Under federal pressure, the new compulsory chapel — sorry, the trend toward requiring students to complete sensitivity and diversity sessions — is moving beyond four-year institutions to community and technical colleges whose student bodies are typically more commuter than residential [Graham Shaw, Pope Center] More on diversity and sensitivity training and the doubtful evidence of its actual effects here, etc.
Archive for December, 2015
Liability roundup
- “Definition of Insanity – Expecting Certification of a Personal Injury Class Action” [James Beck on oral contraceptive defective packaging litigation]
- “Noticed something strange. In jury selection, attorneys for two other defendants conferred with attorneys for the plaintiff.” [Madison County Record, more]
- Changes in federal discovery rules effective December 1 [Mathea Bulander and Jason Moore (Redgrave LLP), Washington Legal Foundation] More: Jeff Bennion, Above the Law.
- Eric Turkewitz takes issue with my reference to New York’s Scaffold Law in writing on Sheldon Silver’s downfall [New York Personal Injury Attorney Blog]
- Changes ahead for Rule 23, which governs class actions? [Andrew Trask]
- Behind the attacks on arbitration: plaintiff’s bar, key political player, is “fighting back hard” against threat to its interests [Daniel Fisher, earlier here, here, etc.]
- Not every hot-coffee-spill case is like Liebeck v. McDonald’s. Sometimes defendants actually are negligent [Nick Farr/Abnormal Use, earlier here and many others]
Maryland, which impairs foreclosures, now leads nation in foreclosure filings
Unintended consequences: “It was the second consecutive month that Maryland led the nation in [the rate of] foreclosure filings, RealtyTrac said.” While filings nationwide were down 7 percent from a year earlier, those in Maryland were up 13 percent. [Baltimore Business Journal] We’ve noted before that although liberal legislators in Annapolis imagined they were doing poorer homeowners a favor by making the state’s foreclosure process so slow, the results have included unusual delays in bounce-back from housing recessions and persistent neighborhood blight. That’s to say nothing of the entrenchment of non-paying occupants in luxury homes for years at a stretch. To quote another commentator’s words in our March item:
“Living rent-free in a $600,000 house is a ‘plight’ only in the sense that at some point you may have to stop.” [Arnold Kling on the Washington Post’s naive Prince George’s County foreclosure series; coverage of Maryland’s unusually lender-hostile foreclosure law at Overlawyered here, here, here, here, here, and here]
[cross-posted from Free State Notes]
Redistricting at the Supreme Court
Yesterday the Supreme Court (ruling only on a narrow procedural issue, not the merits) gave the go-ahead to a suit challenging Maryland’s outlandish Congressional districting map, and three other pending merits cases indicate the Court’s renewed interest in redistricting and allied topics. I’ve got a post at Cato tying together the latest developments with my own work on redistricting reform in Maryland (earlier on which). Meanwhile, my colleague Ilya Shapiro counters the editors of USA Today on the just-argued case of whether population equality among districts should be based on numbers of persons, including such groups as children and non-citizens, or on numbers of persons eligible to vote, allowing him a rare chance to work the old term “rotten boroughs” from parliamentary history. More on the Evenwel oral argument from Ilya and from Andrew Grossman.
Congress sends private collectors after tax debtors, again
We warned lawmakers about this renewed plunge into law enforcement for profit, but did they listen? “Congress Orders IRS To Use Private Debt Collection Companies” [Kelly Phillips Erb, Robert Wood, both Forbes] Earlier here, here, etc.
At “least three persons shall be employed to drive” each vehicle
If you worry that local authorities will make overly cautious decisions on how to regulate self-driving cars — or that some of them are currently making overly cautious decisions on regulating ride-sharing — cheer up, because in the past the adoption of initial, highly cumbersome rules has tended to be followed by revisions in a more rational direction later, once the technologies become familiar. Take the progression of English motor vehicle law from its “red flag law” origins in 1865 to its significantly relaxed revision in 1896. Of course, that did take 31 years [Mental Floss]
Tipping as progressive bugaboo
The current trend in social justice circles is to disapprove of tipping, and not coincidentally wage and hour law has been ratcheting up the pressure on tip-based compensation arrangements, both by curtailing employers’ leeway to count tip income as a credit toward regular wages, and by more intense litigation pressure on tip pooling and similar arrangements. Such changes alone will probably not suffice to kill the custom, so we can look forward to continuing innovation in other legal weaponry aimed at it, such as — for instance — theories that tipping aids and abets pay discrimination [Workplace Prof]
December 9 roundup
- Judge Posner cites a Cato amicus brief: Cook County sheriff can’t browbeat Visa and MasterCard into dropping business with sex ad site [Ilya Shapiro, Eugene Volokh] And Daniel Fisher speculates that Posner’s thoughts on how far law enforcers can push around private actors on First Amendment-related subject matter (but without filing charges against them) might carry over to Eric Schneiderman’s ExxonMobil climate-advocacy inquisition [Forbes]
- “How To Blog: A Primer (And Not A Boring Primer, Either)” [Jim Dedman, Abnormal Use]
- What the campus protests are about: power [Jonathan Last, Weekly Standard]
- Eric Turkewitz draws a connection between the debate on guns and my recent work on redistricting, and Ken White at Popehat has more on the debate on guns;
- Vibrations from “ridge-like” BMW motorcycle seat said to have had unwanted stimulative effect on male user [Marin Independent Journal]
- Why are Republicans not moving to block Department of Justice settlement slush funds “funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups” that in some cases route dollars “back to programs that congressional Republicans deliberately stripped of funds”? [Kim Strassel, WSJ]
- What happens at CLE stays at CLE: doings get wild at a famous mass torts seminar in Las Vegas [Above the Law]
But you can’t check out
Why did a GOP Congress just give the Internal Revenue Service new power to yank Americans’ passports and with it, the right to travel? “Renouncing citizenship isn’t necessarily a way out any more -– the State Department just raised the fee for that by 422%, to nearly $2,500.” [Iain Murray, National Review] And: “We think of passports as being needed only for international travel, but some people may find that passports are also required for domestic travel in 2016.” [Robert Wood, Forbes]
“The biggest obstacle to proper treatment, in Dr. DeVita’s view, is the FDA.”
Longtime director of the National Cancer Institute Vincent DeVita has a new book out (with daughter Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn) on the fight against cancer. (DeVita is also a former director of the Yale Cancer Center, and a former physician in chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center). From a New York Times review, via Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism:
The regulatory caution of the Food and Drug Administration has been a thorn in his side for decades: “I’d like to be able to say that as cancer drugs have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, the F.D.A. has as well. But it has not.” In fact, he writes, “the rate-limiting step in eradicating cancer today is not the science but the regulatory environment we work in.”
And Laura Landro covers the book at the Wall Street Journal:
The biggest obstacle to proper treatment, in Dr. DeVita’s view, is the FDA. The agency, he believes, acts with an overabundance of caution, approving a drug for one cancer but restricting its use for another. It has created a lot of “Dr. No’s,” who are “prone to saying no to cancer drugs.”…
Dr. DeVita calls on regulators to allow testing at earlier stages of a disease rather than only after current treatments have failed, and he argues that more drugs should be available, before approval, for “compassionate” use in the absence of other treatments. “People are not dying because the drugs don’t exist,” he writes, “but because they can’t get them.”