In Howell, N.J., Maria Vaccarella has been fined $500 by the state for “keeping captive game animals” after nursing a squirrel and her young that had fallen out of a tree. A spokesman for the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife said pictures of the animals had circulated on social media and that the state was “obligated to follow up” when “contacted about the social media posts by a licensed wildlife rehabilitator.” [NJ.com]
Archive for January, 2016
Suit: Twitter abets terrorism
Say, how about letting random juries in sympathetic damages cases determine the boundaries of free speech? Twitter “is being sued by the widow of an American killed in Jordan… [Tamara Fields] said Twitter knowingly let the militant Islamist group use its network to spread propaganda, raise money and attract recruits.” [Reuters]
Medical roundup
- “No, Donating Your Leftover Tissue To Research Is Not Like Letting Someone Rifle Through Your Phone” [Michelle Meyer answers “Henrietta Lacks” author Rebecca Skloot; related, Richard Epstein/Hoover]
- “Women Should Not Have to Visit a Doctor for Birth Control” [Jeffrey Singer, Time/Cato]
- Lawyer ads can scare TV viewers into discontinuing medically indicated therapies. But is more regulation the right answer? [reform group Sick of Lawsuits]
- Johnson & Johnson followed federal government’s own advice on labeling a drug, and got slammed by a jury in consequence [WSJ editorial]
- U.S. opinion resistant to ratifying treaties that would create an international-law right to health care, so how about smuggling it in via congressional/executive agreement? [Nicholas Diamond, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
- Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries and New Zealand, has replaced malpractice suits with iatrogenic injury compensation scheme [Pro Publica]
- Has liberalized patient access to opioids been a net harm? Study suggests no [Tyler Cowen]
The Flint water crisis
Recommended in sorting out what went wrong on many sides: here’s a local, detailed commentary on Flint, Michigan’s water crisis that doesn’t read as if it’d picked its villain in advance. [Greg Branch]
New AU student? Report for your oppression training
American University, in Washington, D.C., according to this document from last month, “is undertaking an ambitious plan to modernize the general education experience” with the assistance of a task force whose Nov. 30 report “outlines a dramatically different approach to liberal arts education,” one that includes “sustained attention to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
The draft of “Reimagining General Education: Toward a New AU Core Curriculum” envisages the following changes:
* All first-years would be obliged in their second semester to take a one- or three-credit course in oppression studies. Sample content: “Students will explore how historical violence, such as the early slave trade and genocidal conquests, shape the contemporary experiences of marginalized groups and struggles for human rights. Class materials will consider how entrenched systems of inequality marginalize some groups and privilege others.” (The draft text describes this as a three-credit course, but at another point says that whether it will be for one or three credits is yet to be determined.)
* “If budget allows,” “all students living on campus” will be housed with the cohort of students with whom they have taken the series of mandatory courses culminating in the oppression course. They will live under upper-class “mentors” and it is envisaged that “student support teams” will emerge from each cohort under the supervision of the mentors.
I wonder whether they will wind up calling these mentored support teams “block committees for the Defense of the Revolution.”
FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) reminds us, citing a University of Delaware episode, that dormitory mentoring in oppression studies goes back a while. Meanwhile — more or less unrelatedly, except that at a higher level it is most certainly related — per this University of Louisville law faculty anecdote, a colleague who told students on the final day of class to “think for yourselves” and that multiple political viewpoints should feel welcome at the school was promptly hauled to account [Russell L. Weaver, Courier-Journal] (& Robby Soave, Reason)
Britain prunes obsolete laws
Among the countless activities banned by old British laws are carrying a plank down a busy sidewalk and beating a carpet in the street “unless the item can be classified as a doormat and it is beaten before 8 a.m.” “So voluminous and eccentric is Britain’s collective body of 44,000 pieces of primary legislation that it has a small team of officials whose sole task is to prune it…. Sifting out the obsolete legislation is the work of two lawyers and a researcher at Britain’s Law Commission, which is responsible for reviewing laws and recommending changes. Thanks to them, more than 200 measures are scheduled to be repealed” in 2016. [New York Times]
“Former Taco Bell Exec Sues Uber Driver He Attacked For $5 Million”
“The Taco Bell exec who got canned from his job after he was caught on video drunkenly attacking his Uber driver is suing the driver for $5 million. … The suit says that it’s against California state law to record someone without their consent.” A lawyer for Uber driver Edward Caban says plaintiff Benjamin Golden’s lawyer is incorrectly invoking the California law, which he says bans audio but not video recording. [LAist]
N.B. Note reader David C.’s advice in comments that the privacy suit appears to be a counterclaim to an existing lawsuit by the driver, always an important piece of context, and that the in-car tape recorded both audio and video of the incident.
“Yahoo settles e-mail privacy class-action: $4M for lawyers, $0 for users”
“Under the proposal, the massive class of non-Yahoo users won’t get any payment, but the class lawyers at Girard Gibbs and Kaplan Fox intend to ask for up to $4 million in fees. (The ultimate amount of fees will be up to the judge, but Yahoo has agreed not to oppose any fee request up to $4 million.) While users won’t get any payment, Yahoo will change how it handles user e-mails — but it isn’t the change that the plaintiffs attorneys were originally asking for.” [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]
January 15 roundup
- Malheur standoff: here come the self-styled “citizens’ grand jury” hobbyists [Oregonian, my two cents on this branch of folk law, earlier]
- Your egg-flipping, coffee-guzzling grandma was right all along about nutrition, federal government now seems gradually to be conceding [Washington Post]
- “Obama’s State of the Union pledge to push for bipartisan redistricting reform was a late add” [L.A. Times, Politico, American Prospect, Todd Eberly on Twitter, some earlier takes here and here]
- More Charlie Hebdo retrospectives after a year [Anthony Fisher, Reason] Another bad year for blasphemers [Sarah McLaughlin, more] The magazine’s false friends [Andrew Stuttaford; hadn’t realized that departing NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos, who so curiously compared the magazine’s contents to “hate speech unprotected by the Constitution,” has lately held “the James Madison Visiting Professorship on First Amendment Issues” at the Columbia School of Journalism]
- “The Ten Most Significant Class Action Cases of 2015” [Andrew Trask]
- More from Cato on Obama’s “mishmash” of executive orders on guns [Adam Bates, Tim Lynch, Emily Ekins]
- The “worst and most counter-productive legal complaint that’s been filed in a long, long time” [Barry Rascovar, Maryland Reporter on move by ACLU of Maryland/NAACP Legal Defense Fund to challenge as racially discriminatory the decision to cancel construction of a new Baltimore subway line]
NYC: “Examples of violations….Requiring all men to wear ties in order to dine at a restaurant.”
New York City issues its regulations on how employers, retailers, and other businesses covered by discrimination law must handle gender identity. “The NYCHRL requires [businesses] to use an individual’s preferred [pronoun] …such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir.”