Claims that only 12 percent of private-sector employees currently have access to employer-paid family leave don’t “match well with real-life experience or casual observation” or with data from nationally representative surveys, which find that more than half of employed mothers were offered paid maternity leave. Turns out that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics uses tricky, and underinclusive, definitions. “As a result, BLS figures seem to grossly underestimate paid family leave availability. BLS methods penalize employers that provide flexible benefits, by pretending their benefits don’t exist.” [Vanessa Brown Calder, Cato]
Archive for August, 2017
Oz court: supermarkets need not shadow shoppers against slip hazards
A court in Australia has ordered costs against a claimant who had sued a grocery store after a slip-fall, after finding that “the grape could not have been on the floor longer than 10 minutes… and it was not realistic to expect every piece of vegetable matter which fell to the floor be picked up instantly.” [Harriet Alexander, Melbourne Age via Tortylicious on Facebook]:
“Coles is not bound to ensure the absolute safety of entrants to its stores,” he said.
“It must take reasonable care.
“Coles could not have been expected to ensure safety by, for example, having several staff in every aisle doing nothing but watching for dropped vegetable matter, or by allocating a staff member to ‘shadow’ every customer as they walked around the store.”
August 16 roundup
- Federalist Society podcast with Wayne Crews and Devon Westhill on subregulatory guidance, agency memos, circulars, Dear Colleague letters, and other regulatory “dark matter”;
- Having announced end to practice of funneling litigation settlement cash to private advocacy groups, AG Sessions plans to investigate some actions of previous administration in this line [New York Post, earlier, related Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz testimony on Obama bank settlements]
- Update: jury acquits 4 Boston Teamsters on extortion charges in intimidation of “Top Chef” show and guest host Padma Lakshmi [Nate Raymond/Reuters (“smash your pretty little face”), more, Daily Mail (language, epithets); earlier]
- “Hunted becomes the hunter: How Cloudflare is turning the tables on a patent troll” [Connie Loisos, Techcrunch]
- Here’s a pro se sovereign citizen complaint if you can stand to look [@associatesmind thread on this N.D. Calif. filing]
- IP license withheld: “Spain’s Bright Blue ‘Smurf Village’ Is Being Forced to De-Smurf” [Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura; Júzcar, Spain]
After SCOTUS rulings, less forum-shopping
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods, cases filed in the Eastern District of Texas fell from 36% of all patent filings to 21% [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal] “Quick trials, big verdicts favoring consumers, and a state law that allows nonresidents to easily join mass litigations made St. Louis a destination of choice for attorneys going after companies that do business nationwide. Those days may be over” following the high court’s decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb [Margaret Cronin Fisk and Jef Feeley, Bloomberg]
More: Multidistrict litigation sought in more patent cases [Amanda Bronstad, Texas Lawyer]
Environment roundup
- California law requires cities, counties to generate elaborate plans for new housing. No need to grant permits though [Liam Dillon, L.A. Times]
- Strenuous campaigns to block fossil fuel infrastructure have helped saddle Rhode Island with some of the highest electric rates in the land [Douglas Gablinske, Providence Journal]
- Ronald Bailey reviews Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks, by Geoffrey Kabat [Reason last winter]
- Update: judge strikes down Montgomery County, Md. ban on common lawn pesticides [my Free State Notes post]
- Short video with Prof. Eric Claeys (George Mason/Scalia) on Penn Central v. City of New York (1978), the leading case in regulatory takings law [Federalist Society]
- Scientist leading WHO review of Roundup chemical knew of but omitted recent study finding no cancer risk; California went ahead and listed glyphosate anyway [Reuters Investigates, Karl Plume/Reuters on California action, Kiera Butler/Mother Jones]
Great moments in lawyer marketing
This should qualify for some sort of prize for lawyer online marketing of questionable taste:
[original tweet, NYC-based Olenko Law Firm, linked Harper’s Bazaar article, my own Twitter response to latter]
Crime and punishment roundup
- “This Massachusetts Lawmaker Wants to Throw Folks in Prison for Having Secret Car Compartments” [Scott Shackford; earlier on compartment bans here, here, and here]
- Traffic stops dangerous and intrusive. Why not focus them where they’re most needed? [Steve Chapman] More: a different view from Scott Greenfield;
- Why is AG Sessions enabling forfeiture end runs by police around their own state lawmakers? It’s not good federalism [Natalie Delgadillo, Governing] Angling to end suit, Philadelphia offers to end use of asset forfeiture funds for law enforcement [Robert Moran, Philadelphia Inquirer]
- White-collar prosecution: “Time To Revisit The Yates Memo?” [Robert Bork, Jr.]
- What happened when Rhode Island inadvertently legalized indoor prostitution [Elana Gordon, NewsWorks]
- What if U.S. Department of Justice policies had to be run through OIRA regulatory review for cost-benefit comparison, as many other agencies’ do? [Mark Osler, Marshall Project]
Ken White on grand juries and search warrants
Ken White at Popehat has written new explainers on how federal grand juries work and on search warrants. From the latter: “Even the best-trained and most responsible federal agents — and I mean this with the utmost respect — tend to act like coked-up raccoons when you turn them loose with a search warrant.”
Knowledge of the law is no excuse, FDCPA edition
“In a 7-4 en banc decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that the bona fide error defense in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) did not protect a debt collector who complied with then-controlling Seventh Circuit precedent — which was subsequently overruled by that court.” [Stefanie H. Jackman, Inside ARM]
Google (per)plex, continued
Nick Gillespie interviews me for the Reason podcast on the Google/James Damore story. I get to make a point there wasn’t space for in my USA Today piece: the indirect government pressure on employers to police speech to avoid litigation mirrors the pressure put on classroom content at universities under Title IX and similar laws.
I also appeared on Guy Gordon’s radio show on Detroit’s WJR, and wrote a piece for Cato at Liberty on a dispute between Google and the federal government on employment discrimination and employee privacy that would probably be getting more attention if the memo story weren’t consuming all the oxygen in the room.
Meanwhile, Conor Friedersdorf asks Google CEO Sundar Pichai: could you clarify which passages of the memo tripped the wire, and which were OK? [earlier] And a piece by Nick Wingfield in the New York Times recalls part of the backdrop to the memo dispute: years of callout campaigning in tech to force political dissenters off of boards and out of jobs.