- “Trump promises ‘massive permit reform’ in infrastructure bill” [Melanie Zanona, The Hill]
- Murr v. Wisconsin: landowner subjected to forced multi-parcel grouping loses regulatory takings case 5-3, Kennedy writing [opinion, Cato brief, Roger Pilon (Penn Central takings case was a train wreck, and SCOTUS should stop trying to build on it) and more, Ilya Somin (multi-factorial test proffered by Kennedy “a recipe for confusion, uncertainty, and constant litigation”), Gideon Kanner, Robert H. Thomas/Inverse Condemnation]
- Congressional Delegation: ‘Our Home State Of Utah Has Repeatedly Fallen Victim To Overreaching Use Of The Antiquities Act’ [Aileen Yeung, Western Wire]
- “Towards a Private Flood Insurance Market” [Ike Brannon, Cato]
- Attorneys general of 21 states hail EPA move to rescind overreaching WOTUS (Waters of the United States) power grab [West Virginia Record, earlier]
- More research on how urban building restrictions drive up housing prices, harm younger and poorer residents and newcomers, misallocate labor geographically, widen inequality [Tyler Cowen on work by Andrii Parkhomenko, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, Lyman Stone]
Archive for June, 2017
Lawsuit against dog dismissed
Randall Kevin Jones was injured by police canine Draco when apprehended, and proceeded to sue the animal itself, among others, under Georgia law for negligence. The Eleventh Circuit ordered the claim against the dog dismissed, noting “that the practical problems with suing a dog are virtually endless.” [Jordan Fowler, Washington Legal Foundation] To quote the opinion in Jones v. Fransen:
…under the express terms of Georgia law, only a person may be held liable for breaching a legal duty. … Not surprisingly, O.C.G.A. § 50-21-22(4), which we use to determine the meaning of words used in Georgia’s tort statutes, does not define the word “person” to include dogs.
In a 2001 case called Dye v. Wargo, the Seventh Circuit likewise dismissed an attempt to sue a police dog.
P.S. “I have here a stack of affidavits declaring the defendant a good boy.” — @jhimmibhob on Twitter.
Campus climate roundup
- This seems an important point: requiring students to engage in social justice work impinges on their moral independence [Julie Lawton, DePaul Law]
- 7 minutes of madness: astounding Michael Moynihan video on the Evergreen State blowup [Vice News, language]
- Classics in ruins [Sandra Kotta/Quillette, parts one, two]
- “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race” [Coyote]
- Claim: college violated Title IX by not doing more to stop anonymous off-campus social media posts [T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post on suit against University of Mary Washington]
- Historical figure almost wholly forgotten except as name on building. Worth exhuming just to manifest our disdain? [Charles Reichmann, San Francisco Chronicle on Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley] More: Online shaming mobs from both sides of the political spectrum now going after provocative academics [Heterodox Academy]
The forgotten war on Chinese restaurants
From the 1890s to the 1920s labor unions helped lead a war of laws and boycotts aimed at Chinese restaurants, drawing on anti-immigrant feeling and even sex panic. Recounting a forgotten history [Gabriel J. Chin and John Ormonde, Cato Regulation]
Pro baseball and safety netting
At some point “baseball will succumb to demands for more netting whether or not it’s what teams or most fans want. If they don’t, cities like New York will undoubtedly compel them.” [Jonathan S. Tobin, The Federalist]
June 28 roundup
- Unlike some other states, Massachusetts has not passed a law making it unlawful to encourage suicide; confidante nonetheless convicted of involuntary manslaughter over texts encouraging fellow teenager to do that [New York Times, NPR]
- New Emoluments Clause lawsuits against President Trump vary from previous pattern, still face uphill battle [Victor Li, ABA Journal; earlier]
- “Putting occupational licensing on the Maryland reform agenda” [my new Free State Notes]
- “Interpreting State Constitutions,” judges’ panel discussion with Judith French, Jeffrey Sutton, Steve Yarbrough, Matt Kemp [Ohio Federalist Society chapters]
- SCOTUS closes a door, and rightly so, in the long-running Chevron-Ecuador-Donziger saga [Michael Krauss]
- Green Bay fan sues Chicago Bears over “no opposing team gear at pregame warmups” rule [WDEZ, Howard Wasserman/Prawfs]
NBER: Seattle minimum wage hike hurt low-wage workers
A working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by a University of Washington team — the same team hired by Seattle to evaluate its minimum-wage experiment — just found serious ill effects:
This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.
A Jonathan Meer post reprinted by Alex Tabarrok spells out just how bad that news is:
– The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by *3.5 million hours per quarter*. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.
– The losses were so dramatic that this increase ‘reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.’ On average, low-wage workers *lost* $125 per month….
I know that so many people just desperately want to believe that the minimum wage is a free lunch. It’s not. These job losses will only get worse as the minimum wage climbs higher, and this team is working on linking to demographic data to examine who the losers from this policy are. I fully expect that these losses are borne most heavily by low-income and minority households.
But there’s more. When Seattle’s City Hall got word the adverse study was coming from members of its own research team, it quickly commissioned a pro-labor group at Berkeley to do a counter-study looking at restaurants and concluding that everything was peachy keen [Seattle Weekly] “Does City Hall really want to know the consequences, or does it want to put blinders on and pat itself on the back?” [Seattle Times editorial]
One other takeaway from the NBER: the low-wage-earner losses weren’t in restaurant jobs, which are far less mobile. Few Seattle city residents will switch to suburban eateries for everyday dining, even in response to relative shifts in cost or quality. But many blue-collar and clerical jobs can migrate to suburbs or locations farther away than that. In short, beware of restaurant-sector-only studies of local minimum wage effects, which will typically understate damage to hours worked.
More: Ben Casselman and Kathryn Casteel, Five Thirty-Eight; Max Ehrenfreund/Washington Post; Michael Saltsman/Forbes (“New Report Marks The Beginning Of The End For ‘Fight For $15′”); Ryan Bourne, Cato.
Zillow cease-and-desist closes McMansion Hell blog
23-year-old Kate Wagner has at least temporarily shuttered McMansion Hell, a popular blog on which she posted photos of modern houses overlaid with sarcastic comments about their perceived design shortcomings. Real estate aggregator Zillow sent Wagner a cease and desist order because she used photos taken from its site. (Zillow itself borrows photos from other providers under license.) Jim Dalrymple, BuzzFeed:
Ken White, an attorney who writes for the legal blog Popehat, agreed that McMansion Hell would qualify as fair use. Because Zillow and McMansion Hell aren’t competing businesses, he said, “all of the fair use factors are in the bloggers’ favor.”
Zillow appears to have been trying to “make a satirical blogger shut up rather than face the costs of vexatious litigation,” White told BuzzFeed News.
Supreme Court will hear cakeshop case
By agreeing to hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court has set up a potentially major decision on “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel the petitioner to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the free speech or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. My link-rich Cato post also goes on to discuss the sleeper case of Pavan v. Smith, which offers a glimpse of how a post-Scalia conservative wing may address issues following in the wake of Obergefell.
P.S. More from Erica Goldberg on the hubbub over Gorsuch’s dissent in Pavan.
Home improvement chains sued over 4 x 4 lumber
4 x 4 lumber isn’t really four by four in dimensions, and if that comes as news to you, you might be a class action plaintiff [Rick Romell, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/USA Today Network]