I’m quoted by Scott Reeder on the regulatory obstacles a Bloomington, Ill. woman faces in trying to start a taxi business. [Reason]
Author Archive
In Boston today
I’m speaking at 1 p.m. today at Boston University Law School to the school’s Federalist Society chapter about my book Schools for Misrule. The event is open to the public. See you there!
From comments: web accessibility trips up a state medical board
Thanks to reader Hugo Cunningham for spotting this in a new Boston Globe report on the failure of the Massachusetts state medical board to post physicians’ disciplinary problems and other performance issues online:
Another major omission has resulted from a Catch-22-like requirement in state law. Russell Aims, the … chief of staff
[of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine], said the board used to post digital copies of its disciplinary orders [for medical malpractice]. But an online accessibility law requires that documents be available in a text-to-speech format for the visually impaired.Because the PDF format of the disciplinary records is not compatible with text-to-speech software, Aims said, the law dictates that such records cannot appear in the database. If the visually impaired cannot access the information, then no one can.
Law school roundup
Many links that tend to harmonize with arguments made in Schools for Misrule, along with a few others:
- Judges criticize law reviews: “The high bench vs. the ivory tower” [Richard Brust, ABA Journal]
- “The fervor of the sixties penetrated law schools quite passionately” [Ann Althouse quoting an introduction to clinical legal education]
- More on forthcoming Brian Tamanaha book, Failing Law Schools [ABA Journal]
- “The Coming Crash in Legal Education: How We Got Here, and Where We Go Now” [Richard W. Bourne, SSRN via Kenneth Anderson/Volokh] How law, medicine and architectural schools joined the academy [Richard Neumann, Jr./SSRN via Caron]
- How lucrative are the sidelines a lawprof can develop, such as expert witness work? It varies greatly, but one star’s NYC condo is for sale for $15.9M [Julie Zeveloff, Business Insider]
- “Lawsuits against law schools weak: experts” [Reuters]
- “Obama hugging Derrick Bell” video: neither newsy nor likely to damage the President’s image, and why again is Prof. Bell supposed to be a more alarming connection than Prof. Ogletree himself? [Breitbart, Hinderaker, Cooke/NRO, and an HLS reminiscence from David French at NRO]
Great moments in law firm management?
According to the Sun-Sentinel, managers at the Deerfield Beach, Fla. real estate law firm of Elizabeth Wellborn fired 14 employees on Friday for wearing orange clothing. According to the report, an executive had been informed that the workers were wearing orange as a protest, but several employees told the newspaper that they knew of no protest and that they customarily wore orange on paydays so that they would appear as a group at a happy hour after work.
If the story checks out as reported — the law firm was recorded as having declined comment — expect to hear rumblings about how it refutes the American legal principle of “employment at will,” though it doesn’t actually refute that principle any more than the tale of a wastrel heir refutes the principle of inheritance.
“Trivializing hate”
David Link on the conviction of Rutgers student Dharun Ravi over his mistreatment of eventual suicide victim Tyler Clementi [Independent Gay Forum; earlier here, here, here, etc.] (& Greenfield)
P.S. James Jacobs and Tish Durkin were among contributors to a recent roundtable on hate crime laws at the NYT’s “Room for Debate”.
Clarifying Florida lawyers’ position
According to what seems to be the sense of many in the Florida legal profession, doctors and their patients should not have the right to enter enforceable arbitration agreements before the fact to resolve disputes, but lawyers and their clients should have the right to enter enforceable agreements before the fact to limit liability for excessive charging of legal fees. Thanks for clarifying! [White Coat, scroll; earlier]
Don’t
…break and enter into the house of your client’s husband to retrieve her possessions [Albuquerque lawyer Raymond Van Arnam, fined, sentenced to weekend jail time and ordered to pay restitution, but not deprived of his law license, on charges of misdemeanor criminal trespass and misdemeanor larceny; Above the Law]
iPhone’s hellish Chinese workplace: the sequel
“This American Life” has retracted a much-discussed news segment about the horrors of Apple’s Shenzhen, China workplace after discovering it was faked; Mike Daisey’s report contained “numerous fabrications,” it says. For more on how readiness to believe the worst about big business can leave media open to being fooled by manipulative packagers of news, see the GM trucks episode, Food Lion, and a great many others. [Ira Glass, Jack Shafer, Edward Champion]
More from David Henderson. And Coyote: “The problem with the media is not outright bias, but an intellectual mono-culture that fails to exercise the most basic skepticism when stories fit their narrative.”
Restricting helium sales to prevent squeaky-voice foolery?
A group called the National Inhalant Prevention Coalition, with support from federal agencies SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse), held a press conference yesterday to promote wider restrictions on the sale and use of helium, the familiar balloon-filling gas that as most people know will make one’s voice squeaky if inhaled. Although helium has low toxicity, it can pose dangers to the user, especially when inhaled directly from a pressurized container, the dangers “mostly related to the mechanical damage of introducing a highly compressed gas into your lungs,” as a doctor put it in a 1997 publication from NIPC (“Helium: Not a Laughing Matter”). The Washington Times reports on the coalition’s demands and quotes me for balance: “Small risk is worth knowing about, but it’s not worth rearranging our whole lives around.” It’s one thing to make sure kids know it’s unacceptably dangerous to breathe gases from pressurized containers, and another to make it unlawful for responsible 17-year-olds to pick up the balloon supplies for the family wedding.
P.S. Several readers wrote to say that because of current federal policy helium winds up artificially underpriced, encouraging its use for frivolous purposes; more on that here.