This week the Supreme Court heard oral argument (transcript) in Benisek v. Lamone, the challenge to Maryland’s gerrymandered Sixth District. I was there with some critics of the gerrymander in front of the Court steps and spoke to a number of reporters afterward [Danielle Gaines, Frederick News-Post; Bruce DePuyt, Maryland Matters] See also Eric Boehm, Reason. Earlier here. Background links on Maryland case: Cynthia Prairie, Maryland Reporter in January.
Archive for March, 2018
California judge: Prop 65 requires warnings on coffee
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled Wednesday that coffee merchants are liable under Prop 65 for not warning of the possible cancer risks of the beverage. I’ve got a write-up at Cato at Liberty noting that the primary problem is with the law itself, jealously guarded by lawyers who make out well from it. Excerpt:
Almost everyone agrees by now that the over-proliferation of warnings makes it less likely that consumers will pay attention to those few warnings that actually flag notable risks. …
What happens next? As the Post reports, “In addition to the warning signs likely to result from the lawsuit, the Council for Education and Research on Toxics, which brought the lawsuit, has asked for fines as much as $2,500 for every person exposed to the chemical since 2002, potentially opening the door to massive settlements.” And the financial shakedown value here is far from incidental; it’s the very motor that keeps the law going.
Earlier here. See also Michael Marlow, Cato “Regulation,” 2013-14 (study finds “little to no statistical support” that Proposition 65 “significantly influenced cancer incidence in California.”) And a furniture warning via Timothy Lee (link fixed now). More: Omri Ben-Shahar, AICR (evidence that coffee is cancer-protective on net).
Banking and finance roundup
- High cross-border remittance costs for globally mobile workers slow ascent from poverty, and know-your-customer and money-laundering regulations have made things worse [Money and Banking]
- “The Supreme Court should find ALJs to be ‘officers of the United States’ and thus make them subject to presidential appointment and removal.” [Ilya Shapiro on Cato merits amicus filing in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission]
- “Settlement of Lawyer-Driven ‘Merger Tax’ Litigation Stumbles in New York” [Greg Herbers, WLF]
- “Financial Regulation: The Apotheosis of the Administrative State?” 2017 National Lawyers Convention Federalist Society panel with Richard Epstein, Hal Scott, Peter Wallison, and Arthur Wilmarth, moderated by Judge Carlos Bea;
- With advances in Oregon and even California, deregulation of commercial insurance lines is having a moment [Ray Lehmann, Insurance Journal; Lehmann’s 2017 Insurance Regulation Report Card for R Street Institute] Perennially troubled Massachusetts, on the other hand, continues slide in same survey [Agency Checklists]
- Tech companies have been experimenting with old and lawful device of dual class stock and SEC shouldn’t be allowed to use raised eyebrow power to stop that [Bainbridge, WLF]
Update: court strikes down Seattle landlords-must-accept-first-tenant law
A Washington court has struck down Seattle’s new law requiring landlords to rent to the first qualified tenant-applicant who applies, supposedly as a way of countering unconscious or implicit bias. Judge Suzanne Parisien
said the law violated property rights by stripping landlords of their ability to “freely dispose of property” and to choose their own tenant, a “fundamental attribute of property ownership.”
The judge also concluded the law violated landlords’ due process rights by imposing the rule without limitation. “A law that undertakes to abolish or limit the exercise of rights beyond what is necessary to provide for the public welfare cannot be included in the lawful police power of the government,” she wrote.
Finally, the judge said the law violated the First Amendment by broadly banning certain types of advertising by property owners absent individualized suspicion of discrimination. [David Kroman, Crosscut, earlier] More: Ilya Somin.
Unions explore ways to dodge Janus in advance
In the pending Janus case, the Supreme Court may recognize a First Amendment right of government workers not to be obliged to pay mandatory union dues as a condition of employment, while not disturbing the situation for private sector employees, who have no such First Amendment right. Presto, an opening for union subterfuge involving pretend privatization of the government jobs:
The unions’ version is to create and insert between government and employees sham “private” units to handle human resource and payroll functions and, thereby, assume the role of “legal employer.”
Ironically, some of the first groups of unionized employees to be targeted for such a strategy are in sectors where public-employee status had itself been a subterfuge: independent home health care workers paid with state moneys who had only been declared public employees in the first place as a way to herd them into unions. With the new twist, these independent workers could thus have been reclassified twice: first from private to public so as to allow the fiction of a single employer and coverage by pro-union state policy, and then from public to private to avoid the constitutional protections that would ordinarily accompany work for a public employer. [Red Jahncke, New London Day and earlier The Hill.)
