That big scare campaign against energy drinks has been quietly losing steam. Among recent developments: the voluntary dismissal of lawsuits filed by the large Florida plaintiff’s firm of Morgan & Morgan [Baylen Linnekin]
Archive for August, 2016
No place for fledgling wineries
Regulation is helping make the Napa Valley “a weird museum for rich people” with barriers against small wine competitors and new entrants that lack a zillionaire’s backing [Coyote]
Schools roundup
Could the White House be “tyrant-proofed”?
How would one go about “tyrant-proofing” the U.S. presidency, after years in which many were happy to cheer the expansion of White House power so long as the office was held by someone *they* liked? Key point in Ben Wittes’s 3-part series at Lawfare: the hardest to tyrant-proof are not the extraordinary and covert national security powers held by the chief executive, but the everyday powers over the Department of Justice and regulatory agencies [parts one, two, three].
More: Neither Donald Trump nor his progressive opponents have shown themselves loyal to the principle of the rule of law [John McGinnis, Liberty and Law] Nature of the Presidency lends itself to authoritarianism and despite retrenchment under Coolidge and Ike, that’s been the trend for a century or more [Arnold Kling] And quoting William & Mary lawprof Neal Devins: “A President Trump could say, ‘I’m going to use the Obama playbook’ and go pretty far.” [Marc Fisher, Washington Post] And: Tyler Cowen on FDR, McCarthy, the politics of the 1930s-50s, and “our authoritarians” versus “their authoritarians.”
New student-loan rules will encourage more suits against colleges
The U.S. Department of Education has proposed new regulations that will make it easier for borrowers to avoid paying back student loans by alleging that they did not get the education they believed they were signing up for. [Anthony Caso via Caron]:
Called “borrower defense,” existing regulations allow forgiveness of student loans when the college violates state law, committing fraud. That means that the college made a knowingly false representation of a material fact and the student reasonably relied on that representation to his or her detriment. …
[The Department proposes to replace] the old fraud standard with “substantial misrepresentation,” which they helpfully define to mean “misleading under the circumstances.” You might ask what that means. Nobody knows. The standard is left intentionally vague so that Department of Education bureaucrats can make it up as they go along. If there is no legal standard, then everybody is subject to suit.
Did the school advertise some leading professors who retired or moved to other schools before you graduated? Obviously misleading — sue them. Did the school mention some of its more famous alumni — perhaps a Hollywood star — while the only job you can get with your drama degree is as a barista at Starbuck’s? Now you can sue, claiming that the glossy puff piece from the school was misleading.
Banking and finance roundup
- Government badly messes up pension arrangements for its own workers. So why are California and other states muscling their way into provision of private pensions? [Steven Greenhut, City Journal]
- Unconstitutional doings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) should not be ratified after the fact [Ilya Shapiro and Jayme Weber, Cato]
- Temple-Inland, Inc. v. Cook: federal court rules Delaware practices on unclaimed property unconstitutional [Alston & Bird, my recent]
- “In praise of debt” [David Henderson] “The credit card companies were there for me” [same]
- May be wrong: Prof. Bainbridge on why U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is off base in proposals to put workers on company boards, tinker with executive pay (related here and here);
- “The Glass-Steagall Rorschach Test” [Mark Calabria, earlier]