“…you can come here and practice.”
— Guest spokeswoman on New Orleans’s WWL-TV, this evening, urging volunteer medical personnel to report to emergency centers to tend to evacuees and hurricane victims (live broadcast, 8:47 p.m. Central)
Author Archive
PFAW vs. John Roberts
A People for the American Way report attacking the Supreme Court nominee is “something of a bore”, “lacks any nuance that would make it credible”, “scattershot”, a “less than compelling document” based on “utter dogmatism”, opines Richard Epstein. Ah, but don’t underestimate the group’s powers to stir up media trouble for Roberts, replies Stephen Presser as the two continue their featured discussion of the Supreme Court vacancy at Point of Law.
State Supreme Court races
Campaign spending on them soared in 2004 to $24.4 million, more than twice the previous record set in 2000. (Robert Tanner, “TV Spending for State Supreme Court Campaigns Soared in 2004”, AP/Law.com, Jun. 28).
RFK Jr. and Katrina
Religious disbelief and child custody
Eugene Volokh (Aug. 29) finds particularly egregious — and at odds with the First Amendment — the practice of courts in various states of “discrimination in favor of religious parents and against irreligious ones, or in favor of more religious parents and against less religious ones, in child custody cases, on the theory that it’s in the child’s ‘best interests’ (that’s the relevant legal test) to be raised with a religious education.” For more on civil disabilities of freethinkers, see Jan. 21-23, 2000.
P.S. Reader John Steele Gordon writes to say, “It seems to me that the ACLU could much more profitably direct its jihad against religion at these cases, which do a great deal of harm to real people, than at carvings of the Ten Commandments on public property, which do not.” And here’s quite a bit more from Eugene.
Yet more: Reader Carl Fink, in response to John Gordon’s comment above, defends the ACLU:
The ACLU is just as likely to assist a religious person whose right to practice has been denied, as a nonreligious person whose tax money is being spent to promote a religion. To name one recent case, in State of New Jersey v. Lloyd Fuller, an ACLU attorney submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing for the rights of potential jurors to wear traditional Muslim (or by extension other religious) dress without being excluded from juries (see link).
What we object to is government enforcement of any religious policy, including religious EXCLUSION.
“Picking patrons’ pockets”
The United Kingdom has reluctantly joined 19 other EU countries “adopting the droit de suite, or artist’s resale right, which requires sellers to pay artists (or their heirs) as much as 4% of the price every time a piece is resold, for up to 70 years after an artist’s death. (The droit does not apply to sales between two collectors.)” The rule, which applies retroactively to art created in the past and already in collectors’ hands, is likely to harm British galleries and dealers — and perhaps artists as well — by driving the international art market to countries that do not enforce such rules. “The cream of the crop of important modern and contemporary art has already fled Europe and is beginning to leave London in anticipation of 2006,” says Dallas economist David Kusin, who conducted a study on the subject for the European Fine Art Foundation. (Susan Adams, Forbes, Jun. 20).
Campaign finance regulation and the rule of law
A news story from Israel gets Tom Palmer thinking (Aug. 28).
Sneak previews as securities law violations
The Securities and Exchange Commission is apparently looking into the question of whether for a movie company to hold prescreenings of upcoming movies for stock analysts “constitutes disclosure of material information to a group of select people”, thus potentially running afoul of public disclosure regulations. Bruce Carton (Aug. 26), Larry Ribstein (Aug. 26) and Tom Kirkendall (Aug. 29) comment.
Passport-grabbing counsel
Consumers who need protection from their lawyers dept.: “A Staten Island, N.Y., judge has ordered an attorney to return the passport of her Sri Lankan client, comparing the lawyer’s refusal to give back the passport until she is paid her fees to holding the client hostage.” It would seem that passport-withholding is by no means an unknown tactic for lawyers wishing to make sure their fees get paid; in a 1987 decision from the Southern District of New York, U.S. v. Bakhtiar, a federal court even opined that it saw that it saw “nothing unethical or shocking” about the practice. However, Civil Court Judge Philip S. Straniere in his unreported small claims opinion disagreed with the reasoning of Bakhtiar. The client in the case, who had retained the lawyer in a child custody proceeding, was named was Chandrani Goonewardene; Judge Straniere declined to release the lawyer’s name in his opinion, “instead referring to her by the pseudonym ‘Amanda Bonner.’ (Amanda Bonner is also the name of the attorney played by Katharine Hepburn in the film ‘Adam’s Rib.’)” (Mark Fass, “Judge Orders Attorney to Return Passport Held in Fee Dispute”, New York Law Journal, Aug. 23).