Merry Christmas, and highlights of Overlawyered past is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Parody based on Grinch tale defeats Seuss estate is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Spirit of Overlawyered past is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Christmas lighting fight divides community is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Also on this year’s list is the Wonder Woman Battle Action Sword, which, the WATCH team says, encourages young children “to bear arms”—as if you get a Wonder Woman toy and immediately deploy to Yemen. They also say that the “rigid plastic sword blade has the potential to cause facial or other impact injuries.” Yeah…and so does a fork. In fact, so does a candy cane, if you suck it to a sharp point.

“The Dangerous Toys of Christmas: Debunked!” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

FDA-compliant Kinder egg will reach US shores is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

In 2005 a young UCLA law professor, Stuart Banner, published How the Indians Lost Their Land, an extensively researched work that does much to correct the portrayal of white-Indian relations as a mere catalog of thefts, conquests, and usurpations. As Banner demonstrates, the actions and attitudes of white Americans and their institutions have shown a full range of shadow and light, from extreme wickedness and ignorance to as much grace, goodwill, and foresight as could have been expected under the circumstances. Tracing the many twists and reverses of federal Indian policy, Banner notes that it was usually anything but obvious which proposed measures would truly serve the interests of aboriginal inhabitants, that nearly all major changes in policy enjoyed support among some Indians and Indian-friendly white reformers, and that most of the major disasters to afflict America’s Indian population were either unforeseen or not well controllable by the central government.

I also quote the leading 20th Century scholar of Indian law, Felix S. Cohen, architect of the “Indian New Deal” and one of the most progressive law professors and FDR appointees of his era:

Fortunately for the security of American real estate titles, the business of securing cessions of Indian titles has been, on the whole, conscientiously pursued by the Federal Government, as long as there has been a Federal Government. The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms. We have not always succeeded in this effort but our deviations have not been typical.

It is, in fact, difficult to understand the decisions on Indian title or to appreciate their scope and their limitations if one views the history of American land settlement as a history of wholesale robbery.

More in this short 2012 Cato post and the Richard Reinsch essay to which it links.

Thanksgiving: a Day of Indigenous Mourning for American land? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

November 8 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Kmart's knock-off banana costume just doesn't have the same a-peel, designer says https://t.co/x2B16jmea1

— Keith Robinson (@wkeithrobinson) October 2, 2017

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands on cheerleader uniforms has generated new uncertainty as to where a line falls between useful aspects of apparel, which are not copyrightable, and decorative aspects, which are. “The ruling is widely expected to lead to increased litigation in the fashion industry.” A lawsuit against Kmart over its sale of a banana costume “could be the first in a wave of copyright lawsuits over fairly generic Halloween costume designs.” [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica; Bill Duhart, NJ.com; Polly Mosendz and Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg]

Suit over banana costume: a closet full of wearable-copyright disputes? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

I might have added countless other examples of songs, poems, and nationalist rhetoric in which “slave” was employed 1) as an epithet, 2) to signify subjection to kingly or other un-republican authority, or 3) both, everywhere from Patrick Henry’s famous speech to Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell to Rule, Britannia! to La Marseillaise. Suffice it to say that the word’s occurrence in a poem — even one penned by a slaveholder — needs to be read in context to determine whether American chattel slavery was the intended reference, and in the case of the third verse of the national anthem, there are plenty of reasons to think it was not.

In which I defend the national anthem is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system