Suburban Chicago last month: “A mother faced a visit from police and an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigation after she allowed her 8-year-old daughter to walk the family’s dog around the block alone.” [Joel Shannon, USA Today]
Kavanaugh hearings roundup
The hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have wrapped up:
- Ilya Somin on the nominee’s view of executive power;
- “The attacks on originalism during the Gorsuch hearings were seen as failures—in the sense that they failed to persuasively portray originalism as outside the mainstream. Thus they were not widely repeated during the Kavanaugh hearings… ” [Michael Ramsey, Originalism Blog]
- Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) took a quote in which Kavanaugh summarized the positions taken by litigants in a lawsuit, snipped off his “But they said” wording introducing the summary, and represented the remainder as his own position. Others followed [PolitiFact; Glenn Kessler, Washington Post “Fact Checker” (four Pinocchios); our earlier encounters with Harris on truancy laws and the Moonlight Fire case, and see also Elizabeth Nolan Brown]
- Some critics charged Kavanaugh with not answering truthfully in several lines of questioning; David Lat responds with explanations regarding Judge Bill Pryor’s nomination, MemoGate, and NSA surveillance. Also, when you’ve lost Vox…
- I joined Newell Normand on WWL for a brief recounting of the week’s action and a look at what lies ahead (most likely, confirmation before month’s end);
- Another overview of the four days: “Arguing about documents rather than Kavanaugh’s qualifications or his judicial philosophy has a political purpose.” [John McGinnis]
USG: whoops, that Mata Hari stuff was just banter over car insurance
Prosecutors can plant wrong, inflammatory, and damaging stories about defendants with no real consequence, part 24,873 [Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times]:
Federal prosecutors have admitted that they wrongly accused Maria Butina, a Russian citizen now in custody on charges of illegally acting as a foreign agent, of offering to trade sex for a job as part of a covert effort by Russian government officials to infiltrate Republican circles in the United States.
In a court filing late Friday, prosecutors in the United States attorney’s office in Washington acknowledged that they had been “mistaken” in interpreting what were apparently joking text messages between Ms. Butina and a friend who had helped her renew her car insurance.
Campus climate roundup
- In separate incidents, public universities (Rutgers and the University of New Mexico, respectively) discipline a professor and a med student over vulgar and inflammatory political postings on their personal Facebook pages. First Amendment trouble [FIRE on Rutgers case; Eugene Volokh: Rutgers, UNM cases]
- Defend someone who’s facing Title IX charges, and you just might yourself find yourself facing Title IX charges too along with the withholding of your degree [ABA Journal on Yogesh Patil case; Drew Musto, Cornell Sun (19 Cornell law profs write to president to criticize withholding of Ph.D.); Scott Greenfield]
- Social justice bureaucracy within University of Texas might be bigger than some whole universities [Mark Pulliam] “Ohio State employs 88 diversity-related staffers at a cost of $7.3M annually” [Derek Draplin, The College Fix]
- “Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given ‘reverse mentors’ to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new [U.K.] Government funded scheme” [Camilla Turner, Telegraph]
- “Wow, this is truly astounding. A *published* paper [on gender differences in trait variability] was deleted and an imposter paper of same length and page numbers substituted to appease a mob.” [Theodore P. Hill, Quillette, as summarized by Alex Tabarrok] Reception of James Damore episode on campus: “[T]hose of us working in tech have been trying to figure out what we can and cannot say on the subject of diversity. You might imagine that a university would be more open to discussing his ideas, but my experience suggests otherwise.” [Stuart Reges, Quillette]
- Speak not of oaths: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is latest public institution to require diversity statements of all faculty, staff applicants [Rita Loffredo, The College Fix] Harvard students “will be required to complete a Title IX training module to enroll in fall 2018 classes” [Jamie D. Halper, Harvard Crimson]
“Autopilot doesn’t make the car impervious to all accidents.”
“A Utah woman who in May 2018 crashed her Tesla Model S into a fire engine while having the Autopilot assist mode engaged has now sued the company in state court, claiming negligence, among other allegations.” A spokesman for Tesla says the company “has always been clear that Autopilot doesn’t make the car impervious to all accidents.” [Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica]
Dissension in ACLU ranks over NRA brief
Last month we noted that the ACLU had filed a brief on the side of the NRA in its regulatory-retaliation First Amendment suit against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The brief “strikes me as quite sound legally,” writes Eugene Volokh, who quotes and annotates its text. But the action has roused passionate opposition within the organization itself, reports Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. For example, the ACLU’s New York affiliate declined to join the brief and its officials issued a public statement critical of it. Among their arguments: the NRA “has enormous resources and is fully able to present its First Amendment claim.” Others argue that the dispute is at least in part fact-intensive and does not rest entirely on First Amendment issues, since Cuomo had denounced a particular insurance product marketed by the NRA as unlawful — although the governor’s own statements make clear that his call for regulators to squeeze the group’s finances went beyond that, and indeed included a call for them to put the squeeze on groups with advocacy missions similar to the NRA’s. Yet other factions within the ACLU charge that for it to side with the NRA is to advance “white supremacy.” More: Scott Greenfield.
The legal role the ACLU is playing here, it should be noted, is amicus, as distinct from pro bono defense. As Howard Wasserman, writing at PrawfsBlawg, notes:
The resources argument (putting aside whether it has any merit) strikes me as inapposite in this case. The ACLU is not representing the NRA in this case, so any expenditure of ACLU resources does not relieve the NRA of the burden to spend money on its own lawyers to make its own arguments. The benefit of the ACLU’s brief, on which it did expend some of its limited resources, is to the NRA’s legal position, not to its wallet. An argument that the ACLU not only should not represent well-resourced parties* but should not provide amicus support for well-resourced parties seems over-inclusive, tying the merits of a party’s constitutional position to the money in its bank account.
