I’ll be one of the panelists on a webinar this Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern (fee-based, CLE credit available) presented by the ABA’s State and Local Government Law Section on Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Supreme Court’s recent case on invocational prayer at town councils and similar legislative bodies (earlier here and here). Other panelists include Eric Rassbach of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and Mark Burkland of Holland & Knight, while Patricia Salkin, Dean and Professor of Law at Touro Law Center, will serve as moderator. More at Inverse Condemnation.
Archive for 2014
“Exxon Not Liable for Alligators in Mississippi Dump, Court Rules”
“Exxon Mobil Corp. isn’t responsible for alligators overrunning a rural dump site it owns in Mississippi, the state supreme court ruled, because the global oil explorer can’t control wild animals. … Even if Exxon had wanted to cull the congregation, it would have been prevented by state law that designates alligators as a protected species, making it illegal to hunt or disturb them, according to the ruling.” [Bloomberg/Insurance Journal]
Bay Area mom thrown off bus seat awarded $15 million
Maria Francisco fell off her bus seat and was injured when an Alameda-Contra Costa transit bus driver, according to Francisco’s lawyer, took a speed bump at 30 mph. Francisco can walk, but has been awarded $15 million for her injuries, and her daughter, then 4, a further $1 million for witnessing her mom’s fall. I’m quoted in Britain’s Daily Mail expressing misgivings about the level of damages (“spin to win”).
One reaction via @LauraKMcNally on Twitter: “Compare re: soldier injury comp.”
Environmental roundup
- Julie Gunlock, from her new book, on killer garden hoses [Free-Range Kids]
- “EPA and the Army Corps’ ‘Waters of the U.S.’ Proposal: Will it Initiate Regulatory Overflow?” [Samuel Boxerman with Lisa Jones, WLF]
- Federal rules governing land ownership on Indian reservations ensure waste and neglect [Chris Edwards, Cato]
- “Zoning’s Racist Roots Still Bear Fruit” [A. Barton Hinkle]
- Victor Fleischer: Pigouvian taxes on externalities beloved of economists, not so great as actionable policy [TaxProf]
- So economically and so environmentally destructive, it’s got to be federal ethanol policy [Hinkle]
- “Regulation Through Sham Litigation: The Sue and Settle Phenomenon” [Andrew Grossman for Heritage on a consent-decree pattern found in environmental regulation and far beyond; Josiah Neeley, The Federalist]
A tale of St. Bernardine of Siena
Some consider the Renaissance Italian cleric (whose feast day is today) to be patron of p.r. practitioners and lobbyists, and at least one comic tale, prefiguring the later Public Choice theme of “Bootleggers and Baptists,” tends to back them up. I explain at Cato at Liberty.
“Arbitration Three Years After Concepcion”
Still pretty much the Litigation Lobby’s number one target, and still worth defending with appropriate vigor. [Andrew Pincus, American Lawyer]
Alt-medicine personality menaces critic
Author Jon Entine, associated with George Mason U.’s STATS project and a visiting fellow at AEI, wrote a highly critical piece at Forbes.com about Mike Adams, whose extremely controversial views on science, medicine, vaccines, GMOs and other topics get wide circulation through the site Natural News, much shared on the internet. Adams’s resulting legal threats led Forbes to pull down the Entine piece (the publication of which Adams deemed “cyber-bullying” and “electronic harassment”), and Keith Kloor at DiscoverBlogs prints choice excerpts from what is said to be Adams’s electronic correspondence with Entine. More: Sharon Hill, Doubtful News.
Crime and punishment roundup
- Radley Balko weighs in on Philadelphia bodega-robbery scandal: “I want to refer to these thugs as ‘rogue cops,’ but given that [they’ve thrived] how rogue can they really be?” [Washington Post, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
- Speaking of Philadelphia cops: “16 Philly police, firefighters earned more than $400,000 in overtime since ’09” [Brian X. McCrone and Emily Babay, Philly.com]
- Also from Balko: “Police cameras are great, except when the video goes missing“; “Police shooting 377 rounds into a car occupied by two unarmed men “raises concerns.” That’s one way of putting it.” And a not very funny t-shirt;
- “Mission creep”: Department of Homeland Security has its fingers in many more pies than you might realize [Albuquerque Journal]
- Felony murder rule: “Sentenced To Life In Prison For Loaning His Roommate His Car And Going To Sleep” [Amy Alkon] Sentencing reform is bipartisan issue on both sides [L.A. Times]
- How many parents and caregivers are behind bars on scientifically bogus “shaken-baby” charges, and is there any urgency to finding out? [Matt Stroud, The Verge; earlier]
- Milwaukee cop drives into sober woman’s car, charges her with DUI [WITI via Greenfield]
“I showed up with a restraining order”
And a Kenosha, Wis. dad says that’s what it took to get some relief from the school on his complaints that his daughter was being attacked and bullied by one of her kindergarten classmates. A school spokeswoman “said there are two sides to every story, but she couldn’t talk about specifics.” Depending on whether, e.g., health privacy laws happen to apply in the situation, it might be true as a legal proposition that she couldn’t talk about specifics. [Fox 11 Online]
For-profit entities wielding government force
On “The perils of privatized probation,” Radley Balko seems convincing to me [Washington Post], quoting The Economist’s “Democracy in America“:
I’ve written about these fees before, but here’s a quick refresher: if you get hit with a $200 ticket you can’t pay, then a private-probation company will let you pay it off in instalments, for a monthly fee. Then there may be additional fees for electronic monitoring, drug testing and classes—many of which are assigned not by a judge, but by the private company itself. When probationers cannot pay, courts issue warrants for their arrest and their probation terms are extended—a reprehensible practice known as “tolling”, which a judge declared illegal last year. These are folks who had trouble paying the initial fine; you have to imagine they’ll have trouble paying additional fines. It’s plausible to posit that these firms’ business models are based on assigning unpayable fees to people who lack the sophistication, time, will or whatever to contest them. One might even say these predatory firms treat the long arm of the law as sort of lever on a juicer into which poor people are fed and squeezed to produce an endless stream of fees.
The incentives of the private companies do not, to put it mildly, appear well aligned with the interests of the public. More in our law enforcement for profit tag. Update: Sarah Stillman in the New Yorker with a damning investigative article.