“Iowa Supreme Court Says Porch Drinking Is Not a Crime” [Jacob Sullum]
Archive for June, 2015
Police and prosecution roundup
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cracks down on “rent-a-D.A.” scheme in which private debt collector acquired right to use prosecutor’s letterhead [Jeff Gelles, Philadelphia Inquirer, earlier here and here]
- What Santa Ana, Calif. cops did “after destroying –- or so they thought –- all the surveillance cameras inside the cannabis shop.” [Orange County Weekly via Radley Balko]
- Maryland reforms mandatory minimums [Scott Shackford/Reason, Sen. Michael Hough/Washington Times]
- Locking up past sex offenders for pre-crime: “Civil Commitment and Civil Liberties” [Cato Unbound with Galen Baughman, David Prescott, Eric Janus, Amanda Pustilnik; Jason Kuznicki, ed.]
- Two strikes and you’re out, Sen. Warren? Or is there some alternative to DPAs/NPAs (deferred prosecution agreements/non-prosecution agreements?) [Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice]
- Covert cellphone tracking: “Baltimore Police Admit Thousands of Stingray Uses” [Adam Bates, Cato, related on Erie County/Buffalo]
- “Citizens face consequences for breaking the law, but those with the power to administer those laws rarely face any.” [Ken White, Popehat] “61% of IRS Employees Who Cheated On Their Taxes Were Allowed To Keep Their Jobs” [Paul Caron, TaxProf]
“Magna Carta and the Rule of Law around the World”
King and government do not exercise absolute power but are themselves bound by law: the Magna Carta’s 800th anniversary is today. Marking the sealing of the “Great Charter of Liberties” agreed to by King John, the Cato Institute held a panel discussion June 4 featuring Richard Helmholz (U. Chicago), Roger Pilon (Cato), Tom Palmer (Atlas Network, Cato), Richard Pipes (Harvard), Swaminathan Aiyar (Cato), and Juan Carlos Botero (World Justice Project), moderated by Ilya Shapiro and Ian Vasquez (Cato).
More: Carrie-Ann Biondi, The Objective Standard (“a profound development on the road to a civilized, rights-based society… toward properly limited government.”), Sheldon Richman (a study in unintended consequences and spontaneous social evolution), Roger Pilon (“We’re back in the fields of Runnymede, importuning our government for relief from its assumption of plenary power.”), Deepak Lal (India and Hong Kong have benefited enormously from it; mainland China, Egypt, and Russia feel its lack). [Slightly edited to add new introduction.]
“Feds Who Didn’t Even Discover The OPM Hack Themselves…”
“…Still Say We Should Give Them Cybersecurity Powers” The spectacular breach of Office of Personnel Management records, which exposed to China-based hackers information on every federal employee as well as the obviously sensitive contents of security clearance applications, was revealed when a vendor of security services was allowed to do a sales presentation on the federal network in question and discovered the already-exploited vulnerability. But of course the feds will be totally competent in prescribing practice to the private sector, right? [Mike Masnick, TechDirt] Earlier on regulation of private-sector electronic security here, here, etc. Related: W$J (DHS couldn’t move to secure networks without engaging in collective bargaining first). Related: pending bills “authorize government to impose data retention mandate on private businesses”
Banking and finance roundup
- “FATCA: An American Tax Nightmare” [Stu Haugen, New York Times via TaxProf]
- Following Iceland’s model? “Neither [Krugman nor Yglesias] mentions that a major part of the Icelandic recipe was letting *foreign* deposit holders twist in the wind.” [Tyler Cowen]
- Wasting a Crisis: Why Securities Regulation Fails, new book by Virginia law dean Paul Mahoney [Thaya Knight, Cato, with video of Cato event]
- Seventh Circuit reverses $2.46 billion judgment against HSBC Holdings in Household International case [Reuters/Business Insider]
- “I’ve been with them 40 years and then they have this? It’s a pain.” Banks close longtime local accounts as anti-money-laundering rules squeeze economy in border town Nogales, Ariz. [W$J]
- Six regulatory agencies issue diversity guidelines for financial institutions, implementing Dodd-Frank mandate [FDIC]
- Judge to Labaton Sucharow, Bernstein Litowitz: you might at least want to talk to those “confidential informants” your case relies on [Daniel Fisher, Forbes]
Detroit: “Scared to death” theory brings $300K after 85-year-old’s crash
An 85-year-old driver crashed into the back of a tractor-trailer, both vehicles traveling at relatively low speed, and was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. A Michigan appeals court agreed that a jury could hear an expert witness’s theory, dismissed by a cardiologist as “silly,” that Abdulla Kassem had suffered a heart attack that “could have been caused by a ‘fear of impending doom,’ just before the 2008 crash in Dearborn. There was no autopsy.” An insurance company has now paid $300,000 to settle the case. [AP/WDIV]
Here come the web accessibility regs, cont’d
Amy Alkon discusses with readers the regulations for private online commerce and publishing expected soon from the federal government, drawing this comment signed Lamont Cranston:
This is no joke. If you work for Federal Money, which I do, everything published to the web must be Section 508 compliant.
