“Four years after their son was first placed into foster care, a Deschutes County judge has determined that Amy Fabbrini and Eric Ziegler can parent both their boys.” The couple’s infant had been restored to them by a court ruling three weeks ago; now “4-year-old Christopher is on a track to come home as well. Both boys have spent nearly their entire lives in foster care based on the state’s concerns that Fabbrini and Ziegler were intellectually incapable of caring for their children,” though no abuse has been alleged. [Samantha Swindler, Oregonian; earlier]
Archive for January, 2018
Best of Overlawyered — September 2017
- “Utterly worthless,” “no better than a racket”: Subway sandwich settlement comes in for criticism at Seventh Circuit;
- Defamation suit after being called patent troll;
- Publishing a gun design online = arms export?
- Drug company hands patents over to Indian tribe;
- No, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not an “ode to slavery” as some have mistaken it;
- “Public interest” lawyer sues to end bottomless brunches;
- “Starbucks robber to sue customer”;
- “Mouse attacked, traumatized me in Home Depot, woman says in suit.”
Save the date, Feb. 8: Lenore Skenazy speaking on the sex offender registry
Coming to Cato in Washington, D.C. noon Feb. 8, register or watch online:
You May Be a Sex Offender if…
Featuring Lenore Skenazy, Author and columnist, founder of Free-Range Kids; with comments by Dara Lind, Senior Reporter, Vox; moderated by Walter Olson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.
In 1994, responding to a terrible murder, Congress passed a law requiring all 50 states to set up sex offender registries. Now many states closely control where and with whom persons on the registries may live, while public maps showing offenders’ places of residence lead to social shunning and occasional harassment. They also scare parents from letting their children play outside.
But does the registry make kids any safer? Lenore Skenazy, the New York newspaper columnist famous for letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone and founding the “anti-helicopter parenting” movement, has found that offender maps have helped shape public perceptions of a society rife with child-snatching. That led her to other questions: Who gets on the list? Could you, or someone you love, wind up on the list? How about getting off it?
Lenore Skenazy has spoken around the world on the costs of irrational fears of risk to young people and is the president of the new nonprofit dedicated to overthrowing overprotection, Let Grow. Commenting on her remarks will be Vox senior reporter Dara Lind, who has written on how the registry system fits into the wider scheme of criminal justice sanctions and how it may affect recidivism.
A southern border wall: the eminent domain angle
“The federal government’s boldest land grab in a generation produced the first border wall — and a trail of abuse, mistakes and unfairness.” It happened back in 2007. [T. Christian Miller, ProPublica, and Kiah Collier and Julián Aguilar, Texas Tribune; related, Ilya Somin]
Wage and hour roundup
- Among this administration’s most notable accomplishments — hurrah for Labor Sec. Alex Acosta and team — is to ditch its predecessor’s horrible overtime rules [Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post on opinion letters and internships] DoL rollback of Obama rules on tip pooling is fully justified [Christian Britschgi]
- “A Seattle Game-Changer? The latest empirical research further underscores the harm of minimum wage laws” [Ryan Bourne, Regulation mag] “Report: California’s $15 Minimum Wage Will Destroy 400,000 Jobs” [Scott Shackford]
- It just couldn’t have been Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne’s fault that some donut-franchise workers saw benefits and breaks trimmed after a minimum wage hike. “Instead, she attacked the employers.” [David Henderson; Robyn Urback/CBC and May Warren/Toronto Metro on changes by owners of some Tim Horton outlets]
- Study: grocery stores hike prices when minimum wage rises, “poor households are most negatively affected” [Tyler Cowen on Renkin, Montialoux, and Siegenthaler paper] New York enacts a minimum wage law applying to restaurant chains with at least 30 outlets, and presto-change-o, some upstate pizzerias have new names and are now separate businesses [Geoff Herbert, Syracuse.com]
- “Employer Responsibilities under the Fair Labor Standards Act After a Disaster” [Annamaria Duran, SwipeClock, promotional material for software product but informative even so]
- If lawsuits succeed in forcing ridesharing into employment mold, many will find it less attractive to earn money by driving [Coyote]
“Split up the Ninth Circuit—but Not Because It’s Liberal”
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Ilya Shapiro on the case for breaking up the overburdened, overbusy Ninth Circuit, which can be made independently of the usual ideological concerns [Cato/WSJ] Because of the Ninth’s unique practice of forming en banc panels by randomly selecting 11 of its 29 judges rather than summoning the full number, I’ve referred to it in the past as “the court that’s not all there.”
