“Henry Ford Health System will pay $70,000 to a family who alleges the system failed to provide sign language interpreters to a patient and family members in 2004, and must train staff on the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to a settlement announced … by the U.S. Justice Department.” [Detroit News]
Author Archive
Scope of existing state employer-contraceptive mandates
It has been asserted in various outlets that many states already mandate contraceptive coverage, that the Catholic church has been content to live with those mandates, and so that the current firestorm over the ObamaCare provision must just be something cooked up by Republican consultants. Here is a response from the National Council of Catholic Bishops via NR’s Kathryn Lopez:
6. The federal mandate is much stricter than existing state mandates. HHS chose the narrowest state-level religious exemption as the model for its own. That exemption was drafted by the ACLU and exists in only 3 states (New York, California, Oregon). Even without a religious exemption, religious employers can already avoid the contraceptive mandates in 28 states by self-insuring their prescription drug coverage, dropping that coverage altogether, or opting for regulation under a federal law (ERISA) that pre-empts state law. The HHS mandate closes off all these avenues of relief.
More on the controversy from my Cato colleague Roger Pilon and from Jonathan Rauch. And: John Cochrane on the wider folly of letting the feds mandate contraceptive coverage in the first place: “Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.”
Law students sue over bad grades
The former Texas Southern students say their D on Contracts was arbitrary and capricious. [Houston Chronicle] Per @tedfrank, “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”
February 9 roundup
- Ninth Circuit panel strikes down California’s Prop 8 [Volokh, Kerr, Magliocca, Lithwick, Steve Chapman]
- Judge dismisses PETA “killer whales enslaved” case [Caroline May/Daily Caller, CNN, earlier]
- “Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web – And Might Win” [Joe Mullin/Wired, earlier; more on testimony by Web father Tim Berners-Lee] Update: Ding Dong! Jury rejects claim;
- “Further Analysis of the Bottle-Rocket Case” [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
- As patients suffer: “The War Over Prescription Painkillers,” start of a Radley Balko series [HuffPo parts one, two so far]
- Richard Epstein on federal fiat and Yale disciplinary procedure [Defining Ideas] Under new-style rules at Yale, will a professor even be aware he’s been accused and henceforth is to be “monitored”? [KC Johnson]
- Jim Copland testimony on abuses in government contingent-fee litigation [Manhattan Institute, PDF] “Parens patriae” proposal to replace class actions with state attorney general suits, but with private entrepreneurial bar still in saddle [Adam Zimmerman/Prawfs on Myriam Gilles/Gary Friedman, SSRN]
Dickens bicentenary
Kevin at Lowering the Bar recounts Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.
“Judge rejects injured beer-pong champ”
“A New Jersey man who got so drunk playing beer pong at a Greenwich Village pub that he thought walking across a busy highway was a good idea cannot sue the bar over his injuries, a judge has ruled.” [Dareh Gregorian, NY Post]
“Man has no right to ex-girlfriend’s lottery winnings, judge rules”
“A Seminole County man who sued his ex-girlfriend for half of her $1 million Florida Lottery winnings went away empty-handed Tuesday, her attorney said.” [Orlando Sentinel]
A Stuart Taylor, Jr. archive
The author, reporter, and legal commentator has just posted a nicely designed online archive of his work, often linked in this space.
“Our Constitution Is Out of Step with the Rest of the World”
And thank goodness for that, observes my Cato colleague Roger Pilon. Promising more while in practice delivering less, other countries’ constitutions tend to be less careful in enumerating and limiting government powers, even as they promise all manner of (often unsustainable) entitlements. More: Mike Rappaport and relatedly, on the academic left, Mark Tushnet (among his colleagues “debate has ended over whether constitutions should include …rights” of the social/economic sort that depart from U.S. constitutional practice).
“Class-action lawyers swarm around buyout deals”
Merger announcements often trigger a spate of press releases announcing that securities plaintiff’s firms are “investigating” the situation. Even if the evidence of wrongdoing is absent and the financial analysis thin, lawsuits may be the next step, because that’s where the money is [David Nicklaus, St. Louis Post-Dispatch]