- “Torts of the Future: Addressing the Liability and Regulatory Implications of Emerging Technologies” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform]
- “After paying out millions, Detroit pushes new law protecting cities from claims over bad sidewalks” [WXYZ]
- Fire doors at U.N. cut and repurposed to make cabinets, court rules original manufacturers not liable for failure to warn of asbestos dust risk should doors be cut up [Lynn Lehnert, Asbestos Case Tracker]
- Woman sues bar that served her over her later drunk driving accident and injuries allegedly suffered in police custody [Penn Record]
- Can members of a class action be identified? Supreme Court should resolve circuit split on the important class-action-certification issue of “ascertainability” [David E. Sellinger and Aaron Van Nostrand, WLF]
- Federal court in the Eastern District of New York gets lots of food marketing lawsuits [Emily Saul and Danika Fears, New York Post, Elizabeth Nolan Brown]
Archive for March, 2017
At Cato: laws making ridesharing drivers wait, and the N.C. bathroom compromise
I’ve got two new pieces up at Cato at Liberty:
1) Following an outcry, Nevada lawmakers have dropped a plan to hobble ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber by requiring that their drivers wait at least 15 minutes before picking up a fare. The bill had been backed by a taxi union that donates heavily to lawmakers: all must be brought down to the level of the slowest in the name of a level playing field!
2) No one’s willing to come out and say that the North Carolina bathroom compromise signed yesterday by Gov. Roy Cooper is actually pretty good. But it is.
At the New York Post: too late for AGs to pose as above politics
My piece at the New York Post begins:
Having muscled their way to the front line in the nation’s political battles, state attorneys general are now in for getting roughed up along with the other partisan combatants.
The Republican Attorneys General Association, representing just over half the 50 state AGs, has voted to end a “rare bit of bipartisanship in the polarized environment of US politics,” to quote Reuters, which reported the news. It’s going to ditch an unspoken hands-off agreement with its rival Democratic Attorneys General Association under which each party targeted open seats only and held back from bankrolling challenges against the others’ incumbents.
Democrats are expected to respond in kind and start going after incumbent Republicans. If there were still any hope that the chief legal officers of the states could stay above the fray in some genteel way, it’s pretty much gone. Truth to tell, it’s been gone for years.
I run through some of the politicized doings of state AGs — from funneling lawsuit settlements to community-group chums, to organizing in packs to roam the national political scene fighting Presidents of both parties, to taking out after wrongful advocacy in such forms as “climate denial,” to the new prosecution over hidden filming of Planned Parenthood executives. Like or dislike this activity, there’s no doubt it’s political and that attorneys general need to make themselves accountable for it at election time.
Seattle: we’ll pick a union for Uber drivers
In 2015 the city of Seattle passed a unique law imposing a collective bargaining law on Uber drivers and giving the city itself the power to select a union to represent the drivers. It chose the Teamsters Union, which already represented (competing) taxi drivers. Like the federal law of collective bargaining agreements, the city law purports to take away individual drivers’ rights to reach other deals, whether or not they voted for the union. “The Teamsters are allied with Yellow Cab and pushed for the 2015 ordinance requiring union negotiations.” Litigation in both state and federal court seeks to set aside the law on multiple grounds including pre-emption, antitrust, and privacy violation. [Daniel Fisher] More: WSJ editorial today.
Environment roundup
- “The river can’t stop people from throwing hooks in it, which seems like an important right for a legal person to have” [Lowering the Bar] “Just days after New Zealand declared the Whanganui River a legal person, the world’s population of river people (not people who live on the river, but rivers who are people) tripled, when a court in India waved its judicial wand and transformed the Ganges and Yamuna rivers” [same, follow-up]
- One way to make Vladimir Putin unhappy: support legal fracking in U.S. [Eric Roston, Bloomberg]
- Stadium subsidies for the Patagonia set: outdoor gear makers push federal Western land grabs [Terry Anderson]
- Washington Post account of Wyoming rancher Clean Water case might deserve a Pinocchio or two of its own [Jonathan Wood]
- “When should the federal government own land?” [Tyler Cowen]
- Missed this 2014 Los Angeles Times investigation into the story behind a federal raid on pot-hunters in the rural Southwest [“A Sting in the Desert“]
“What Kind of a Judge is Neil Gorsuch?”
