“Melody Stoops admits she was in the ‘business’ of bringing lawsuits against companies over calls they made to her cell phones without her permission.” Storing the prepaid-service phones in a shoebox when not in use, she waited for robocalls from solvent companies, which are mostly banned under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “She has filed at least 11 TCPA cases in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania and has sent at least 25 pre-litigation demand letters.” A judge has now disallowed her standing to sue on one of the cases, saying she cannot claim that the calls were a nuisance, invasion of privacy, or economic injury given that she obtained the phones with the goal of suffering legal injury. [Jessica Karmasek, Legal Newsline/Forbes]
Archive for August, 2016
Teen shot by friend, survivors sue government
“The family of a 13-year-old boy fatally shot by a friend in a wooded area of Joint Base Lewis-McChord has sued the federal government, alleging a hole in the fence around the base contributed to his death.” [Tacoma News-Tribune]
August 31 roundup
- “If you want lifetime employment, go into compliance.” [Daniel Yergin, WSJ via Arnold Kling]
- A Supreme Court with new Clinton nominees likely to spell bad news for business in arbitration, class actions, employment/labor, environmental issues [Daniel Fisher]
- Guilty plea for man who staged 50+ fake car accidents as part of eastern Connecticut fraud ring [U.S. Department of Justice, Norwich Bulletin, Insurance Journal]
- An ambitious social welfare program in India failed in part because of its transparency and anti-corruption rules [Phys.org]
- “The Supreme Court Should Reassert the Importance of Procedural Gatekeeper Rules to Deter Antitrust Litigation Excesses” [Alden Abbott]
- A short guide to what lawyers mean by “equity,” for law students and others [Sam Bray]
“Ohio Supreme Court sides with workers’ comp fraud”
“The employer fired Onderko for his ‘deceptive’ attempt to obtain workers’ compensation benefits for a non-work-related injury. He injured his knee while pumping gas on his way home from work, and falsely tried to claim that the gas-pump injury was an exacerbation of an earlier work injury.” In a decision with only one dissent, the Ohio Supreme Court has now held that the genuineness of the injury was irrelevant to his ability to sue for being fired over it: “It no longer matters whether the workers’ compensation injury underlying a retaliation claim is legitimate or illegitimate, or the employee filing such a claim is truthful or a perpetrator of a fraud.” [Jon Hyman]
Behind on your child support? Texas won’t renew your vehicle registration
Some will lose their jobs for lack of transportation, while others will gain a first-time criminal record after taking chances on a no-longer-legal ride. Are you sure you’ve thought this through, Texas? [Houston Chronicle] Related earlier on tying driver’s licenses to issues of legal compliance unrelated to road safety here, here, here, etc.
Crime and punishment roundup
- Quebec waiter arrested after seafood puts allergic customer in coma [CBC]
- Two Black Lives Matter groupings have issued agendas, one zany leftism, the other directed at nuts-and-bolts criminal justice system reform. Media: “Door 1, please.” [Ed Krayewski]
- Conservative lawprof Mike Rappaport on DEA’s “absurd,” “ridiculous” refusal to take marijuana off Schedule I [Law and Liberty] Recommended: Scott Greenfield and David Meyer-Lindenberg interview Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Cato Institute alum [Fault Lines]
- “Criminal defense bar sides with business lobby in False Claims Act case” [Alison Frankel, Reuters on State Farm case before Supreme Court]
- 6th Circuit: amendments to Michigan sex offender registry law impose retroactive, hence unconstitutional, punishment [Jonathan Adler, Scott Greenfield]
- “Criminalizing Entrepreneurs: The regulatory state is also a prison state” [F.H. Buckley, American Conservative]
J.D. Vance on payday lending
J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which I read last week and recommend (reviews: Aaron Renn, City Journal; Robert Pondiscio, U.S. News) is not as political a book as the early reviewers made it sound, and Vance takes an unsentimental view of the unlikeliness of political solutions to cure the cultural ills of families and communities he knows from his youth. Here and there he does have a few words to say about laws, though. From Helen Dale’s review in the London Spectator:
He points out – with his poor credit history – that he has had recourse to payday lenders. On one occasion, he avoided a large overdraft fee. Without a payday lender, he’d have been forced to go to a loan shark – which, given the drug culture among poor whites, could have been injurious to his health.
‘The legislators debating the merits of payday lending didn’t mention situations like that,’ he notes. ‘The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me’.
Arizona AG, citing “systemic abuse”, asks for dismissal of batch ADA cases
The “Arizona attorney general’s office on Wednesday filed a motion to dismiss more than 1,000 cases focused on business parking lots, brought by a Phoenix lawyer … The lawyer, Peter Strojnik, has filed more than 2,000 disability access cases in less than a year on behalf of Advocates for American Disabled Individuals. The plaintiff reportedly had a standard settlement offer of $7,500” and settled most of its cases for an average of $3,900 a pop, less than the cost of legal defense. The executive director of an organization that “is the federally designated disability protection and advocacy group for Arizona” criticized the AG’s action. [ABA Journal] Meanwhile, the executive director of a disabilities nonprofit represented by attorney Strojnik has resigned. The attorney “is currently under active investigation with the Arizona State Bar Association. Strojnik has been disciplined by the Arizona State Bar Association three times, according to ABC 15 KNXV-TV.” [Phoenix Business Journal, earlier]
Banking and finance roundup
- Wells Fargo declines to serve firm that sells knives online, which might relate to a “mass de-risking” trend that followed Operation Choke Point [Kelsey Harkness/Daily Signal, H. Clay Aalders/The Truth About Knives]
- “Time For Securities Lawyers To Stand Behind Their `Confidential Witnesses'” [Lyle Roberts via Daniel Fisher]
- Attractions of English law may help London retain luster as financial center post-Brexit [Jon Sindreu, WSJ]
- “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exit Tax’ Is an Unseemly Example of Banana Republic Economics” [Daniel Mitchell, related earlier] Three good ideas from Clinton’s small business tax plan [Scott Greenberg, Tax Foundation]
- Lawyers file class actions against Yale, Harvard, MIT, many other universities, objecting to excessive fees on retirement fund investments [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism; Benjamin Edwards, PrawfsBlawg]
- “White House climate disclosure plan is major executive overreach.” [Ray Lehmann, R Street Institute]
Cato panel on the Games That Must Not Be Named
On Wednesday I took part in a panel discussion on the intellectual property issues associated with media commentary on the Olympics, which enjoy a distinctively favorable IP regime: a 1978 federal law gives the U.S. Olympic Committee stronger rights over the word “Olympics” than it would get under ordinary trademark law, including wider scope to go after parody and other situations that will sometimes arguably be fair use. Other panelists include Cato’s Julian Sanchez and Jim Harper, and the moderator was Cato’s Kat Murti. The audience Q&A included a question from noted media law attorney Paul Alan Levy. You can watch here: