Better check your oath of office, says Ken of Popehat. More on the West Virginia lawmaker’s proposed Barbie ban here and from Scott Greenfield.
Author Archive
CPSIA hits Martha’s Vineyard
When you live on an island, resale can be a lifeline:
At a time when the crumbling national economy is forcing many Vineyard families to seek bargains on kids’ clothing, toys and games, both Island thrift stores have been forced to throw away nearly their entire inventory of children’s items due to a new federal law designed to protect children from lead products. …the second-hand stores in Tisbury and Edgartown this week cleared their stores of children’s merchandise in dismay. …
Both the Martha’s Vineyard Second Hand Store in Edgartown, run by the Island chapter of the Boys’ and Girls’ Club, and the Thrift Shop in Vineyard Haven, run by the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, have been forced to throw away hundreds or perhaps thousands of children’s items with potentially lead-carrying zippers, buttons, painted fabrics or decals.
“We had to clear out the toys, the kids’ clothing, the dolls . . . everything had to go,” said Dolly Campbell, assistant manager of the Vineyard Haven Thrift Shop, painting a scene straight out of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. “I understand why they passed the law, but they didn’t think it out very well. Now we don’t have any toys or children’s clothing for families in need. What kind of sense does that make?”
The director of the Edgartown store is aware of the law’s restraints on giving away inventory that cannot be sold, but confides that she quietly let people know the things were out in the trash just in case they might want to take it when she wasn’t looking.
“What’s next? Will we no longer be able to say hello to our neighbors? Does this law make the world a better place? I don’t think so,” she said.
Read the whole thing (Jim Hickey, Martha’s Vineyard Gazette). And (via incoming links, which themselves have a serendipitous quality much like thrift stores) here’s a picture from The Magic Bus, 1948; and a third entry in the series on vintage kids’ books by Carol Baicker-McKee.
What? You mean salmonella isn’t a chemical?
“The plants in Texas and Georgia that were sending out contaminated peanut butter and ground peanut products… had federal organic certification“.
New Orleans: Five-fingered FOIA request?
If it’s too much trouble to go through the prescribed channels to request information, you can just ask the city’s sanitation director:
At the same time New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration was citing storage problems as its reason for erasing all but about a dozen of the mayor’s e-mail messages from 2008, another administration official was providing an activist lawyer with thousands of electronic messages written by or sent to at least four City Council members and their staffers during the past three years.
The council said sanitation director Veronica White, without any involvement by the city attorney or the council itself, handed over emails that may have included materials falling under attorney-client privilege, personal correspondence and communications from constituents, and details on pending lawsuits and criminal investigations, as well as council members’ private opinions on pending ordinances. Lawyer Tracie Washington, who obtained the messages, has clashed with the council on various issues including its attempt to demolish some public housing projects. [Times-Picayune/NOLA.com]
Peremptory juror challenges
I’m on record as saying I wouldn’t mind if they were abolished entirely, although the idea floated by Iowa lawprof in Nathan Koppel’s WSJ article yesterday, of limiting them to three per side, seems like a plausible compromise. (A further possible refinement: excusing more juror prospects if both sides agree in wanting them off the case).
Most of the lawyers who are blogging in response to the Koppel article, however, take a position sharply different from mine: Patrick and Ken at Popehat, Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett (and further). (More: WSJ law blog.) Deadline pressure doesn’t permit me to join in, but anyone interested in the issue will want to follow the discussion. Earlier mentions on this website are here, including a discussion of England’s near-abolition of the practice in 1989.
CPSIA: “What’s so sad is that books aren’t dangerous”
Excellent article today on libraries, books and CPSIA in one of Texas’s leading newspapers, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. 
It confirms, among other things, that the big Half Price Books chain has made a policy of pulling pre-1985 books from its shelves, as well as more recent books that contain various kinds of embellishments and special features. If you happen to know an editor with the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune or one of the other big media outlets that are still utterly ignoring the crisis, this makes a good clip to send them, just to let them know that 1) what’s going on is only too real; and 2) they’re being scooped repeatedly by other journalists, just as the Boston Globe scooped them last week on the resale story.
