“A black box emitting a high pitched pulsing sound designed to deter loitering teenagers is being used in thousands of sites around Britain just a year after its launch, prompting warnings from civil liberties campaigners that it is a ‘sonic weapon’ that could be illegal.” The so-called Mosquito device emits a disagreeable though harmless noise at frequencies that can be heard by most persons younger than 25 but not by most of those older. “Liberty [a legal-rights campaign] suggests the device may fall foul of article eight of the European convention on human rights, conferring the right to a private life, or article 14 on the grounds that it is discriminatory on grounds of age. The organisation also believes it may contravene environmental health legislation – a suggestion dismissed by inventor Howard Stapleton on the ground that many devices, including cars, are louder.” (Lucy Ward, “3,300 sales and rising – ultrasonic answer to teenage gangs sets alarm bells ringing”, Guardian, Mar. 17).
Author Archive
“FBI Probing Edwards Senate Campaign Donor”
We told you the continuing Paul Minor imbroglio in Mississippi (Mar. 16 and many other posts) was going to be worth watching:
[In recent weeks] four former fundraising aides to [former Sen. John] Edwards have spoken voluntarily to FBI agents.
Democrats familiar with the investigation said that neither the current or past Edwards campaigns nor any of his staffers appear to be targets of the investigation, which is trying to determine whether Minor reimbursed his children for $8,000 in contributions to Edwards, an illegal practice known as “conduiting.” …
Trial lawyers are a fixture of Democratic politics and fundraising, particularly in the South, but some also have a reputation in Democratic political circles for a freewheeling approach to campaign finance law. Within Edwards’ 2004 campaign, staffers referred to those flamboyant personalities by an acronym: They called them “DFTLs,” which according to former staffers was short for “dirty (expletive) trial lawyers.”
“No current staffer for John Edwards for President uses that kind of language to talk about our donors,” said Kate Bedingfield, campaign spokeswoman.
(Ben Smith, The Politico, Mar. 21). I mentioned Minor’s prominence among Edwards’ presidential donors in this 2004 W$J piece. And as Ted noted on Jun. 24 of last year the Federal Election Commission has fined the law firm of prominent Arkansas plaintiff’s attorney Tab Turner, as well as the Edwards 2004 presidential campaign itself, over Turner’s having unlawfully funneled money to the campaign in the guise of contributions by employees at his firm (see Apr. 28-29, 2003).
Flying-imams case: sued passengers may get help
Following up on Mar. 15 and before that Dec. 6: “Lawyers and a Muslim group say they will defend at no cost airline passengers caught up in a lawsuit between a group of imams and U.S. Airways if the passengers are named as ‘John Does’ and sued for reporting suspicious behavior that got the Muslim clerics booted from a November flight. … Gerry Nolting, whose Minnesota law firm Faegre & Benson LLP is offering to represent passengers for free, says the judicial system is being ‘used for intimidation purposes’ and that it is ‘just flat wrong and needs to be strongly, strongly discouraged.'” Also offering help is “Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-area physician and director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy — a group founded in 2003 to promote moderate Muslim ideas through its Web site — [who] told The Washington Times his group will raise money for legal fees for passengers if they are sued by the imams.” (Audrey Hudson, “Muslims offer to help ‘John Does’ sued by imams”, Washington Times, Mar. 21).
Protest a group home, get investigated for housing bias
They’re doing it again in California: “State and federal authorities have opened an investigation into a Norco housewife, alleging that her vitriolic protests against a high-risk group home in her neighborhood may constitute housing discrimination.” Federal officials asked state fair housing regulators to investigate Julie Waltz, 61, who had protested plans to open a group house next to her home for developmentally disabled residents; among those eligible to reside there under state law would be persons deemed not competent to stand trial on sex crime charges. In 2000, the Ninth Circuit ruled that three Berkeley, Calif. neighbors’ rights had been violated by an “extraordinarily intrusive and chilling” investigation of whether their protests had been contrary to housing discrimination law. In that episode, as in the latest one, housing advocates had set the investigation in motion by filing complaints against the neighbors.
A spokesman for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that in order to recommend the inquiry, it had to push aside internal guidelines that prohibit such an investigation because it infringes on the 1st Amendment.
The rules require that complaints of housing discrimination be investigated only in cases in which the alleged victim’s safety has been threatened.
No such allegation has been made against Waltz, but HUD opened an investigation into her and state investigators ordered her to respond to the complaint in detail because a preliminary review showed that someone else in the neighborhood may have made a violent threat, said HUD spokesman Larry Bush.
(Garrett Therolf, “Protester of group home is targeted”, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 20).
Annals of incivility
It may not quite reach Jamail-esque depths — almost nothing can survive that far down other than those curious tube worms that live on volcanic sulfide fumes — but the lawyerly unpleasantness in the case of Redwood v. Dobson (PDF) was plenty bad enough, as recounted in Judge Easterbrook’s entertaining opinion. Discussion: Evan Schaeffer’s Illinois Trial Practice, Prof. Bainbridge, Legal Ethics Forum.
Individual gun rights
Stuart Taylor, Jr., finds Judge Silberman’s Second Amendment opinion in Parker v. District of Columbia persuasive (“A Right to Keep and Bare Arms?”, National Journal, Mar. 19, will rotate off soon).
Welcome Chicago Tribune readers
Today’s Trib reprints my Times (U.K.) piece urging caution about journalists’ claims that business has “trounced the trial lawyers”. (Walter Olson, “Trial lawyers not trounced yet”, Mar. 20).
YouTube users at legal risk?
Needless alarmism, or logical extrapolation from RIAA’s willingness to sue small-fry individual music-sharers along with the grandparents whose computers they had borrowed?
According to some legal experts, YouTube’s uploading community could find itself in the line of fire. … Centralized source or no, Christopher Norgaard, intellectual property attorney and partner in the Los Angeles office of Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley, said he believes YouTube and its users face a significant risk of exposure to secondary liability for copyright infringement. Secondary liability can be either contributory, meaning inducement of infringement, or vicarious, meaning profiting from infringement while failing to exercise a right to stop it.
(Jennifer LeClaire, “Are YouTube Users at Risk in Viacom Suit?”, NewsFactor, Mar. 16).
UK: Thousands face pay slashes under comparable worth
“Hundreds of thousands of men working in the public sector are facing salary cuts of up to £15,000 a year as equal pay agreements take effect, The Times has learnt. Compensation claims for up to 1.5 million workers could cost the taxpayer more than £10 billion and mean that male staff lose up to 40 per cent of their salary.” According to commenters on the article, the agreements are based on the principle known in the U.S. as comparable worth — that is to say, not equal pay for doing the same job, but equal pay for doing jobs that some evaluator decides are equally difficult or meritorious or socially productive, such as (hypothetically) librarian and garbage collector. (Jill Sherman, “Thousands face pay cut under new equality law”, Times Online, Mar. 12)
Interestingly, while unions have apparently sought in many cases to minimize disruptions by phasing in the new principles, entrepreneurial lawyering is destabilizing the situation: “aggressive no-win, no-fee lawyers are now unpicking the agreements by winning higher compensation payments for thousands of individual claimaints.” This appears to be leading to tension between the unions and the private employment lawyers. Some highly paid women, as well as many men, are expected to be hit with pay cuts.
“I’ll sue ya”
We mentioned this song before, but didn’t know there was a video:
(via Mark Lyon in Evan Schaeffer’s comments section).