For more on the scope of white-collar crime laws, see my chapter on white-collar prosecution in last year’s Cato Handbook for Policymakers 8th Edition.

A traveling Chinese executive is arrested is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

In a recent Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb Brown, Cato adjunct scholar Andrew Grossman of Baker & Hostetler discusses the “legally aggressive” new round of climate change litigation, in which municipalities in California and Colorado, as well as New York City, have sued energy producers and distributors seeking to recover damages over the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As Grossman notes, the idea of suing over the role of carbon emissions in climate change has by this point been tried many times. The most obvious approach would be to sue large industrial emitters of carbon, which is what some state governments did in one of the most prominent cases, filed against electric utilities. In its 2011 AEP v. Connecticut decision, however, the Supreme Court ruled that such outputs were regulated comprehensively and exclusively at the federal level through enactments like the Clean Air Act, and were not subject to an additional level of state regulation through public nuisance claims. Suits on other theories, such as Comer v. Murphy Oilfrom the Fifth Circuit and the Kivalina case in the Northern District of California, have been launched “to enormous bombast and press attention and they have all bombed out…. Those cases were the low-hanging fruit. Those were the more obvious legal theories if you were going to try to bring this kind of case,” he says.

Now the question is whether litigants can accomplish an end run by instead attacking upstream, pre-emissions activity, specifically the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels destined to be burned. Ambitiously, some of the new suits attempt to apply state common law to activities occurring around the world – to the doings of worldwide corporations such as Royal Dutch-Shell, for example, and to oil production from places like the coast of Norway and its subsequent use by European motorists. Needless to say, many of these processes are comprehensively regulated by the laws of the European Union and its member countries. Doctrinally, then, the new efforts get into even deeper water (so to speak) than strictly domestic claims. From the podcast:

If a court in California is going to go around telling Norway what to do, well, gosh, Norway may not really like that. And what do you do in that instance? It’s not apparent to me how this works. How does the court figure out what Norway’s regulations are and what Norway is doing about this? Who’s going to tell them? I don’t know. What if Norway disagrees with whatever it is that the court decides needs to be done in this case? Does Norway complain to the court? Do they send an ambassador to file a brief or something? I don’t know. This has never happened before. And what if Norway decides that they don’t like whatever it is the court is doing and they’re going to impose, say, reciprocal trade tariffs, or something like that, against the United States on the basis of one of these rulings? Does the court hold them in contempt?

Listen to the whole thing here (cross-posted from Cato at Liberty).

Andrew Grossman on municipal climate suits is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

FATCA may soon vex the British royal family is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Banking and finance roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Liability for abetting workplace bias is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Related: voters who believe in rule by executive fiat have so many choices this year, Bernie Sanders high among them [@joshgreenman on Twitter]

Obama administration swats inversions, Pfizer deal collapses is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

…ask yourself: if you think that the “use of an American bank” is a sufficient basis for the exercise of US jurisdiction over foreign nationals residing and conducting business abroad, then presumably you’re OK with being hauled into court in Singapore because you have used, say, a Singaporean bank, or into a Mexican court because your money found its way to a Mexican mortgage broker, or into a Danish court because you have at times used a Danish Internet Service Provider. Yes? When you look at it that way it becomes a little more difficult to applaud wholeheartedly – shouldn’t we have been able to count on the Swiss, within whose jurisdiction FIFA undoubtedly lies, to do something?

FIFA: “Use of an American bank” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

(1) List all employees who were discharged or whose contracts were not renewed [from August 25, 2009, through the present] due to a medical reason.
(2) For each employee listed in response to request number 1, include the employee’s name, citizenship, employment contract, position title, reason for and date of discharge, a copy of the separation notice and the last known contact information for each individual.
(3) For each employee listed in response to request number 1, include their employment application and related correspondence, any interview notes, the identity of the person who hired the employee, how the employee obtained the position (i.e., online, in person, recruiter), the location where the employee was interviewed, and the identity and location of the person who made the final hiring decision.
(4) List all the persons who applied for a position but were not hired within the relevant period due to a medical reason
(5) For each person listed in response to request number 4, include their citizenship, employment application and related correspondence, any interview notes, the identity of the person [who] hired the employee, how the employee learned of the position (i.e., online, in person, recruiter), the location where the employee was interviewed, and the identity and location of the person who made the final hiring decision.

The cruise line complied in (massive) part, but not fully, “providing records for employees and applicants who were United States citizens” but not others. The agency took the dispute to court and proceeded to lose at every stage, the Eleventh Circuit being the latest to find its information demands burdensome and irrelevant: “The relevance necessary to support a subpoena for the investigation of an individual charge is relevance to the contested issues that must be decided to resolve the charge, not relevance to issues that may be contested when and if future charges are brought by others.” [Hunton and Williams; Phelps Dunbar]

Meanwhile, the commission has issued its fiscal 2014 performance report; in explaining a drop in resolved complaints, its public statement cites the “lingering effects of sequestration and the government shutdown” but not the marked skepticism that judges repeatedly showed toward EEOC positions through the year.

Eleventh Circuit slaps down overly broad EEOC subpoena is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Tax flight: King seeks protection of Queen is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system