Climate change suit roundup
- Biggest recruit yet for climate recoupment suits: NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio sues blaming five oil companies for Superstorm Sandy [Seth Barron/City Journal, John Timmer/ArsTechnica, WSJ; Stephen Bainbridge on parallel divestment effort]
- California cities/counties suing oil companies: climate change will be our ruin. Same cities/counties selling bonds to investors: risk? what risk? [Andrew Scurria/WSJ; John O’Brien/Forbes] Santa Cruz joins several other Bay Area counties in action [Nicholas Ibarra, Santa Cruz Sentinel]
- Can’t spell “Oedipal” without “O-i-l”: Rockefeller heirs bankroll #ExxonKnew crusade against great-granddad’s company [Reeves Wiedeman, New York mag]
- Same article takes disbelieving tone about possibility that state AGs’ campaign might trample anyone’s First Amendment rights [memory refresher] More about that in this Margaret (Peggy) Little and Andrew Grossman 2016 Federalist Society podcast and my Twitter thread about it;
- National Association of Manufacturers launches legal initiative to push back against industrywide and attorney-general tort, nuisance, and public-recoupment suits, notably on climate and lead paint [John Siciliano, Washington Examiner; Linda Kelly, The Hill; NAM’s Manufacturing Accountability Project and its coverage of the art of “climate attribution,” the early failed Kivalina suit (more on which), origins of Global Warming Legal Action Project]
- Pssst, Vice — in profiling Steve Berman you might want to be aware that a few other attorneys claim some minor role in also having “won a $200 billion settlement from tobacco companies in the 90s” [compare claims of lawyers organizing opioid suits]
German social media law: early takedowns spur outcry
“A new law meant to curtail hate speech on social media in Germany is stifling free speech and making martyrs out of anti-immigrant politicians whose posts are deleted, the top-selling Bild newspaper said on Thursday” under the headline “Please spare us the thought police!” [Michelle Martin, Thomson Reuters] In one probably intended effect of the draconian law — drafted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats — Twitter moved to take down some pronouncements by politicians from the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. But the NetzDG enactment, as it is known, has quickly had a number of less expected applications, including the blockage of a satirical publication that had mimicked the tone of an AfD leader, and even the deletion of a years-earlier tweet by Justice Minister Heiko Maas, a champion of the law, in which he had called an author an “idiot.” [Reuters; AFP/The National; DW; Tim Cushing/TechDirt; earlier here, here, here, here, and here]
Best of Overlawyered — August 2017
- “California: ADA lawsuit mill destroys family’s restaurant dream“;
- “UK tourists abroad file wave of food poisoning claims“;
- Brady Campaign talks couple into suing gun dealer, guess who gets left high and dry;
- EEOC: “gentleman’s club” broke law by refusing to hire male barkeep;
- $41.7M verdict against school for failing to warn of tick bites on field trip to China;
- “If you’re an eclipse viewer and you’re hurt on someone else’s property, you could have a claim“;
- “Seattle landlords aren’t to know about would-be tenants’ criminal records“;
- “Maybe the best outcome in the case would be if the [New York Times paid Sarah Palin] $0 damages, but the editor who wrote the false words resigned in shame.”
Challenge to Seattle law banning choice of tenants
“In Yim v. City of Seattle, PLF is challenging an anti-discrimination law that prohibits landlords from choosing their own tenants. Today, we filed our opening brief to ask the Court to invalidate this oppressive and brazen violation of fundamental rights. Under Seattle’s ‘first-in-time’ rule, a landlord must offer a rental unit to the first person who submits an adequate application.” [Ethan Blevins, Pacific Legal Foundation, earlier on Seattle law purporting to require landlords to rent to first qualified tenant who applies] The law has been rationalized in part as a way to restrict the operation of “unconscious” bias. “The Seattle law illustrates an important downside of trying to use government regulation to offset the subconscious cognitive biases of the private sector: there is little, if any reason to believe that voters and politicians are less biased than the people whose behavior they are trying to regulate. Much of the time, they are likely to be more so.” [Ilya Somin]