Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for June, 2019

Overlawyered turns 20 years old

Overlawyered, often named as the oldest law blog, published its first post on July 1, 1999. That means tonight we’ll complete 20 years of continuous publication. You can read the first half-month of posts here, and some best-of highlights from over the years here. Happy birthday to us!

To get more Overlawyered in your social media diet, like us on Facebook here (and don’t forget to like the Cato Institute and the page for me, Walter Olson) and follow us on Twitter (ditto and ditto).

P.S. Internet Archive’s first snapshot of the front page was taken Oct. 7, 1999, and featured the pink-and-grey color scheme that the site was to retain for many years. (Plus a webring — does anyone remember those? — an articles library, a discussion forum other than comments, and many other features since discontinued.) You can see the archives for the first half of July 1999 in Internet Archive form here.

And: “So congratulations to Walter Olson on his blog’s 20 birthday. Two decades in, and his blog is as vital and compelling as ever,” writes Bob Ambrogi at LawSites. He also takes up the question of whether Greg Siskind’s VisaLaw, which in 1998 launched a page with reverse chronological scrolling updates to report on a legislative emergency, fits the bill as both older and a legal blog.

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“New York Lawmakers Plan To Address Website Accessibility”

“A Committee in the New York State Senate aims to develop a legal standard for the accessibility of business websites under New York law, in response to the exponential increase in website accessibility litigation in the state. Whether state legislation could stem this tide, or instead make matters worse for businesses, remains to be seen.” [John W. Egan and Minh N. Vu, Seyfarth Shaw; Dan M. Clark, New York Law Journal] On the surge in web accessibility suits, which nearly tripled in 2018 from the previous year, see Seyfarth’s reports here and here from January, and Usable.net here and here.

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Supreme Court: no judicial remedy for partisan gerrymandering

My quick take at Cato:

A constitutional wrong to which there is no remedy? For decades the Supreme Court has held severe partisan gerrymandering to be a violation of equal protection, but for just as long it has proved unwilling to convert that holding into any sort of solid remedy. In last year’s Cato Supreme Court Review I described the resulting situation as the “ghost ship of gerrymandering law,” drifting on as precedent, yet abandoned by a majority crew.

Today in Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek Chief Justice Roberts as expected recruited the votes of newcomers Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for the position identified with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia that gerrymandering is a political question to which the Constitution provides no judicial remedy.

If partisan gerrymandering is a substantial evil worth fighting – and I believe it is – we should now get serious about finding that remedy through other means….

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Environment roundup

  • “Whaling jobs were well-paying and glamorous by Soviet standards.” The story behind “arguably one of the greatest environmental crimes of the 20th century.” [Charles Homans, Pacific Standard]
  • Laying groundwork for high-stakes lawsuits against agriculture and livestock industries over CO2 emissions [Daniel Walters, SSRN via Twitter]
  • Laws banning plastic straws sometimes forget interests of disabled [Palo Alto Daily Post]
  • Oregon ban on gold placer stream mining, California law giving state first refusal right in federal land sales are two places high court might want to clarify boundary of federal and state land authority [Jonathan Wood, Federalist Society]
  • “The Troubled History of Cancer Risk Assessment: The Linear-No-Threshold paradigm, which asserts there are no safe exposure levels, is the product of flawed and corrupted science.” [Edward J. Calabrese, Cato Regulation magazine]
  • Why the vultures of Spain tend to avoid crossing over into Portugal [Bruno Martin thread on Twitter]

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Battles continue over lawyer speech codes, in both U.S. and Canada

As I noted last year, the American Bar Association in 2016 adopted as a recommendation its Model Rule 8.4 (g),

which makes it “professional misconduct” for an attorney to engage in “conduct,” including verbal “conduct,” that “the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.” …

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has argued that the ABA rule’s scope “is broad and vague enough to potentially apply to a wide range of political speech, and thus violate the First Amendment.”

The rule would invite charges of professional misconduct against lawyers who express or circulate opinions, jokes, or graphics that they should have known would make a listener uncomfortable based on one or another protected class membership. It would apply in an extremely wide range of contexts “related to the practice of law”, as listed in these April comments:

Activities that seem to fall within the extremely broad scope of proposed Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(g) include:

* presenting CLE courses;
* participating in panel discussions that touch on controversial political, religious, and social viewpoints;
* teaching law school classes as faculty, adjunct faculty, or guest lecturers;
* writing law review articles, op-eds, blogposts, or tweets;
* giving media interviews;
* serving on the board of one’s religious congregation, K-12 school, or college;
* providing pro bono legal advice to nonprofits;
* serving at legal aid clinics;
* lobbying on various legal issues;
* testifying before a legislative body;
* writing comment letters to government agencies;
* sitting on the board of a fraternity or sorority;
* volunteering for political parties; and
* advocating through social justice organizations.

