Archive for April, 2015

Senate confirms Loretta Lynch as Attorney General

One always hopes for the best, but there are multiple reasons to think that Loretta Lynch will be even less friendly toward liberty issues than predecessor Eric Holder, himself no favorite of this space. “Loretta Lynch zealously defended civil asset forfeiture during her confirmation hearings, and was a devoted practitioner of it as a U.S. Attorney in New York.” She’s a staunch Drug Warrior, too. [Adam Bates, Cato]

P.S. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which bills itself as a “civil and human rights coalition,” worries not about Lynch’s record on police power or, really, any of these issues [Ed Krayewski, Reason]

Filed under: Department of Justice

Supreme Court hears raisin case again

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Horne v. USDA, with many Justices skeptical of the government’s position that it can seize nearly half of a family’s raisin crop under a USDA program without creating a “taking” for which it would owe just compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Cato filed an amicus brief on behalf of the raisin-farming Horne family, as it had also done at earlier stages of the protracted case [our earlier coverage; my colleague Trevor Burrus’s write-up from March; Damon Root, Reason] And The Daily Show (“raisin outlaw”).

Filed under: agriculture and farming, eminent domain, Supreme Court

Chanel v. Ms. Chanel Jones

Chanel, the giant design house, has sued Ms. Chanel Jones of Merrillville, Indiana over her salon’s name [Julie Zerbo, Fashion Law Blog via Amy Landers, PrawfsBlawg]

Filed under: apparel, trademarks

Medical roundup

Mississippi community rallies behind 88 year old doctor investigated by licensure board for practicing from his car [AP]
Pennsylvania: “Kill deal between Attorney General’s office and law firm, nursing homes ask court” [Harrisburg Patriot-News; earlier on AG Kathleen Kane; related on law firm of Cohen Milstein, on which earlier]
Hazards of overwarning in the wired hospital: “2,507,822 unique alarms in one month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false.” [Robert Wachter, Medium]
JAMS arbitrator, a retired California Supreme Court judge, resists subpoena seeking explanation of settlement allocation decisions among Prempro clients of Girardi Keese [National Law Journal; see also from way back]
Reports of VA-scandal retaliation raise question: do all the HIPAA laws in the world protect us from persons in high places wishing to pry into our medical records with ill intent? [J. D. Tuccille, Reason]
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman charged that 79% of herbal supplements lacked appropriate DNA, but that claim itself turns out to be hard to substantiate [Bill Hammond, New York Daily News]
Nurses’ gallows humor defended against That’s-Not-Funny Brigade [Alexandra Robbins, Washington Post]

Filed under: arbitration, attorneys general, HIPAA, medical, Mississippi, New York, nursing homes, Pennsylvania

From mass copyright complaints to web accessibility: one lawyer’s journey

Fifteen years ago, I wrote the following, to considerable skepticism from some ADA advocates, about the idea that online publishers should be legally obliged to make their websites “accessible” to blind, deaf, and other disabled users:

If it’s easy for entrepreneurial litigators to stroll down the main street of a town and find stores vulnerable to an ADA suit because their water fountain or pay phone is at the wrong height, it’s even easier for them to surf the Web and find sites that flunk the most widely accepted disability guidelines. Assuming a court can be found with proper jurisdiction over them, the next logical step is the filing of accessibility complaints by the cartload.

Federal courts were cool toward the idea of obligatory web accessibility, but more recently it has been stirring back to life, in part owing to an Obama administration move to revitalize the idea. And while it’s taken me a while to catch up with the story, it appears that at least one practicing lawyer has indeed spotted a niche for the mass filing of ADA suits against small businesses over their online presence.

That lawyer is Minneapolis-based attorney Paul Hansmeier, who fittingly or otherwise was previously associated with the now-disgraced Prenda Law Group, which engaged in mass copyright complaint filing against computer users recorded as downloading certain X-rated materials. Mike Masnick at TechDirt followed the adventures of Hansmeier and his Class Justice in multiple web-accessibility filing in this 2013 post with sequel and even more entertaining followup (channeling Dan Nienaber, Mankato, Minn., Free Press). Now Tim Cushing at TechDirt reports that Hansmeier is running into a bit of resistance in the form of a counterclaim by one of his targets, Kahler Hotels.

Filed under: ADA filing mills, Minnesota, web accessibility

Sixth Circuit smacks EEOC on work-from-home accommodation

An 8-5 decision from (these days) one of the nation’s more liberal circuits in EEOC v. Ford Motor Company:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to reasonably accommodate their disabled employees; it does not endow all disabled persons with a job—or job schedule—of their choosing. Jane Harris, a Ford Motor Company employee with irritable bowel syndrome, sought a job schedule of her choosing: to work from home on an as-needed basis, up to four days per week. Ford denied her request, deeming regular and predictable on-site attendance essential to Harris’s highly interactive job. Ford’s papers andpractices—and Harris’s three past telecommuting failures—backed up its business judgment.