The gun research ban that wasn’t
From a new Trevor Burrus article on which policy ideas might significantly reduce firearms death rates, and which almost certainly won’t:
Allow the CDC to make recommendations for gun reform: First of all, the CDC is not “banned” from studying gun violence. Here is a 110 page CDC study on gun violence from 2013. The CDC is banned from advocating or promoting gun control, which makes sense because such advocacy is not science. Advocacy from the CDC is problematic, such as when it advocates state-controlled liquor sales, and the imprimatur of the CDC can confuse as well as illuminate.
David Harsanyi has more on the supposed research ban that wasn’t. And Ilya Shapiro responds to former Justice John Paul Stevens’s proposal that the Second Amendment be repealed. [Washington Examiner]
Update: habeas corpus claim for elephants “wholly frivolous on its face”
Updating a November post: a judge has rejected a habeas corpus petition filed by Steven Wise’s Nonhuman Rights Project against a small Connecticut zoo on behalf of three elephants. Ted Folkman, Letters Blogatory:
The judge held that under Connecticut law, at least, it’s necessary for the next friend to have at least some relationship with the real party in interest. Here there was no relationship between the NhRP and the elephants. Indeed, as the judge observed, the people with the real relationship with the elephants were the zookeepers—the people who were being sued! …I don’t think standing is the key issue here. But the judge’s discussion does raise the question of why one would think that Steven Wise has any more right to represent the interests of these elephants than do the people who know the elephants best. This illustrates one of the real problems with Wise’s crusade: it’s an attempt to use the courts for essentially legislative purposes, and the “client” is a mere fiction or pawn. …
Why does the the NhRP focus on trying to get a court to declare that highly intelligent animals are persons with rights, instead of trying to pass improved animal cruelty laws or even trying to pass more radical statutes, e.g., a law making it illegal to own or keep elephants, say? A cynical view is that if you pass general criminal laws, then when someone violates the law, the government takes the initiative to prosecute the offenders. But if the way we protect animals going forward is through litigation with the animals as plaintiffs, then there will be a regular role for the NhRP in conducting litigation and in shaping the outcomes of particular cases. … [They] will always need the ‘help’ of the lawyers.
March 28 roundup
- One-woman false-accusation machine induced Pittsburgh police to file eight criminal cases against couple; one was jailed for six days and the other for six months before she admitted making it up [Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
- Regulation is the bane of a great many California small businesses, and that goes for Humboldt County marijuana growers too [David Boaz, Cato]
- One Billy Goat might have cause to regret picking trademark fight with another [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
- “Antitrust Jurisprudence Is the Right’s Greatest Legal Success” [John McGinnis, Law and Liberty]
- State Attorney General Election Tracker is a new resource from law firm Cozen O’Connor tracking campaign and election news from state attorney general elections across the country;
- “Iowa judge admits hundreds of his rulings were ghost-written by attorneys” [Clark Kauffman, Des Moines Register]
New Yorker on Stand Your Ground
A big piece by Mike Spies in the New Yorker on the history of Florida as a battlefield on gun issues asserts that 1) Florida enacted the nation’s first Stand Your Ground law in the early 2000s, and broadly hints that 2) the law resulted in a jury’s 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.
Is that so? Though both points are often claimed, as we’ve pointed out in the past, neither stands up to scrutiny. As Peter Jamison of the Tampa Bay Times noted in this 2014 piece, the “truth is that Florida did not pioneer the controversial rules” abolishing duty-to-retreat in favor of Stand Your Ground; many states had long since done so through case law development. Much more on the legal background in Ilya Shapiro’s 2013 Senate testimony, which points, for example, to a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1895. (Florida’s statute did introduce new procedural protections at the charge stage for defendants, which is a different matter.)
Meanwhile, Zimmerman’s acquittal came after his lawyers advanced a conventional self-defense theory as opposed to one rooted in Stand Your Ground.
The magazine’s celebrated fact-checking system does not seem to have functioned well in this case.
Climate change litigation roundup
- Wearing two hats: mayor of Imperial Beach, Calif. suing oil companies is also with an environmentalist group [Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times] “Cross Examination Is Going To Be Brutal” given local officials’ earlier statements [Karen Kidd, Forbes, citing Richard Epstein]
- Municipalities’ suits ignore important goal of California law “that emissions should be reduced, not simply shifted out of state due to high costs and burdensome regulations” [Dorothy Rothrock (CMTA), Sacramento Bee]
- Washington Legal Foundation webinar on public nuisance suits with Richard Faulk of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Neil Merkl of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP;
- “Schwarzenegger to Sue Big Oil for ‘First Degree Murder’” [Edward Isaac-Dovere, Politico]
- “What is a non-mood-affiliated way to get up to speed on climate change issues?” [Tyler Cowen and commenters; brief Cowen explainer on mood affiliation]
- “Whether it is lawsuits against opioid manufacturers or lawsuits against oil companies, public policy should be crafted in the statehouse, not the courthouse.” [David Yates, Southeast Texas Record]