Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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Maryland appeals court: all pit bulls dangerous

The Gazette (suburban Maryland) on a 4-3 Maryland Court of Appeals decision:

Animal shelters and rescue organizations across Maryland are bracing for an influx of surrendered pit bulls in the wake of a state high court ruling that declared the breed “inherently dangerous.”

The decision strengthened a 1998 ruling that landlords can be held liable for dog attacks.

The Maryland Court of Appeals ruling last week modified the state’s common law of liability, establishing a standard that when owners or landlords have knowledge a pit bull or pit-bull mix is living on their property, it is not necessary to prove they had knowledge the dog was dangerous to be held liable.

The Frederick News-Post:

As a result of the decision, the Frederick County Animal Control shelter has temporarily suspended adoptions of pit bulls and pit bull mixes, director Harold Domer said Tuesday.

Arin Greenwood writes at Huffington Post of her 14-year relationship with a “sweet, spoiled and beloved” family member “who perhaps never knew that she was a pit bull”. More: NBC Washington; opinion in Tracey v. Solesky (PDF).

More: Ron Miller’s view. And from Twitter, @radleybalko (“An opinion as useless as it is ignorant,”) @Popehat (“Mine wants to lick me to death,”) and @sbagen (“Breed bans lack scientific support, hurt persons with disabilities with service dogs.”)

New server; missing emails and comments

Following some down time, Overlawyered has re-emerged on new servers and with upgraded software allowing for improved features. Thanks to Jason Vines of the Cato Institute for his assistance.

Unfortunately, during this process, my email accounts went dark for a while. If you sent me an email anytime over the weekend or on Monday through the late afternoon, I probably didn’t get it and you should send it again.

In addition, several reader comments approved on Friday and Saturday were inadvertently lost in the upgrade. I may be able to go back to my files to reconstruct what these were, but if the comments were important to you, you should consider re-posting them.

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A universal driver-cellphone ban?

I’ve got an op-ed in Saturday’s Orange County Register taking exception to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s call for Congressional legislation to ban “talking on a cellphone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.” Something you might not have known: the feds blame a crash on distraction if a cellphone is so much as “in the presence of the driver at the time of the crash.” (Distracted Driving Summit Press kit (PDF), “Traffic Safety Facts” p. 2, h/t Investor’s Business Daily; earlier here, here, etc.) More: Rob Port, SayAnythingBlog. Update: LaHood spokesman says Reuters overstated his boss’s position.

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The legal decline of football?

Numerous lawsuits have been filed lately against football teams over players’ brain injuries. If the legal system handles these lawsuits in line with the principles it applies to other mass torts, organized football could either go away or be transformed into a very different game. The Chicago Tribune editorializes on the subject and quotes me.

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May 7 roundup

  • NY lawyer sanctioned $10K for behavior at deposition [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
  • Obvious dangers and the W.V. frat-house rear-launched bottle rocket case [Popehat, earlier here, here]
  • Review of Liberty’s Refuge, new book on freedom of assembly by Washington U. lawprof John Inazu [Anthony Deardurff, Liberty Law]
  • If forfeiture and asset freeze can be deployed in a copyright enforcement case, where will they strike next? [Timothy Lee, Cato]
  • Hard-hitting Kim Strassel column on Al “Crucify Them” Armendariz [WSJ, earlier] Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson: “If you want to live by the precautionary principle, then crawl up in a ball and live in a cave.” [Coyote] Washington Post on the case for the Keystone pipeline [Adler]
  • Losing two looks like carelessness: second Durham County D.A. removed from office for misconduct [Volokh, KC Johnson]
  • Why won’t the Eighth Circuit recognize fraudulent misjoinder? [Beck]

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No constitutional right to punitive damages, cont’d

We’ve already mentioned this in the context of the Chrysler bankruptcy (criticized in some quarters for having divested the reorganized company of punitive damage exposure over pre-bankruptcy conduct) but here’s Drug and Device Law gathering up decisions from various states to confirm that, no, there is no vested or constitutional right to punitive damages:

Constitutional challenges have been rejected under due process, taking, jury trial, open courts and various other state constitutional provisions. It makes sense. While compensatory damages might present a closer question (depending on issues such as retroactivity), there’s simply no constitutional right for one private party to demand that another private party be punished.

Especially not when the putative purpose of the damages, to inflict financial distress on the target, has been obviated by an intervening bankruptcy.

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Disagree with your AG? Sue him.

Rob McKenna, attorney general of the state of Washington, is among many state AGs who has joined in courtroom challenges to ObamaCare. Now a local “public interest” law firm, Smith & Lowney, has sued McKenna on behalf of a group of residents who disagree with that decision, saying he is breaching his duty to represent the state’s citizenry by taking a view contrary to theirs. [KOMO]

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Labor and employment roundup

  • Failure to accommodate employee’s religious belief forbidding hair-cutting results in $27K payout by Taco Bell operator [EEOC, North Carolina]
  • There’s a reason they call it Government Motors: nonunion GM assembly workers get shaft [Fountain]
  • Mayor Bloomberg refreshingly sane on “living wage,” though not alas rent control [Heather Mac Donald, Secular Right]
  • “The cost of labor isn’t the main problem, it’s the rigidities,” says French CEO [Bloomberg]
  • Maryland governor signs bill softening “workplace fraud” law that bedevils firms that use independent contractors [H.B. 1364, earlier]
  • Watch out for ghastly, mislabeled “Paycheck Fairness Act,” they’re trying to bring it back [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Examiner, earlier]
  • “The most infuriating part of this is that it takes five years of litigation to fire a badly behaved police officer” [Josh Barro, Masnick/TechDirt, on cop’s harassment of skateboarder; Baltimore Sun (police union calls officer’s firing “outrageous.”)]

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Good news for farm families

As I relate in a post at Cato at Liberty, the Obama Labor Department has withdrawn a far-reaching proposal that would have banned much or most work done by kids on farms, even work for their own family members (a narrow exemption would have remained in cases where parents were the sole owners of a farmstead). The proposals drew a huge outcry from rural America (earlier here and here).

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation (PDF),

For approximately a decade, activists have attempted to pass legislation amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to restrict the ability of youth under the age of 16 to work in agriculture. The legislation has never been scheduled for a vote or even a hearing, and the DOL-proposed rule change is [was] apparently an effort to restrict youth employment in agriculture through regulation.

If it seems impossibly extreme to forbid 15-year-olds from feeding chickens at a neighboring farm owned by their aunt, be aware that many groups organized around the fine-sounding mission of ending “child labor” would like to institute bans that go even further. For example, an NGO by the name of Global March Against Child Labor (represented in Washington, D.C. here) supported the DoL rules and declares itself “of the view that child labour in agriculture should not be allowed in any part of the world and in any form- whether as family labour or as hired labour.”

P.S. For more pro-ban sentiment, see this piece by AP labor correspondent Sam Hananel stenographizing the views of groups like Human Rights Watch.

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