“Back in 2015, two cases were decided within days of each other that allowed claims to go forward suggesting that a pharmacy could be potentially liable for both filling suspect prescriptions (see here) and for not filling suspect prescriptions (see here). Hence ‘damned if you do (question a prescription) and damned if you don’t.'” A key element on one side: pharmacies that refuse to fill prescriptions that they believe show red flags are apt to explain themselves to customers, and those explanations can expose them to defamation actions filed by the doctors who wrote the scripts. [Michelle Yeary, Drug and Device Law]
Archive for May, 2018
“Local Governments and Occupational Licensing Absurdity”
“The proliferation of state licensing requirements is already bad enough. There’s no need for cities to pile their own mandates on.” Detroit, which requires licenses for at least 60 occupations, is among the worst offenders. [C. Jarrett Dieterle, Governing]
Also in Michigan: “Shampooing Hair And Piloting Commercial Airliners Require Same Number Of Training Hours In Michigan” [Michigan Capitol Confidential]
“My job as an NYPD officer made me obese”
“A morbidly obese city cop got a hefty pension when he retired on disability at age 43, but he’s still hungry for more dough — so he’s suing the NYPD, claiming the job left him corpulent.” [Julia Marsh and Jennifer Bain, New York Post, February]
May 30 roundup
- “Leave your 13-year-old home alone? Police can take her into custody under Illinois law” [Jeffrey Schwab, Illinois Policy]
- So many stars to sue: Huang v. leading Hollywood names [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar]
- Morgan Spurlock’s claim in 2004’s Super Size Me of eating only McDonald’s food for a month and coming out as a physical wreck with liver damage was one that later researchers failed to replicate; now confessional memoir sheds further doubt on baseline assertions essential to the famous documentary [Phelim McAleer, WSJ]
- If you’ve seen those “1500 missing immigrant kids” stories — and especially if you’ve helped spread them — you might want to check out some of these threads and links [Josie Duffy Rice, Dara Lind, Rich Lowry]
- “Antitrust Enforcement by State Attorney Generals,” Federalist Society podcast with Adam Biegel, Vic Domen, Jennifer Thomson, Jeffrey Oliver, and Ian Conner]
- “The lopsided House vote for treating assaults on cops as federal crimes is a bipartisan portrait in cowardice.” [Jacob Sullum, more, Scott Greenfield, earlier on hate crimes model for “Protect and Serve Act”]
“EU Parliament website violates GDPR”
We have updated our privacy policy, and when I say we, I mean “not including the people who dreamed up this regulation.” [Matthias Gliwka] And of course: “Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR” [Russell Brandom, The Verge; Austrian privacy advocate] Plus Twitter humor from Danny Adams.
Environment roundup
- Cato Daily Podcast on changes in the Endangered Species Act with Jonathan Wood of the Pacific Legal Foundation and Cato’s Caleb Brown;
- In 1971 Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit let loose the craziness by reading NEPA, passed a year earlier, as giving private parties the right to challenge government actions [Richard Epstein, Hoover “Defining Ideas” via John Cochrane]
- Ambassador Nikki Haley says U.S. will not support U.N. global pact on environment [Ben Evansky, Fox News]
- Recent Federalist Society audio features on Clean Water Act include Jonathan Adler and Timothy Bishop on deference and Peter Prows, Tyler Welti, Jonathan Wood, and Tony Francois on exemptions;
- Tree, tree, go away: some of what’s wrong with the California scheme to mandate solar panels on all new homes [John Cochrane]
- “The Defeat of California Senate Bill 827 and the Future of the Struggle to Curb Zoning” [Ilya Somin]
Digital advances in ambulance chasing
“Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors’ offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients. The potentially creepy part? They’re only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room.” [Bobby Allyn, NPR]
Some problems with the right of publicity
The right of publicity, or right to control the commercial use of one’s identity, has developed as judge-made law and in state statutes; it also figures in many other nations’ law, often under the heading of “personality rights.” Together with the convention of treating it as a form of property rather than a personal right it leads to some practically dubious consequences, discussed by guest blogger Jennifer Rothman in a series of Volokh Conspiracy posts based on a new book. Among them are legal risks for reporting on and depictions of both living and deceased persons, including biographies and discussion of public figures; proposals for transferability and alienability of the right would also mean that persons can in some circumstances lose control over their identities while alive.
“Play-Doh Smell Trademarked”
Paradoxically or otherwise, makers of products like perfume cannot trademark their scents, because the fragrance needs to be “nonfunctional.” The Play-Doh scent is “one of only about a dozen scent trademarks that the [U.S. Patent and Trademark Office] has recognized to date, including Verizon’s ‘flowery musk’ store scent, the bubble-gum smell of Grendene jelly sandals, and the scent of strawberries with which Lactona toothbrushes are ‘impregnated.'” [Lowering the Bar]
“They like a Quarter Pounder without cheese. So they’re suing McDonald’s for $5 million”
Some McDonald’s stores used to charge separate prices for Quarter Pounders depending on whether they did or did not include cheese, but then moved to a policy of charging the same price either way. Lawyers have now filed an intended class action claiming that two South Florida clients “have suffered injury” because under the new pricing scheme they “were required to pay for cheese… that they did not want and did not receive.”” [Howard Cohen, Miami Herald]