Also on the library issue, there is good coverage in the Zanesville, Ohio Times Reporter (a disproportionate amount of the good library coverage has come from the state of Ohio, which I suspect must be a tribute to some energetic library people there). The American Library Association has a wiki reiterating (at present) that association’s advice to members not to throw out pre-1985 books: “If you feel you must remove books from circulation, please store them until rulings are clearer!”. In her latest roundup, Deputy Headmistress describes how her own local library is boxing up many books that are likely to have been printed after 1985, because their copyright date falls before then; it is a common practice for children’s books to list only a copyright date even if they were printed many years later. So at that cautious library, at least, the law’s effects are even more drastic than one might have assumed.
Darwin Central, which took out after the offending Snopes.com on the books issue a couple of weeks ago, follows up today with a post entitled, “Snopes Defending the Book Burners”. 
Linda L. Richards at January Magazine was among those misled by the Snopes slant. In a wide-ranging CPSIA roundup last month (worth reading in its entirety), Punditry by the Pint had wise advice: “This might be one of the cases where it would be good to read up on Snopes’ False Authority Syndrome page.” A visit to the Snopes page in question indicates that it now carries a “Last Updated” date of February 19, which indicates that it has been changed since we last had occasion to discuss it; at a brief glance, some of the dismissive language I and others found so objectionable seems no longer to be there, though it has not been replaced by language that’s actually cogent or up-to-date. Someone might want to do a before-and-after comparison using the Wayback Machine.
Also on books, children’s book author and editor Carol Baicker-McKee has a lovely followup to her excellent post of a day earlier, describing some of the kinds of older children’s books (of uncertain copyright status, too “quiet” in their themes to attract reprint interest from publishers) that might face a bleak future. She admires silhouette art, a feature of many midcentury children’s books (like the 1941 Marcella Chute volume from which this illustration is taken) but which is uncommon today.
Baicker-McKee has devoted more thought to the economics of children’s publishing than have most of us, and she writes beautifully of what is at risk. Ed Driscoll also has some to-the-point observations at Pajamas Media, where he quotes Mark Steyn: “A nation’s collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what’s left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense.”
There are other news stories I haven’t gotten to — in particular, the Wall Street Journal’s important reporting on $1 billion-plus (at least) in stranded inventories, much of which may be headed for landfills, and the news of the sudden 40% drop in the stock price of well-known kids’ retailer Gymboree as it was forced to take massive inventory write-offs. I’ll have to get to those at a later date, however, as an unrelated deadline is going to be absorbing much of my attention over the next few days.
March 5 roundup
- Uninjured patients of California, unite to demand the money you have coming to you! [Russell Jackson via PoL]
- Lawyer’s nastygram to blogger Patterico: how dare you talk to my witnesses as part of your research on my case? [Ken @ Popehat, Sheffner/Copyrights and Campaigns, Volokh, Hricik/Legal Ethics Forum; lawyer Kathy Kelly retracts and regrets her threat; the underlying article by Radley Balko, alleging extraordinary misconduct by Mississippi-based medical examiners in a Louisiana case, is here [caution, disturbing images and videos]; reactions to that from Patrick @ Popehat, BoingBoing, Coyote]
- Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) being helpful to trial lawyers? Old news to Overlawyered readers [AmLaw Daily, Wood @PoL, our earlier coverage of Specter]
- California lawyers are obliged to pay $500 annual dues to the state bar, which leaves one member irritated when the official bar publication showcases a predictable brand of politics [Bookworm Room on CLAY awards, California Lawyer] More: Discriminations on the Virginia state bar;
- So is the New Jersey Law Journal going to start printing regular tutorials on how to take unlawful action against blogs that criticize one’s client, or is it just going to be the one time? [Ron Coleman]
- New blogger Andrew Grossman joins Point of Law, expert on the “overcriminalization” of life [intro, proposed we-must-do-something-about-chimps “Captive Primate Safety Act”]
- R.I.P. Murray Teigh Bloom, author of The Trouble With Lawyers (1968), whose obituary appeared in the New York Times the other day;
- Eric Turkewitz continues his investigations of online solicitation of victims of the Continental #3407 Buffalo crash; might the New York anti-chasing rules be working? [fifth and sixth posts in series]
- Stadium patdown case: California constitution “does not grant courts a roving commission to micromanage” security arrangements at private facilities [Egelko, Chronicle]
Pre-emption: don’t be sick
Now that its settled that every jury should be a new regulator deciding in hindsight whether label warnings should have been stronger, some who worry about the future of the drug business are inclined to feel nauseous. Resist that feeling, points out emergency room blogger White Coat: should your condition grow so severe as to call for medical attention, the arsenal of antiemetic treatments available to doctors keeps dwindling under the legal pressure.
