“Concerns about insurance requirements will keep a southwest Missouri high school team from participating in the first high school bass pro fishing tournament in June.” The insurer for the Nixa High School angling team said it had only suggested, not required, “such things as having the volunteer boaters take a Coast Guard certification course at a cost of about $400 each, and to be CPR- and first-aid trained and requiring students and boat captains to wear specific safety glasses.” [AP/Houston Chronicle; Springfield News-Leader]
Archive for 2014
Occupational licensure — in the New York Times
“The right and left agree — too many occupations are overregulated” [Morris Kleiner, New York Times via Peter Van Doren, Cato; Arnold Kling]
Court decides Bond v. U.S. narrowly
A jealous wife’s attempt to poison a rival gave the Supreme Court a splendid chance to detoxify a pernicious constitutional law doctrine about the scope of the treaty power, but yesterday the Court passed up the chance. [Earlier.] My colleague Ilya Shapiro explains. Chief Justice Roberts, for the majority: “The global need to prevent chemical warfare does not require the federal government to reach into the kitchen cupboard, or to treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon.”
P.S. Congratulations to my colleague Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz and the Cato Institute amicus program (i.e. Ilya Shapiro) for the way Justice Scalia in his concurrence picks up whole chunks of argumentation from Nick’s 2005 HLR article on the treaty power and Cato’s recent amicus brief based on the same line of argument. Also, for those keeping score, this is another embarrassing 0-9 goose-egg defeat for the Obama administration, which once again took a position totally aggrandizing of federal government power and once again could not win for it the vote of even a single Justice. [piece slightly revised for style Tues. a.m.] More: Cato podcast with Ilya Shapiro.
Intellectual property roundup
- Supreme Court tackling patent law in several cases this term [Sartori and Aga, WLF; Richard Epstein; Kristen Osenga/Prawfs] New fee-shifting regime announced in Octane Fitness already bringing relief to litigants [Ars Technica on Lumen View/FindTheBest case]
- Copyright claims on intrinsically newsworthy material: curious claim concerning suicide note [Eugene Volokh] “Is it copyright infringement to post a lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter?” Australian university seems to think so [same]
- Fate of Prenda Law model spirals downward [Ars Technica, Volokh, EFF]
- Comedian Adam Carolla has “decided to make himself the focus of the Personal Audio suit against podcasters.” [Steven Malanga]
- Why, as a textbook author, Alex Tabarrok has concluded copyright law is out of control [Marginal Revolution]
- Remembering when patent examiners were celebrities (in the 19th Century) [Slate]
- Someone sends Jim Harper a dubious DMCA takedown notice, and this is his response [Cato]
“When Jail Is No Alibi”
For Daniel Taylor to be convicted of a murder committed while he was actually behind bars, at least three things had to happen: 1) a supposed confession extracted by Chicago police; 2) a conveniently corroborative sighting of Taylor at the scene by another cop; 3) improper withholding of exonerating evidence by the Illinois prosecutor. A Center on Wrongful Convictions video (via Balko)(& welcome Above the Law readers).
Behind the Gibson Guitar raid, cont’d
They wouldn’t show him the warrant because it was sealed [Bill Frezza, Forbes]:
While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day [Gibson Guitar CEO Henry] Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.
Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong….
Juszkiewicz alleges [federal prosecutors] were operating at the behest of lumber unions and environmental pressure groups seeking to kill the market for lumber imports. “This case was not about conservation,” he says. “It was basically protectionism.”
Earlier on the extraordinary Gibson case here.
Public employment roundup
- What is pay? What is wealth? And who (if anyone) should be envying whom? [David Henderson]
- LIRR disability scammer gets probation, will repay lost $294K at rate of $25/month [Lane Filler, Newsday]
- Costly license plate frame can help buy your way into California speeders’ nomenklatura [Priceonomics]
- Ohio school superintendent who illegally used public moneys to promote school tax hike won’t face discipline [Ohio Watchdog]
- Last-in, first-out teacher dismissal sacrosanct in California [Larry Sand]
- “Los Angeles Inspector Convicted of Bribery Keeps $72,000 Pension” [Scott Shackford]
- Heart and lung presumption is an artificial construct that drives municipal budgets for uniformed services [Tampa Bay Times]
Last of the SCOTUS term
The concluding-frenzy stage of the Supreme Court term is upon us; my colleague Ilya Shapiro handicaps the remaining big cases including Bond (treaty power), Hobby Lobby, Harris v. Quinn, SBA List, Canning and others.
Reparations: more reactions
The Ta-Nehisi Coates essay in the Atlantic arguing the case for racial reparations stirred quite a bit of discussion and here are three more reactions:
* John McWhorter, “The Case Against Racial Reparations” [The Daily Beast]
* Jonathan Blanks, “Why Aren’t There More Black Libertarians?” [Libertarianism.org]
* Richard Epstein on Coates’ “acute tunnel vision” and misreadings of individual rights [Hoover “Defining Ideas”]
Plus: not a reaction but an older piece, “How Far Back Should We Go? Why Restitution Should Be Small” [Tyler Cowen, 2002, PDF]
Strangling bank access for lawful businesses
Report from Rep. Darrell Issa’s oversight committee blasts Operation Choke Point [The Hill, earlier here, here]
P.S.: More from Todd Zywicki at Volokh and Glenn Reynolds at USA Today; and earlier from American Banker and from the Washington Times (gun dealers say Operation Choke Point, FDIC guidelines squeezing their access to banks)]