While some state codes of lawyer conduct already ban bias and harassment, these have generally been drafted much more narrowly. In Maine, for example, up to now the missteps have to have been committed “knowingly,” in the course of representing a client, and in a manner “prejudicial to the administration of justice” — all three important safeguards against overbreadth.

Model Rule 8.4 (g) has faced rough sledding around the states since it was proposed. According to these comments in October, “seven states have rejected the rule: Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina, and Tennessee have rejected the proposal. The Attorneys General of four states have concluded that adopting the rule would violate the First Amendment: Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Only Vermont has adopted the model rule in its entirety.”

As Vermont goes, so goes Maine: the Pine Tree State’s highest court has now adopted a version of the rule, although narrowed in several respects. In particular, the Maine version defines “the practice of law” in a less broad (though still quite broad) way that covers fewer purely social activities; it removes socioeconomic status and marital status from the list of protected classes; and it tries at least to define what sorts of speech it will deem to be bias or harassment. Its definition is still quite unclear in its contours, however, and far broader than the standard approved by the U.S. Supreme Court as to harassment law and speech liability in workplace and university settings.

Let’s hope other states don’t follow Maine’s example: even as narrowed, the rules curtail important rights.

In the mean time, however, there is heartening news from Ontario, Canada, where (as I reported last year) the Law Society had gone all in on rules that go much further than the ABA’s, requiring all lawyers on eventual pain of discipline to draft a personal Statement of Principles (SOP) avowing a dedication to principles of diversity, equality, and inclusion. The Society rejected a proposal “to create an exemption to the new mandatory Statement of Principles for persons who believe the requirement violates their freedom of conscience.”

But its membership revolted. Attorney Lisa Bildy and other SOP objectors led a campaign that, in a seeming miracle, elected 22 of its supporters to the 40 lawyer seats among the benchers (governors) at the Law Society. While the newly elected are not a majority because of the other seats on the body reserved for lay benchers and paralegals, the message was unmistakable (more on the campaign from Bruce Pardy, Murray Klippenstein, Teng Rong, and Dylan McGuinty). Now, in the face of a determined campaign of abuse directed at the incoming benchers (sidelight), the Law Society of Ontario’s governing Convocation will meet June 27 to begin considering whether to repeal, render optional, otherwise change, or retain the Statement of Principles requirements.

The June 27 Law Society meeting, and what follows, deserve a close watch by all of us concerned about the rise of speech codes and forced expression in the professions.

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty; earlier]

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Department of Labor reconsiders overtime expansion, joint-employer rules

In March and April, the U.S. Department of Labor issued notices of proposed rulemaking on two of the most hotly contested issues of its predecessor Obama department, overtime for junior managers and the joint-employer rule. Tammy McCutchen:

The DOL proposes to increase the minimum salary for exemption from $455 per week ($23,660 annualized) to $679 per week ($35,308 annualized)…. If adopted, the proposed rule would replace the final rule issued by the DOL on May 19, 2016, but enjoined by the Eastern District of Texas just weeks before its December 1, 2016 effective date. The 2016 final rule would have increased the minimum salary for exemption to $913 per week ($47,476 annualized)

Earlier here and here. In addition, DoL is proposing to clarify what times of compensation and benefits employers must include in the overtime calculations.

Separately, DoL’s proposed rule on joint employment

would replace the January 2016 Administrator’s Interpretation on joint employment, which did not go through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process and was withdrawn in June 2017.

Under the FLSA, companies found to be joint employers are jointly liable for all minimum wage and overtime violations. The statute does not include a definition of joint employment and has left this determination to the courts.

The joint employment issue has become increasingly important since the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dramatically expanded the definition during the Obama administration in the Browning Ferris decision, recently partially affirmed but remanded to the NLRB by the D.C. Circuit. The Trump NLRB has undertaken a rulemaking of its own, proposing to narrow the joint employer definition under the National Labor Relations Act, so as to restore the law, essentially, as it stood prior to Browning Ferris. The NLRB is currently poring over thousands of comments filed for and against its proposed rule. A final joint employer rule is expected from that agency by year end.

The joint employment concept is important because, among other matters, it determines when one employer (typically larger) can be held liable for the actions of another, such as a contractor or franchisee. The proposal would adopt a definition of joint employer originating in a 1983 Ninth Circuit decision in Bonnette v. California Health and Welfare Agency, which does not sweep as broadly as the later definition adopted by the NLRB in Browning-Ferris and by the Obama administration. More: McCutchen podcast on all three issues.