Wage and hour roundup
- Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna introduce legislation to punish employers whose workforce draws on government programs, and even lefty Center for Budget and Policy Priorities sees plenty of problems with that [Steve Goldstein/MarketWatch; Robert Greenstein, Sharon Parrott, Chye-Ching Huang, CBPP; Zuri Davis, Reason; related Ryan Bourne thread]
- “Prevailing Wage Legislation and the Continuing Significance of Race” [David E. Bernstein, Notre Dame Journal on Legislation]
- Study finds that after Minnesota jacked up minimum wage, youth employment and restaurant employment fell, restaurant prices rose [Noah Williams, Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy]
- In a sleeper SCOTUS case this term, Encino Motorcars v. Navarro, on whether service advisors at car dealerships are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Justice Thomas for a 5-4 majority came down in favor of the position that FLSA exemptions should be read fairly, rather than narrowly; let’s hope this points to a wider retreat from the unsound practice of reading unnatural breadth into purportedly remedial statutes even when they contain no instruction to do so [Federalist Society podcast with Tammy McCutchen; Sachin Pandya/Workplace Prof (critical of ruling), Andrew Strom/On Labor (likewise)]
- “Why a Democratic City Council Is Working With a Republican Congress To Overturn a Minimum Wage Bill” [Eric Boehm on D.C.’s Initiative 77] “How Regulation Eliminated Your Waiter” [Ira Stoll on California labor laws]
- 1915 study on Oregon: “The belief was very prevalent among store women that the minimum wage had wrought only harm to them as a whole.” [David Henderson quoting Marie L. Obenauer and Bertha von der Nienburg, Bureau of Labor Statistics]
DeVos & Co. move to revamp Title IX campus sex misconduct rules
Although formal proposals are not due until next month, word has begun to filter out about the U.S. Department of Education’s plans to revisit and revamp the Obama administration’s Title IX guidelines on discipline for campus sexual misconduct. Emily Yoffe at The Atlantic, whose work in this area we’ve covered before, has more:
A year ago, Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos declared that the rules and procedures put in place by the Obama administration on this volatile subject had created a “failed system” that brought justice neither to accuser or accused. She promised to change that….
As I wrote in a three-part Atlantic series last September, the use of Title IX to protect female students, however well-intentioned, has resulted in the over-policing of sex between young adults. It has also sometimes resulted in adjudications that assume guilt, rely on junk science, gut fundamental fairness, engage in racial animus, and disregard the effects of ending men’s educations and crushing futures. The Times’s story was based on a leak, so we still need to see all the rules in their final form. Because these proposed rules will go through an administrative process known as “notice and comment” – meaning the public can weigh in — revisions are likely….
Among items on the reform agenda are the definition of harassment (moving toward the Supreme Court’s definition as opposed to the broader definition used now); the scope of the university’s duty to address wrongdoing (filed complaints only, or any appearance of misconduct whether or not there is a complainant?); whether colleges are obliged to punish misconduct occurring far away or during the summer, as opposed to on campus; sharing evidence with the accused; and allowing colleges to adopt higher standards of proof. Also under scrutiny are the training manuals and materials used for Title IX investigators; many colleges have yielded to pressure to adopt so-called trauma-informed response to accusations, which invokes dubious scientific assertions to stack the process toward overlooking flaws in accusers’ stories and assuming the worst of the accused.
Some of the proposals might make little difference or even encourage dubious “single-investigator” formats, but overall, Yoffe concludes, their thrust would be to “move the policy in a more just direction.”
More: and don’t miss the new analysis by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. in the Weekly Standard.
Brett Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland: a note from the hearing
In Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement at his hearing Tuesday, he praised Merrick Garland, with whom he serves on the D.C. Circuit, as “our superb chief judge.”
If you were surprised by that, you shouldn’t have been. When President Obama nominated Garland to the high court, Judge Kavanaugh described his colleague as “supremely qualified by the objective characteristics of experience, temperament, writing ability, scholarly ability for the Supreme Court … He has been a role model to me in how he goes about his job.”
In fact, it has been reported in at least one place that one reason Kavanaugh was left off Trump’s initial list of SCOTUS nominees was that he had been so vocal and public in praising Garland’s nomination.
Now, it would be understandable if neither side in the partisan confirmation wars chose to emphasize this bit of background to the story. Republican strategists might not be keen on reminding listeners of what their party did with Garland’s nomination, and might also worry about eroding enthusiasm for Kavanaugh among certain elements of their base. Democratic strategists, meanwhile, might see the episode as one in which the present nominee comes off as not-a-monster, and, well, you can’t have that.
The lesson, if there is one, might be that the federal courts are not as polarized and tribal as much of the higher political class and punditry at nomination time. [cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]
September 5 roundup
- Event barns booming as wedding venues, but some owners of traditional banquet halls want them to be subject to heavier regulation, as by requiring use of licensed bartenders [Stephanie Morse, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]
- Protectionism and smuggling in ancien regime France: “Before Drug Prohibition, There Was the War on Calico” [Virginia Postrel]
- Thread unpacks “Big Ag bad, family farms good” platitudes [Sarah Taber]
- “An Oklahoma judge has agreed to resign after he was accused of using his contempt powers to jail people for infractions such as leaving sunflower seeds in his courtroom and talking in court” [ABA Journal]
- Update: North Carolina gerrymandering plaintiffs back off, concede impracticality of using new maps in time for upcoming election [Robert Barnes, Washington Post, earlier]
- “Aretha Franklin Died Without a Will, Bequeathing Estate Issues To Her Heirs” [Caron/TaxProf]