Nevertheless, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued Ford under the ADA. It alleged that Ford failed to reasonably accommodate Harris by denying her telecommuting request and retaliated against her for bringing the issue to the EEOC’s attention. The district court granted summary judgment to Ford on both claims. We affirm.

More: Jon Hyman. On the EEOC’s many rebuffs in federal court, see here, here, here, here, etc.

Filed under: disabled rights, EEOC, Ford Motor, Sixth Circuit

April 22 roundup

“On what planet is it remotely constitutional to *raid someone’s home* and forbid them from speaking about it?” [Julian Sanchez on new at-length National Review account of Wisconsin John Doe raids; my earlier writing on the raids at Cato and here; Scott Shackford, Reason; Walker opponents still defending John Doe proceeding, to praise from (updated) left-leaning national Alliance for Justice and Center for American Progress]
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoes bill to provide more transparency in state’s hiring of outside counsel [Legal NewsLine]
BuckyBalls gone, Zen Magnets still standing: “Two Cheers for 10th Circuit’s Temporary Stay of CPSC’s New Magnet Safety Standard” [Mark Chenoweth, WLF]
Arkansas governor vetoes “right of publicity” bill [Volokh]
NY Times profiles prolific privacy lawsuit filer Jay Edelson, whose class action firm we’ve met before;
Recusal motion gamesmanship from trial lawyers at Illinois Supreme Court [Richard Samp, WLF]
Law faculty diversity: Republican women “were — and are — almost missing from law teaching.” [James Lindgren, SSRN via TaxProf; more from Lindgren]

Filed under: CPSC, Illinois, law schools, recusals, right of publicity, Virginia, Wisconsin

CDC’s Frieden in denial about good news on vaping

Actual cigarette smoking among teens, the kind that requires inhaling carcinogenic products of combustion, is down a startling 25 percent in one year and nearly 42 percent since 2011. The reason is the rapid substitution of vaping or e-cigarettes, which hold singular promise as a harm-reduction measure for those drawn to the nicotine habit. Great news, right? Not if you listen to Thomas Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control, who’s doing his best to disguise good tidings as bad so as to stoke the officially encouraged panic about vaping. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera nails Frieden on the issue [h/t @jackshafer], providing a model of appropriately skeptical press scrutiny of someone who hardly ever gets subjected to that. More on Frieden; David Henderson on how FDA hostility to vaping could slow the shift from more-toxic alternatives; related, Greg Gutfeld on California ads trashing e-cigs.

P.S. Andrew Stuttaford thinks Frieden’s not in denial, he knows better.

Filed under: Centers for Disease Control, FDA, Thomas Frieden, tobacco

Miss child support payment, go to jail

And good luck making those payments once you’ve lost your job or license. The Walter Scott shooting in South Carolina has focused belated attention on the “deadbeat-dad” rules crafted variously to please budget hawks, women’s rights advocates, and conservatives, which in practice can pile hopelessly large obligations on low-earning fathers, enforced in some states not only by jailing but also by deprivation of drivers’ and occupational licenses instrumental in earning a living. I’ve got more at Cato at Liberty, following up on New York Times coverage.

Filed under: child support, crime and punishment, occupational licensure

Traffic and road law roundup

Driver’s license suspensions, which many states use to punish unpaid court debt and other offenses unrelated to driving skill, can accelerate spiral into indigency [New York Times]
Your war on distracted driving: woman says she received $200 ticket “for putting on lip balm at a red light.” [KLAS Las Vegas, Nev.]
“Of Course We Have No Ticket Quotas, But ….” [Lowering the Bar; Edmundson, Mo., in St. Louis County; Mariah Stewart, Huffington Post on revenue generation in Berkeley, Mo., and other neighboring towns; Scott Greenfield (“Ferguson: Where Everyone’s a Criminal”)]
Yet more on St. Louis County: it started with a “defective muffler” stop in Florissant [Riverfront Times]
NYC: “Speed cameras lead to surge in tickets and $16.9M in revenue for city” [NY Daily News]
New Los Angeles parking signs explain it all for you, also recall design of craps table [Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing]
Virginia: “How Police Drones and License-Plate Readers Threaten Liberty” [A. Barton Hinkle; related, Jim Harper/D.C. Examiner]

Filed under: Los Angeles, Missouri, Nevada, police, red light cameras, roads and streets, surveillance, traffic laws, Virginia