P.S. More: Throckmorton’s Other Signs. And, from before the decision, from Yale-affiliated neurologist Peter McAllister in the Providence Journal.
Ads in Google News
Do they change the fair use analysis by which the search giant fends off copyright complaints?
CPSIA chronicles, March 4
[Broken link on CPSC surveillance program fixed now.]
- The internet is a-hum with reactions to a proposal by West Virginia state representative Jeff Eldridge (D-Big Ugly) to ban Barbie dolls “and other similar dolls that promote or influence girls to place an undue importance on physical beauty to the detriment of their intellectual and emotional development.” That idea is predictably going nowhere (at least in West Virginia: Montpelier, Vt. is said to have voted a Barbie ban*), but Eldridge can perhaps take consolation in that CPSIA has already (with virtually no media taking note of the fact) banned the sale of vast numbers of vintage Barbies that pose equal dangers of symbolic or psychological impairment, if not of actual physical dangers. This 1999 New York Times piece describes how Mattel was “beginning an effort to eliminate” the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) compounds in the dolls, and that environmental activist groups contended that PVC often included lead as well as (less surprisingly) the plastic softeners phthalates, some but not all of which are banned by the law.
As Denise Van Patten noted in an About.com write-up in January, it is not clear what old dolls are still going to be lawful to sell, distribute or give away under CPSIA, if they cannot be fit into the “adult collectible” exception that covers items so expensive they will be kept out of children’s hands. Soft plastic is only the beginning of the problem. Most older dolls have paint as a component — often only in the rendering of the eyes, but that’s enough to count as a resale red flag under the CPSC’s Feb. 9 guidelines. Hair and dyed fabric, both of unknown composition? Buttons or snaps in the garment, or worse yet, rhinestones? About the only such plaything a thrift shop would not advised to discard under the guidelines would be an unpainted and unvarnished rigid humanoid figurine of raw wood or cast aluminum. If your child does find one of those on a thrift store shelf, she’s welcome to cuddle it all she pleases. - Carol Baicker McKee is a children’s book author and illustrator who commented eloquently (more) on one of our earlier posts about books. Now she has a great post explaining why, although she “never used to think of myself as an activist,” she’s thrown herself into the fight to change this law. As she points out, some things changed, but other things didn’t change, when the CPSC announced a short safe list of presumptively lawful material for children’s products along with a one-year stay on many testing requirements (but not on the banning of goods that flunk the thresholds). She explains why “the stays provide only the illusion of relief,” and that “when the stay ends a year from now, the destructive testing provisions will still go into effect for all children’s products except the small percentage that have been given a reprieve – the costs of that testing will force the remaining small businesses that have limped along this year into oblivion (and the [requirement for] destructive testing will obviously signal the end of one of a kind products).” Read the whole thing.
- In a classic 1850 pamphlet, Frederic Bastiat writes of “what is seen, and what is not seen” when people recommend government solution to a problem. Deputy Headmistress writes of “what Congress didn’t see“. More: Patrick Stephens on a similar theme last month.
- A Georgia newspaper quotes CPSC spokeswoman Arlene Flecha as saying that “her agency will have inspectors make unannounced visits to stores throughout the country and will randomly conduct tests on products.” And if you’re wondering about the CPSC “Internet surveillance project”, in which agents of the commission pose as consumers in order to
trapdetect persons selling forbidden goods on eBay or Craigslist, you can find out more about that here (link fixed now). - At the Heritage Foundation’s InsiderOnline blog, Alex Adrianson has a detail-filled though not lengthy post that would make a good short introduction to the subject to send to (say) a lawmaker.
- Allison Loudermilk at the How Stuff Works blogs takes a look at the law’s heavy impact on thrift stores (“the selection at your local thrift store just got a whole lot slimmer”), while the PTA Thrift Shop of Carrboro, N.C. regrets to inform its customers that it’s out of kids’ resale entirely due to the law; things are only a little better in Salem, Ore. Manager Lisa Sonnek of the York, Nebraska Goodwill has pulled all the children’s clothing, toys, furniture, and pre-1985 books, in accord with policy from above, but has put aside “some clean children’s clothing, in anticipation of the policy being modified in the near future”. Dunno – that might depend on Henry Waxman’s heart melting or something.
*Although numerous online sources report as fact a Montpelier Barbie “ban”, commenter Barb says it’s far from clear that the reports have much of a factual basis.