Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘CPSIA’

CPSIA chronicles, October 19

More background reading on the Draconian consumer product safety law:

  • Fear of losing even more high-quality German toy suppliers [Kathy + Matt Take Milwaukee]
  • Mattel will pay $13 million to 20 plaintiff’s firms TheTown2to resolve class action over toy recalls; claimed value of settlement to class (vouchers, etc.) is something like $37 million [National Law Journal, Coughlin Stoia release; earlier] Note also Rick Woldenberg’s March analysis of one recall (recall of 436,000 units premised on two cans of bad paint).
  • New law “has added several new tasks [to the CPSC], many of which most charitably can be described as marginal in the overall pursuit of product safety that will divert staff and financial resources from more important safety issues.” [attorney Michael Brown, quoted at Handmade Toy Alliance Blog]
  • Alarmist reporting on Boston’s WBZ affords a glimpse of MaryHadLamb2“the scary people behind the law” [Woldenberg]
  • Effort to help move blogger Kevin Drum up the CPSIA learning curve [Coyote]
  • “The “Resale Round-up,” launched by the CPSC, finally limits the power of these merchants of death who recklessly barter second-hand toys to unsuspecting civilians at low prices…. The only question now is how did any of us survive this long?” [David Harsanyi, Denver Post]
  • Among its other effects, the statute “will boost opportunities for mass-tort suits” [Crain’s Chicago Business]
  • Law’s “continuing disaster for small business” illustrates MaryHadLamb3difference between crony capitalism and the real kind [James DeLong, The American, with kind words for a certain “indispensable” website that’s covered the law]

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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Tuesday in DC: “Food Safety Regulations: Will More Regulation Make Us Safer?”

The American Enterprise Institute is holding a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. Tuesday afternoon and I’ll be one of the participants, along with David W. K. Acheson of Leavitt Partners, Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, and Michelle Worosz of Auburn University, with AEI’s Kenneth Green as moderator. Details here. I’ve had a few things to say about food safety over the years and am also likely to draw on the potential parallels presented by the calamitous Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA).

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Indiana grandmother prosecuted for buying cold medicine

Sally Harpold was cuffed and arrested for buying two packages of cold medicine within a week in violation of Indiana law, though no one contends she or anyone she knew intended to cook them down into methamphetamine [Terre Haute Tribune-Star] Harpold’s story has been racing around blogs well known to our readers: Radley Balko/Reason “Hit and Run”, Ken at Popehat, Amy Alkon (with bonus kind words for @walterolson), Legal Blog Watch, BoingBoing. The Vermillion County, Indiana prosecutor is offering no apologies.

P.S. A Popehat commenter finds new reason to doubt those reassurances on CPSIA enforcement along the lines of “don’t be silly, they’d never go after grandmothers over rummage sales or homemade crafts“.

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CPSIA: “The Waiting Game Continues for Libraries”

Karen Raugust, Publisher’s Weekly, on some recent clarification (not exactly relief) for makers and sellers of new books under the Draconian law:

The Consumer Products Safety Commission recently issued a final lead rule that deemed many—but not all—of the components in ordinary children’s books safe. …

Most ink-on-paper and ink-on-board books will not have to undergo testing under various CPSC rulings. (Some so-called “ordinary” books, such as those with gold foil or spiral bindings, must be tested, and big retailers may require testing even when the CPSIA doesn’t.) All novelty and book-plus formats for children 12 and under must be tested by independent labs.

SpiderMean2However, the CPSC has yet to issue promised guidance to libraries on pre-1985 books:

Thom Barthelmess, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, says most librarians are waiting to see what happens. “We’re hoping for a happy resolution, so our collections aren’t decimated,” he says. If the CPSC’s ruling results in libraries needing to pull books from shelves, “there would be huge ramifications,” he continues. “If we lose a lot of titles printed before 1986, many of which are irreplaceable, it would have a huge impact on the nature of our collections.”

We’ve linked the coverage in Publisher’s Weekly several times over the course of the year but overlooked this report from March:

Most booksellers are now comfortable selling ordinary paper children’s books printed in 1986 and beyond. …

Half Price [Half Price Books, a large chain] removed all book-plus items from the shelves in every store and is warehousing them while it researches how to dispose of them in a safe and environmentally sound way, perhaps at a hazardous waste site.

And an official of the Independent Online Booksellers Association told PW in March that most members of the association were positioning their vintage children’s books as adult collectibles, which supposedly reduces legal risk, though as we noted in February, “the law provides that [retailers] are liable if they sell a product which will commonly be understood as destined for use by children, whether or not they label it as such.” Deputy Headmistress in February and Valerie Jacobsen in March also explained more about the practical drawbacks of the “relabel as collectibles” dodge, as has Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol more recently.

P.S. And welcome listeners at Hartford’s WTIC, where host Ray Dunaway had me as a guest on his show this morning to discuss the law. You’ll find much more here.

PUBLIC DOMAIN GRAPHIC: Edith Brown, illustrator, Jeannette Marks, The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907), courtesy The Children’s Library.

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CPSIA chronicles, September 20

  • Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) doesn’t think Rep. Waxman’s pretend hearing Sept. 10 was enough, and writes a letter to Reps. Waxman and Rush (PDF courtesy Motorcycle Industry Council) explaining why a real hearing is needed (including as an addendum my WSJ piece from last Monday).

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  • Speaking of CPSIA author Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), he’s praised the new rhinestone ban [Woldenberg]
  • At the Wall Street Journal, a letter to the editor regarding my op-ed of last week generally agrees with its thrust but claims that I “[err] when assigning blame to consumer groups” among others for the enactment. I find this charge baffling, since groups like Public Citizen, PIRG and the Consumer Federation of America 1) were routinely cited in the press during the bill’s run-up to enactment as key advocates of its more extreme provisions, 2) have loudly claimed credit for enacting those provisions and the overall bill ever since, 3) have been routinely cited this year in the press as key opponents of any effort to revisit the law in Congress. Why strive to excuse them from a responsibility that they gladly shoulder? Carter Wood at ShopFloor also notes that labor unions unwisely cheered on their purported consumer-group allies, a stance one hopes they are rethinking in light of the statute’s actual effects on American employers and jobs.
  • BoardGameGeek had a discussion of the law again this summer, mostly focusing on the tracking label rules and the burden they pose to makers of new games, but also noting the thrift/reseller effects (earlier). Meanwhile, Handmade Toy Alliance activist Dan Marshall notes on Twitter, “Just spoke with guy who invented a board game about dinosaurs. He’s paying $2400 to get it tested 4 #CPSIA and is mad as hell about Mattel.”
  • So let’s all panic now: NPR reports minute amounts of lead alloy in a Disney-branded zipper.
  • Before CPSIA came along, Illinois lawmakers enacted their own lead law which, stunt-like, sets an even lower permissible lead level often flunked by common substances such as ordinary garden dirt, according to Rick Woldenberg (earlier on dirt, and related on rocks). More: Wacky Hermit.

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PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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