It’s like a choke chain on a leash. Many, many tools and features useful to 99% of your users must remain unavailable because 1% of the people who come to your site might not be able to use them.
It’s one of the reasons ANY federal web site is so BORING in design.
More: Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice (“The Public Accommodation Formerly Known As SJ”)
“Chinese actor sued for staring too intensely from TV at viewer”
China recently made it easier to maintain lawsuits by providing that judges in dismissing cases must give specific written reasons and providing for appeal of dismissals. Modest though it may sound, the change has provoked fears in some quarters that litigants will file too many groundless cases, of which an action by a TV viewer against star Zhao Wei for “staring too hard,” thus causing “spiritual damage,” is cited as an example. [Guardian]
Obama nears final overtime decree
The unilateral measure, which does not require Congressional approval, will raise “from $23,660 to as much as $52,000 the threshold below which workers must be paid overtime.” Don’t expect low-wage workers to benefit: “[B]usinesses offset new overtime costs with lower base wages. One recent study found that workers pay for 80 percent of overtime costs through such base wage cuts.” That doesn’t mean it’s a wash, though: “The change will kill flexible schedules for entry- and mid-level salaried employees.” [James Sherk, Daily Signal] And the measure’s true target, as with so much union-backed labor regulation, is the upwardly mobile job seeker: “Ambitious workers intent on proving their value by taking on extra responsibilities will be severely hobbled in their ability to do so, and instead be reduced to time-clock punchers.” [J.C. Tuccille, Reason]
We covered this truly awful idea at some length last year.
Orange County lowers the boom on Axe
“Recently, the consumer protection unit of the Orange County (CA) District Attorney’s Office filed suit against Unilever, parent company of AXE, accusing the company of fudging the packaging of its male grooming products.” The charges, which were filed concomitantly with a proposed settlement the same day, do not claim that Axe misstated the quantity of product contained by weight, but say its packaging employed “false bottoms, false sidewalls, false lids or false coverings” which “serve no legitimate purpose and mislead consumers as to the amount of product contained in the containers. …Apparently, the DA has never purchased a bag of potato chips.” It is unclear from the coverage whether Orange County consumers were constrained from ascertaining how much product was in one of the packages by, say, lifting it to see how heavy it was, or looking at the number of ounces on the label. In settlement (the same day) of the charges, the company agreed to pay $750,000 to Orange County and $24,000 to its D.A.’s office, and to take out ads in various California newspapers with $3 coupons good off a consumer purchase of Axe. [Nick Farr, Abnormal Use; Orange County Register]
The Orange County district attorney’s office under Tony Rackauckas is emerging as an Overlawyered favorite, having knocked an impressive $16 million out of Toyota in the sudden-acceleration affair even though the cars in question do not suddenly accelerate, of which $4 million went to a locally influential tort attorney; the office has also kept mum about arrangements it has with tort attorneys. And of course Rackauckas’s office has lately been embroiled in one of the nation’s most prominent scandals of prosecutorial abuse (with retaliation angle).
P.S. Oh, and here is coverage of “slack fill” class action suits organized by private lawyers against both Unilever/Axe and competitor Procter & Gamble, confirming that this wasn’t exactly a solitary frolic on the county’s part. More: Amy Alkon.