Eighteen-year-old guys have been known to say stupid things online, especially when engaged in displays of flaming and one-upmanship. Criminal-sentence kind of stupid? “I guess what you post on Facebook matters,” says Justin Carter of San Antonio, jailed after an all-caps flourish about how he was ready to “shoot up a kindergarten.” [Dallas Observer]
P.S. A related Missouri story from last year.
I’ve got a post at Cato at Liberty on today’s big decision in Peruta v. County of San Diego, in which a Ninth Circuit panel struck down a licensing scheme under California law in which even persons with legitimate self-defense concerns were unable to get permission to carry handguns outside the home.
More from David Kopel and Eugene Volokh on how “today’s decision creates a split of the Seventh and Ninth Circuits vs. the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits,” on the court’s reasoning on open vs. concealed carry (an individual right to bear implies that at least one of the two must be allowed), and on how the substantial majority of states already have laws according respect to the freedoms at issue here (& welcome Jim Geraghty/NRO readers; I was also a guest on the Michael Graham Show Friday afternoon to discuss the ruling).
Michael Barone has a refresher on its appearance in areas from school discipline to housing to hiring, and how it pressures actors to take more account of race and ethnicity rather than less in their decision making. [Examiner]
New 96-page paperback available from the Independent Institute. I wrote a blurb:
In clear and non-lawyerly language, Patent Trolls spells out why patent trollery is so loathed and so lucrative: its rapid rise (with lawsuits quintupling in the past three years), the havoc it’s wreaking from Silicon Valley down to your local restaurant and hotel; and the reasons it can be so hard to distinguish trolls from legitimate patent claimants. He lays out remedies worth considering.
— Walter K. Olson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; author, The Litigation Explosion and The Rule of Lawyers; editor, Overlawyered.com
Speaking of restaurants, the latest business to speak out about its bad experience with patent trolls is the venerable hamburger chain White Castle.
“Lawyers are pitching state attorneys general in 16 states with a radical idea: make the food industry pay for soaring obesity-related health care costs. … So far none have agreed to sign on.” One hope: the theory popularized by former FDA chief David Kessler that bacon, brownies and buttered popcorn should be seen as “addictive.” Paul McDonald, a Chicago lawyer who is organizing the campaign, is described as a former “senior counsel at Kraft Foods.” [Helena Bottemiller Evich, Politico]
Lowering the Bar has a closer look at the medical basis of that $862,000 judgment on Long Island. “Did the judge add a zero by mistake?”
“…is sufficient to establish the defendant’s guilt” [James Taranto on campus assault regulations, the federal influence on which we have discussed often in this space, e.g. here, here, and here] More: Greenfield.
Related: “More grotesque sex hearings at Yale” [KC Johnson, Minding the Campus]