- The proportion of jobs requiring a license has risen from roughly 5 percent in the 1950s to 25 percent now, and why that matters [Edward Rodrigue and Richard V. Reeves, Brookings] Signs of bipartisan agreement that occupational licensing has gone too far [J.D. Tuccille, Reason] And surprisingly or not, it’s emerged as an Obama administration cause [Matt Yglesias, Vox]
- “25 quick takes (no kidding!) on the EEOC’s proposed national origin guidance” [Robin Shea]
- “Trial lawyers’ pecuniary interests have shifted our focus toward termination decisions, instead of hiring and promotion practices” [Merrily Archer]
- Is it lawful to move full-time employees to part-time work to avoid ObamaCare mandates? [Jon Hyman, related]
- Florida Supreme Court decision spells Christmas for workers’ comp lawyers, and insurers proceed to file 17 percent rate increase, so everyone’s happy [Insurance Journal]
- “Uber and the gig economy’s existential litigation threat” [Alison Frankel] Labor union grip on state legislature imperils benefits of sharing economy [Steven Greenhut]
Posts Tagged ‘Florida’
The Orlando Pulse nightclub attack
Following the most lethal terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, I will set law and policy aside for this post.
Omar Mateen of Fort Pierce, Fla., known to the FBI as an Islamic State sympathizer and twice the subject of previous investigations, entered Orlando gay nightclub Pulse around 2 a.m. Sunday morning heavily armed and killed 50 persons after taking hostages. Authorities called his attack “well organized and well prepared”; Mateen had firearms training and according to reports had been scoping out gay clubs in the area before the attack.
As in two earlier attacks on American soil — those against a cartoon exhibition in Garland, Texas, and in San Bernardino, California — Mateen used contemporaneous public media (in this case, a 911 call) to pledge his allegiance to the leadership of Islamic State. As Rukmini Callimachi notes in today’s New York Times, this follows a protocol announced by Islamic State for independent fighters acting in sympathy with IS. A few hours later an Islamic State news agency hailed Mateen as an IS fighter, effectively accepting his pledge of allegiance.
The group’s head has urged followers in the West to act without prompting or coordination, selecting targets and employing attack methods in line with instructions published by IS. For example, IS has recommended capturing hostages and holding them in a sealed off space, which makes it likely that a prolonged siege situation will develop for maximum media interest, and that the attacker will die in an eventual police operation, reducing the likelihood of intelligence debriefing following a capture. As at the Bataclan in Paris, the passage of a long period before police rescue arrives tends to augur poorly for victims’ chances of survival.
The instructions-for-lone-wolves model is intended precisely to obviate the need for IS to know of or direct its supporters’ actions in advance. “The fact that there is no link back to the core is *by design* and is intended to protect the organization in an age of surveillance,” writes Callimachi on Twitter.
If you weren’t thinking of Gay Pride Month in a major American tourism city as a likely target for murderous jihadist attack, you should be. As Karol Markowicz writes on Twitter, “Just like it wasn’t a random ‘bunch of folks in a deli in Paris’, let’s not pretend it was a random bunch of folks in a club in Orlando.” If you’re gay, Islamic State’s ideology wants to kill you, even more than it wants to kill unbelieving Westerners in general. For us in America after today, that’s no longer the stuff of distant headlines.
More: I’ve set down some thoughts at Ricochet.
We’ve narrowed down the suspects to the persons in this very room
After a Florida lawyer’s TV ads cultivate his “reputation for aggressively going after drunken drivers,” guess what happens next [New York Daily News]
Morgan & Morgan marches on, now with RFK Jr.
Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan, whose personal injury law firm bids for the distinction of the nation’s largest, has long been active in politics and policy (including the good libertarian cause of legalizing medical marijuana). So there isn’t much that’s newsy about his hosting an April 29 fundraiser for Hillary Clinton headlined by former President Bill Clinton. More noteworthy is that his law firm, per a March 31 announcement, is now welcoming to its practice as of counsel wayward scion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the celebrity environmentalist and frothing hothead long associated with the Florida firm of Levin Papantonio. Along with Kennedy, of course, comes metric tons of baggage — on anti-vaccine scaremongering, on hyperbolic crusades against farms, on demands to put his ideological adversaries behind bars, as would-be EPA administrator, and so much more.
P.S. We have often referred to RFK for short in the past as America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure®. Is it time to retire that nickname in light of the continued rise of other public figures who might justly contend for that title?
Danger: out-of-state geologists!
