Keen to sic the feds on your boss? There’s an app for that, courtesy of the Department of Labor. [Michael Fox]
Author Archive
Digging for ADA gold
Well-known serial ADA litigant George Louie has hit the California Gold Rush country [CJAC] Not that far away: “Serial ADA filer targets popular Davis burger joint” [same, Scott Johnson]
Ceci n’est pas une whistle
Imagine how puzzling it must be to be an employee of the city of Montreal: the city “has set up a whistleblower hotline to encourage you to expose wrongdoings by colleagues but has also created an explicit policy forbidding you to blow the whistle and is threatening severe penalties if you do.” [Montreal Gazette]
Farm animal treatment: letting states and markets sort it out
The New York Times’s “Room for Debate” feature has a round table up on the movement for more humane treatment of farm animals and invited me to participate. I argue that local variation in laws and the emergence of distinct markets for humanely raised meat are preferable to calls for federal government intervention. More: Tom Laskawy, Grist; and see my Cato follow-on post referenced here.
“Revisiting The Unreasonably Dangerous Undergarment”
More developments in “the case of the dangerously defective bra.” [Kevin Couch, Abnormal Use]
Rude metaphor dept.
The law school process compared to a cattle chute [AtL]
May 10 roundup
- Hey, why don’t we invade people’s privacy so we can recruit them as figureheads for our privacy-invasion class action? [Cal Biz Lit, earlier on Starbucks pot-convictions case] Class-action coupon settlements are a no-win for consumers [Michelle Singletary, WaPo]
- “Former Silicosis Clients Sue O’Quinn Law Firm, Estate” [Texas Lawyer via PoL, related earlier]
- Gathering ammunition for suits: “Are your employees recording you?” [Hyman]
- Canada: “Inflatables too dangerous for school fair” [Free-Range Kids]
- Evaluating the effectiveness of medical liability reforms [Kachalia & Mello, NEJM]
- “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About ‘Judge Judy’” [TV Squad]
- “Woman awarded $45,000 after dog kills cat” [six years ago on Overlawyered]
Good news for dairy farmers
The EPA has finally backed off its contention that dairy operations need to construct elaborate retention structures to prevent milk spills, even though (to cite its previous logic) milk contains oils and thus could be considered an “oil discharge.” [“Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) Rule and Milk,” EPA, reporting on April 12 move; earlier here and here]
“What Online Businesses Need to Know About the ADA”
Dangerous, far-reaching web-accessibility proposals haven’t gone away. [Kelly L. Frey Sr. and Shameak Belvitt, Law.com]
“How Copyright Law Makes Sample-Based Music Impossibly Expensive… If You Want To Do It Legally”
Kembrew McLeod: “it [licensing] gets way more complicated when you start sampling songs that contain samples, which is increasingly the case today.” [Atlantic Wire via TechDirt]