

But even when a professor holds opinions off at the far margin, to target him or her for intimidation is an affront to the freedom that makes the academy worth cherishing.

Filed under: colleges and universities, religious liberty

“Jindal signs bill to scuttle levee board oil suit”

After intense political controversy in Louisiana, a controversial environmental suit is apparently on its way out. [KATC] Earlier here and here.

Filed under: environment, Louisiana, oil industry

Fines, fees, probation, and the “new debtor’s prison”

A twelve-minute Cato podcast in which I talk to Caleb Brown about how government can roll minor fines over routine offenses into crushing financial burdens and years of entanglement in the criminal justice system. A particular problem: systems that assign fines and payments to the account of actors in the justice system and for-profit private contractors which can operate under a perverse incentive to trip up petty wrongdoers and keep them in the system. The National Public Radio special “Guilty and Charged,” based on a yearlong investigation, is here. Many of my examples are taken from it, including the persons drawn into the system after fishing out of season and making an illegal left turn, and the woman saddled with a $10,000 debt on emerging from prison. Radley Balko discusses. I’ve written earlier on the problems with private probation, on a Shelby County, Alabama judge’s 2012 finding that the town of Harpersville was engaged in a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” and more broadly on law enforcement for profit and its forfeiture branch.

Related: Tyler Cowen on a new book about persons living at the margins of the law, Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Earlier: link to writings by Barbara Ehrenreich and David Henderson. Sequel: woman dies in Pennsylvania jail after failing to pay truancy fine.

Filed under: crime and punishment, law enforcement for profit, on TV and radio, petty fines and fees

Washington, D.C.’s resident vultures

There’s a lot of amusement about the pair of vultures (real ones) who’ve taken up residence on Washington, D.C.’s K Street. In a new Cato post, I explain what attracts them.

Filed under: lobbyists, WO writings