Occupational licensure, defended: “All those geology companies in Georgia and Alabama that have that certificate of authorization under their state will come into Florida to do that work and then our geologists will end up unemployed.” [Jim Ash, WFSU]
Related: “California’s Bipartisan Push Against Occupational Licensing” [Steven Greenhut, Reason]
Free speech roundup
- “Charlie Hebdo editor: Censorship must not win” [Charb/New York Post] Today, on anniversary of that attack, Cato hosts free speech attorney Robert Corn-Revere on “The Assassin’s Veto,” with comments from GWU lawprof Catherine Ross, moderated by John Samples [details, and watch live]
- Florida lawmakers muzzle doctors’ comments to patients regarding guns. 11th Circuit says okay. No, not okay [Ken White, Eugene Volokh]
- The ‘speech integral to criminal conduct’ exception, important in early free speech law, has come roaring back [Eugene Volokh; for the role of this doctrine in the Oregon cake case, see my post then and his]
- Good news if you’re a Wisconsin conservative who forgot to archive your emails: that nice John Doe prosecutor secretly did it for you [Watchdog]
- From Federalist Society national lawyers’ convention, Prof. Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz interviews Kirsten Powers on her new book The Silencing (wobbly audio in early minutes, which eventually clears);
- “Ex-tenant barred from saying that ex-landlord had been in the Witness Protection Program, ‘[r]egardless of the truth or falsity of this information'” [Volokh]
- Lawprof Eric Posner wants to roll back First Amendment to curb ISIS recruitment. Hell, no [ABA Journal, Anthony Fisher/Reason, Ken White/Popehat]
October 28 roundup
- India monk: I’ll need eight months to respond to court summons because my religion requires me to get there on foot [BBC]
- NYC’s inhospitable treatment of cat cafes leaves you wondering if dogs get a better shake [Nicole Gelinas, New York Post]
- As VW litigation heats up, keep your eye on lawyers’ angling re: multi-district litigation, advises Ted Frank [Chamber-backed Legal NewsLine; Rob Green, Abnormal Use; yet more on multi-district litigation, John Beisner, Chamber ILR]
- A public health study “builds upon Critical Race Theory” to criticize results of Stand Your Ground doctrine in Florida, but most of the cases it uses weren’t decided on basis of that doctrine [Andrew Branco, Legal Insurrection]
- “Subway ‘Footlong’ Settlement: Lawyers Feed, Consumers Fast” [Judicial Hellholes, earlier, note also this on Subway’s affection for the term]
- Not only did the free market not cause that $750 generic pill, it might be on the way to generating a $1 alternative [Bonnie Kristian/Rare, my earlier take] Still, it’s a little more complicated than that, as Alex Tabarrok explains;
- Kathleen Kane saga: “Pennsylvania Attorney General Suspended from the Bar, Still Refuses to Quit” [Hans Bader, CEI]
Crime and punishment roundup
- “Regulatory Crimes and the Mistake of Law Defense” [Paul Larkin, Heritage]
- Victims of sex offender registry laws, cont’d [Lenore Skenazy]
- James Forman, Jr.: case against mass incarceration can stand on its own without flawed Jim Crow analogy [Boston Review and N.Y.U. Law Review, 2011-12]
- “For-profit immigration jails, where the inmates — convicted of nothing — work for less than peanuts.” [@dangillmor on Los Angeles Times]
- “The New Science of Sentencing: Should prison sentences be based on crimes that haven’t been committed yet?” [Marshall Project on statistically derived risk assessments in sentencing]
- Group of 600 New England United Methodist churches issues resolution calling for an end to Drug War [Alex Tabarrok, who was also profiled the other day]
- Prison guard in Florida speaks up about witnessing abuse of inmate, and pays a price [disturbing content, Miami Herald]
Disabled rights roundup
- Per The Economist, long-awaited Justice Department rules decreeing ADA accessibility for websites (earlier here, here, etc.) expected any day now, “in June. For example, each picture must have text describing it, so that screen-reader programs can tell blind people what is there.” Individual enforcement actions, as against Peapod, aren’t waiting [DoJ press release] Settlement with MOOC firm signals DOJ plans to deal with online education providers [Cooley] Contributor believes it’s a snap to include online captioning in all online Harvard and MIT courses, so what’re they waiting for? [Time]
- Rest of the Economist article is of interest too, especially on ADA filing mills in Florida and elsewhere;
- In Sheehan v. San Francisco, Ninth Circuit created right to ADA accommodation in confrontations with law enforcers, SCOTUS reversed on other (qualified immunity) grounds [Mark Pulliam, City Journal; Richard Re, Prawfs]
- Commemorations of 25th anniversary of the ADA — here’s what I had to say about the 20th — include plans “to hold [various Chicago institutions] publicly accountable for their commitments” to, inter alia, “increase civic engagement around disability issues” [Michael Waterstone, Prawfs]
- Sacramento: “Squeeze Inn owner joins fight against costly ADA lawsuits” [KCRA]
- Spread of fake service dog paraphernalia alarms groups that work with actual service dogs [BBC]
- Intended class-action plaintiff sues McDonald’s over new style Coca-Cola Freestyle dispensers, saying touchscreen format unfair to disabled users [BigClassAction.com]
“Report: DOJ is investigating mental-health screening of bar applicants by Florida’s top court”
Lawyers wield an array of coercive powers against third parties, as well as looking after the entrusted interests of often unsophisticated parties and clients. And the goal of accommodating lawyers and aspiring lawyers who suffer from mental illness must be balanced against the “threat” their condition will sometimes pose to clients and the public — at least that’s what the president of the Florida Bar says. With language like that, it’s no surprise his bar appears to be on a collision course with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) enforcement efforts of the U.S. Department of Justice. [ABA Journal]
More: Scott Greenfield wonders who’s looking out for clients’ interests.