Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Baltimore moves to seize Preakness Stakes race

Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh has filed suit seeking to seize the famed Preakness Stakes race — trademarks, business deals, and all — through eminent domain. I’ve got a few things to say about that in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy has an analysis that quotes my piece.

For those just catching up with the underlying story, Pamela Wood covers it at the Baltimore Sun/Capital Gazette as does Robert H. Thomas at Inverse Condemnation. See also my 2014 Cato take on an earlier episode in Maryland’s history of “smash and grab” eminent domain methods.

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Class action roundup

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“Unconscious People Can’t Consent to Police Searches”

Police officers in Wisconsin “drew Gerald Mitchell’s blood while he was unconscious—to test his blood alcohol content after a drunk-driving arrest. The state has attempted to excuse the officers by citing an implied-consent statute, which provides that simply driving on state roads constitutes consent to such searches.” Although the right to privacy are not absolute, there are problems with that approach, made worse by a strange Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion extending to highway searches a Fourth Amendment search exception for “pervasively regulated businesses.” [Ilya Shapiro and Patrick Moran on Cato cert amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to review Mitchell v. Wisconsin]

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Crime and punishment roundup

  • Bloodstain analysis convinced a jury Julie Rea killed her 10-year-old son. It took four years for her to be acquitted on retrial, and another four to be exonerated. Has anything been learned? [Pamela Colloff, ProPublica] Forensics’ alternative-facts problem [Radley Balko] The chemists and the coverup: inside the Massachusetts drug lab scandal [Shawn Musgrave, Reason, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
  • “I would say, you know, as a parting gift, if you’d like to throw in some iPhones every year, we would be super jazzed about that…. So, you know, a hundred, 200 a year.” A window on the unusual business of prison-phone service [Ben Conarck, Florida Times-Union, state Department of Corrections]
  • Should juries be forbidden to hear any evidence or argument about their power of conscientious acquittal? [Jay Schweikert on Cato amicus in case of U.S. v. Manzano, Second Circuit; related, David Boaz on 1960s-era jury nullification of sodomy charges]
  • This hardly ever happens: prosecutor disbarred for misconduct [Matt Sledge, Baton Rouge Advocate; Louisiana high court revokes license of Sal Perricone following anonymous-commenting scandal]
  • “Cultural impact assessments”: Canadian courts weighing whether race should play role in sentencing minority offenders [Dakshana Bascaramurty, Globe and Mail]
  • “The Threat of Creeping Overcriminalization” [Cato Daily Podcast with Shon Hopwood and Caleb Brown] “Tammie Hedges and the Overcriminalization of America” [James Copland and Rafael Mangual, National Review]

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Does European data privacy regulation help entrench U.S. tech firms?

Roslyn Layton, AEI, in November:

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), along with similarly heavy-handed regimes such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act, entrenches established platforms that have the resources to meet their onerous compliance requirements. Since the GDPR’s implementation in May, the rank and market share of small- and medium-sized ad tech companies has declined by 18 to 32 percent in the EU, while these measures have increased for Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Via Alex Stamos thread on Twitter (“Anybody wonder why the big tech companies didn’t really fight that hard against GDPR? It isn’t due to a newfound love of regulation”) by way of James Pethokoukis; more, Antonio García Martínez.

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Supreme Court OKs asbestos suits against non-asbestos manufacturers

Tuesday’s 6-3 decision in Air & Liquid Systems v. DeVries took an expansive view of asbestos liability in the maritime context. I discuss at Cato at Liberty:

…By requiring makers of components to pay for damages they did not cause in the name of warnings that the U.S. Navy almost certainly would not have heeded, the Court yields to an impulse to round up deep pockets lest a sympathetic set of litigants otherwise go uncompensated….

In his dissent, Gorsuch points out that [the new standard formulated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the majority] not only has no evident grounding in existing tort doctrine but is not in fact easy to apply or predict. …

But it seems almost quaint to ask whether a newly announced legal standard can readily be applied and predicted in the context of asbestos law, a sui generis creation in which the courts regularly extract vast sums from defendants on the basis of legal standards assuredly not recognized in law at the time those defendants acted in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The implications of assigning retrospective liability to actions lawful at the time loom large and disturbing over continuing expansions of liability like the one announced in today’s case.

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March 20 roundup

  • Sports betting: best to ignore the leagues’ special pleadings and let federalism work [Patrick Moran, Cato, related podcast]
  • Everything you thought you knew about corporate personhood in the law is wrong [David Bernstein reviews Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations]
  • Federal judge John Kane, on lawyer’s filings: “I have described them as prolix, meandering, full of unfounded supposition and speculation, repetitive and convoluted almost to the point of being maddening.” And he’s just getting started [Scott Greenfield]
  • “Florida Voters Join Chevron Revolt And Strike A Blow Against Judicial Bias” [Mark Chenoweth, Federalist Society Blog] Plus video panel on “The States and Administrative Law” with Nestor Davidson, Chris Green, Miriam Seifter, Hon. Jeffrey Sutton, and Hon. Michael Scudder;
  • Argument that Congressionally extended extension of copyright on (among other works) Atlas Shrugged violates Ayn Rand’s own ethical code [Edward Sisson]
  • “More Legislation, More Violence? The Impact of Dodd-Frank in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” [Nik Stroop and Peter van der Windt, Cato; our longstanding coverage of the conflicts mineral fiasco]

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Janus: what comes after

The Supreme Court’s Janus decision on public sector union fees was not received in a spirit of total cooperation by all public sector unions and employers. Two Cato Daily Podcasts from late last year, one with Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute, the other with Ken Girardin of The Empire Center:

Related: Federalist Society podcast with William Messenger and panel with Messenger, Steven Greenhut, Hon. Chuck Reed, and Hon. Ryan Nelson; William Baude (critical of Janus).

And now, citing the First Amendment and the Janus precedent, “three conservative lawyers are seeking to overturn Texas laws that require attorneys to join the State Bar of Texas and pay annual dues;” in Texas, as in many states, bar dues go to various ideologically fraught issues and causes [Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman]

Just for fun: Cato’s amicus brief in Janus v. AFSCME is an answer on Jeopardy!

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