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Kisor v. Wilkie: high court toughens scrutiny of agency legal positions

Although the Supreme Court in yesterday’s case of Kisor v. Wilkie did not overturn its Auer deference precedent, as Justice Neil Gorsuch and three colleagues wanted it to do, it did adjust the law in a promising direction. Ilya Shapiro explains:

All nine justices agreed that courts need to work harder to ensure that a regulation truly is ambiguous before giving the agency re-interpreting it any sort of deference.

In other words, the Court limited the number of cases where judges defer to agencies, while setting out standards for evaluating those cases that boil down to “when the agency is correct and brings its expertise to bear, having considered the reliance interests of those being regulated” rather than just making legal or political judgment calls willy-nilly. That sounds like reining in the administrative state!…

At bottom, Kavanaugh makes the perfect analogy that sums up the unanimous Court’s position: “Umpires in games at Wrigley Field do not defer to the Cubs manager’s in-game interpretation of Wrigley’s ground rules.” Administrative agencies are now on notice that it’s not “anything goes” when they decide to rewrite their own rules, that judges will hold their feet to the statutory fire.

In short, while Kisor didn’t overturn Auer, it represents a pretty good start at limiting executive-agency overreach….

Earlier here and here.

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June 26 roundup

  • European authorities may order social media platform to prevent Euro users from seeing allegedly defamatory comments maligning an Austrian politician. Can they also order the comments kept from American users, even if American law would treat them as protected expression? [Scott Shackford, Reason]
  • By 6-3 margin, with three Justices concurring in part and dissenting in part, Supreme Court rules that First Amendment bars rule against registration of “scandalous” trademarks; Cato had submitted a humorous brief [Melissa Quinn, Washington Examiner, Ilya Shapiro, earlier; Iancu v. Brunetti]
  • Mexico files charges of cultural appropriation against Carolina Herrera fashion house over native-inspired designs [Julie Zerbo, Fashion Law, AFP, related earlier on indigenous cultures and intellectual property]
  • Schumpeterian innovation and the campaign to break up Big Tech [Ryan Bourne, Cato, earlier]
  • “Another survey of consumer law professors fails to find any who always reads consumer contracts before signing them” [Jeff Sovern, earlier]
  • Settlement of trademark, copyright claims over Star Control game series specifies that litigants must exchange honey and mead [Lee Hutchinson, ArsTechnica]

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“Congress Passes Bill To Protect Small-Business Owners from IRS Seizures”

On June 13 “the U.S. Senate unanimously approved legislation that stops the Internal Revenue Service from raiding the bank accounts of small-business owners. The Clyde-Hirsch-Sowers RESPECT Act, passed as part of the Taxpayer First Act (H.R. 3151), is named after Institute for Justice clients Jeff Hirsch and Randy Sowers, two victims of the IRS’s aggressive seizures for so-called ‘structuring.’ Through structuring laws, the IRS has routinely confiscated cash from ordinary Americans simply because they frequently deposited or withdrew cash in amounts under $10,000. And by using civil forfeiture, the IRS can keep that money without ever filing criminal charges.” [Nick Sibilla, Institute for Justice] We’ve covered the problems with structuring law, as well as asset forfeiture, for many years.

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“Supreme Court Nixes Sentencing Law as Unconstitutionally Vague”

Crossing to join his four liberal colleagues, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion in yesterday’s Davis v. U.S., finding unconstitutionally vague a federal sentence-enhancement provision prescribing “harsher penalties for those who use guns ‘in connection with certain other federal crimes.'” [Jack Rodgers, Courthouse News] His opinion begins:

In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all. Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them. Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements. They hand off the legislature’s responsibility for defining criminal behavior to unelected prosecutors and judges, and they leave people with no sure way to know what consequences will attach to their conduct. When Congress passes a vague law, the role of courts under our Constitution is not to fashion a new, clearer law to take its place, but to treat the law as a nullity and invite Congress to try again.

It was the third rights-of-the-accused case this term in which Gorsuch took the liberal side, and put him at odds once again with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In his dissent yesterday, after crediting tougher federal laws with at least partial responsibility for the drop in crime since the 1980s, Kavanaugh noted that the sentence enhancement has been applied without seeming difficulty in thousands of cases of violent offenses since its enactment:

The Constitution’s separation of powers authorizes this Court to declare Acts of Congress unconstitutional. That is an awesome power. We exercise that power of judicial review in justiciable cases to, among other things, ensure that Congress acts within constitutional limits and abides by the separation of powers. But when we overstep our role in the name of enforcing limits on Congress, we do not uphold the separation of powers, we transgress the separation of powers….

The Court usually reads statutes with a presumption of rationality and a presumption of constitutionality.

While both were appointed by President Trump, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have been anything but in lockstep.

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