New paper from Ilya Shapiro and Frank Garrison for the fledgling Cato Legal Policy Bulletin series, which launched in January with Thomas Berry’s paper “The Illegal Tenure of Civil Rights Head Vanita Gupta.” From the executive summary:
…President Donald Trump picked Gorsuch after promising the American people that he would appoint someone in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who is best known for his devotion to the original meaning of the Constitution, his textualist approach to interpreting legal statutes, and his commitment to ordered liberty through constitutional structure. This policy bulletin weighs Judge Gorsuch’s record with respect to those ideals, ultimately asking whether a Justice Gorsuch would uphold the Constitution’s protection of individual liberty. A survey of Gorsuch opinions in cases involving criminal procedure, constitutional structure, and individual rights reveals an adherence to the rule of law. Moreover, Gorsuch has questioned legal precedent on the separation of powers—especially when it comes to the administrative state—in a way that shows a commitment to the judicial duty to check the other branches of government.
Other links on the nominee: A study of cases finds Neil Gorsuch in the middle of the pack among Tenth Circuit judges on employment discrimination and immigration [Kevin Cope and Joshua Fischman, Five Thirty-Eight] And the editors at the New York Daily News, one of the most outspokenly anti-Trump newspapers, say the Senate should confirm him:
In exchange after exchange with members of the Judiciary Committee, Gorsuch revealed himself to be not the caricature conjured up by Democrats, but a rigorous judicial practitioner with respect for the legislative process and for precedent….
Sen. Dianne Feinstein challenged Gorsuch on whether he “would give a worker a fair shot” — asking him to cite cases in which he stood up for the little guy, affirming his or her rights over that of a wealthy employer.
Gorsuch, off the top of his head, named 10….
Democrats are doing the nation a disservice by planning to filibuster his nomination….They should stand down.
March 29 roundup
- “SEAT Act: Top Senators Sponsoring Bill to Outlaw Low Cost Carriers, Raise Airfares” [Gary Leff, View from the Wing]
- “Trump’s Safe and Sane ‘Regulatory Reform’ Idea” [Cass Sunstein/Bloomberg, earlier Sunstein on Trump regulatory initiatives]
- Changing law and economics shape street protest [Tyler Cowen] Arizona’s bad idea on protestors involves racketeering charges, forfeiture, and more [Coyote]
- “Rights And Reality: Georgia Cop Jails Ex-Wife For Facebook Gripe” [Ken White, Popehat]
- “Opponents of same-sex marriage cynically…manufacture[d] a baseless controversy in the Texas Supreme Court” to attack City of Houston’s spousal benefits, but as the Hon. Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit had already stated in persuasive guidance, Obergefell “is the law of the land.” [Mark Pulliam, Law and Liberty; a second view from Josh Blackman]
- Idea making some headway: adapting use of class action and similar aggregate litigation procedures to administrative adjudication [Sergio Campos, Jotwell]
Split the Ninth Circuit?
A House Judiciary hearing airs both sides on the question of breaking up the very large and busy Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals [ABA Journal, earlier]
“The Story of Asbestos Litigation in Texas and Its National Consequences”
Texas was once the largest center of asbestos litigation in the U.S., with mass recruitment of workers claiming injury from past exposure although displaying no symptoms. Now, more than 40 years after the landmark Fifth Circuit Borel v. Fibreboard case which originated with a Beaumont worker’s complaint, Texas has enacted the nation’s most extensive legislation laying down rules for the conduct of asbestos litigation, much of it aimed at curtailing cases with poor evidence of causation or injury. A new report from Texans for Lawsuit Reform describes and defends the state’s actions.
Kentucky joins Louisiana in adding police to hate-crime protected group list
A police union’s national campaign continues to bear fruit as Gov. Matt Bevin signed a bill making Kentucky the second state, after Louisiana, to include police as a protected group in hate crime law. For principled conservative opponents of hate crime laws as a category, now would be a good time to speak up, wouldn’t it? [Beth Reinhard, WSJ] Such “Blue Lives Matter” bills continue to be introduced elsewhere around the country at both state and municipal levels [Julia Craven/Huffington Post, Tim Cushing/TechDirt]