Minnesota – Overlawyered

Read: my WSJ piece on a bad Minnesota bill on race and child welfare

Walter Olson — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 10:05:51 +0000

Cato has now reprinted, with no paywall, my February Wall Street Journal piece on an audaciously unconstitutional bill moving through the Minnesota senate committee that would introduce explicit racial classifications into the state’s child welfare system, the idea being to institute markedly stronger protections for black families (but not others) against child removal. Earlier here.

Tags: Child Protective Services, Indian tribes, Minnesota, racial preferences, WO writings

Read: my WSJ piece on a bad Minnesota bill on race and child welfare is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Minnesota bill would prescribe child-removal standards that differ by race

Walter Olson — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 16:55:29 +0000

“Should the law require state child-welfare authorities to treat black children differently from white children? Lawmakers in Minnesota may soon vote on a bill to do just that. ” I have an op-ed in the weekend Wall Street Journal’s “Cross Country” column (paywalled) on a bill that has passed a Minnesota senate committee and would introduce explicit racial classifications into the state’s child welfare system, the idea being to institute markedly stronger protections for black families against child removal. I argue that if the provisions are a good idea, they should apply to all families, an argument with implications for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), on which the Minnesota bill was modeled. More on the proposed Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act: Sara Tiano/Chronicle of Social Change, Brainerd Dispatch, Insight News.

Tags: Child Protective Services, Indian tribes, Minnesota, racial preferences

Minnesota bill would prescribe child-removal standards that differ by race is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Discrimination law roundup

Walter Olson — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 10:01:45 +0000

Supreme Court reconvenes for new term and tomorrow will hear cases over whether Title VII ban on sex discrimination extends to sexual orientation and gender identity [SCOTUSBlog symposium with contributors including Richard Epstein, William Eskridge; Will Baude, Volokh Conspiracy; George Will; earlier here, here, here, etc.]
New York City Commission on Human Rights declares it a violation of anti-discrimination law to use the term “illegal alien” in workplace, rental, or public accommodation contexts “with the intent to demean, humiliate, or offend a person or persons.” Does it complicate matters that both federal law and the U.S. Supreme Court use “illegal alien” as a neutral descriptive? [Hans Bader]
Minneapolis passes law restricting landlords’ taking into account of tenants’ past criminal histories, evictions, credit scores [Christian Britschgi, Reason]
Obama-era Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mandated burdensome pay data reporting by employers. Will courts allow a course correction? [Federalist Society teleforum with G. Roger King and James A. Paretti Jr., earlier here and here]
Professor who directs social justice center at Washington, D.C.’s American University proposes new federal Department of Anti-Racism that would wield ample power to order everyone around along with preclearance authority over all “local, state and federal public policies”; also “no political appointees” [Politico via Amy Alkon; Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker with more on work of Prof. Ibram X. Kendi]
Late in its tenure, Obama administration began warning Fannie Mae that discouraging some of the riskiest mortgages (>43% debt-to-income) “could be seen as a violation of the Fair Housing Act.” Fannie and Freddie “quickly complied” and brought the punch bowl back out [Damian Paletta, Washington Post/MSN]

Tags: discrimination law, EEOC, immigration law, landlord tenant law, Minnesota, mortgages, NYC, sexual orientation, transgender

Discrimination law roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Liability roundup

Walter Olson — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 10:59:16 +0000

“Firings and lawsuits follow discovery of secret bugging devices at law firm; ‘It’s very John Grisham'” [Palm Beach County, Fla.; Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
Save on lawyers’ fees, get to trial faster: “If I were able to do something unilaterally, I would probably institute a new federal rule that said that all cases worth less than $500,000 will be tried without any discovery.” [Judge Thomas Hardiman, echoed by Judge Amul Thapar, at Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention panel; David Lat, ABA Journal]
“Austria: Farmer liable for hiker trampled to death by cow” [Elizabeth Schumacher, Deutsche Welle]
“Cloned” discovery: the “name derives from the fact that the plaintiffs are attempting to clone the discovery taken by others in unrelated cases.” Courts should resist [James Beck]
“Minnesota Supreme Court: No Primary Assumption of Risk in Skiing, Snowboarding” [Stephanie K. Jones, Insurance Journal]
Missouri lawmakers seek to limit forum-shopping by out-of-state litigants seeking plaintiff-friendly St. Louis courts [Brian Brueggemann, St. Louis Record]

Tags: assumption of risk, discovery, forum shopping, Minnesota, Missouri, skiing

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

Land use and zoning roundup

Walter Olson — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 10:58:20 +0000

Minneapolis enacts major relaxation of residential zoning, issue has united ideological opposites [Ilya Somin; Christian Britschgi; Somin on developments elsewhere]
“The Disconnect Between Liberal Aspirations and Liberal Housing Policy Is Killing Coastal U.S. Cities” [Better Institutions]
“Steelmanning the NIMBYs” [Scott Alexander, and a response from Michael Lewyn] Ben Carson battles the NIMBYs [Christian Britschgi]
“The use of new urbanist codes to promote inner-suburban renewal pose two distinct problems,” erosion of rule of law and high compliance costs [Nicole Garnett at Hoover conference on “Land, Labor, and the Rule of Law,” related video]
Obscure zoning change could give NYC politicos a lot of new leverage over hotel developers [Britschgi]
Cities are primarily labor markets, ordinances to suppress informal shanty town settlements commonly fail, and more insights from new Alain Bertaud book on markets and cities [Tyler Cowen]

Tags: hotels, land use and zoning, Minnesota

Land use and zoning roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Wage and hour roundup

Walter Olson — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:06:03 +0000

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]

Tags: minimum wage, Minnesota, Oregon, restaurants, Supreme Court, wage and hour suits

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

August 15 roundup

Walter Olson — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 09:55:00 +0000

“Lawmakers are doing nothing to stop wheelchair ramp scams: businesses” [Julia Marsh and Yoav Gonen, New York Post, earlier on NYC ADA shakedowns]
Not a flattering picture: inside the politicized office of one state’s (Minnesota’s) attorney general [Rachel M. Cohen, The Intercept, Briana Bierschbach, Minnesota Public Radio, J. Patrick Coolican and Jessie Van Berkel, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Swanson releases criminal record of aide-turned-critic]
Remembering when the U.S. went through its first moral panic about plastic guns, in 1986 [Dave Kopel]
Until 2012, after 60 Minutes did an exposé, “it was perfectly legal for members of Congress to trade on inside information. Not for you, of course. You’d go to jail. But for some strange reason, mystifying to all, that law simply did not apply to Congress.” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar]
“Federal Court: Miami Taxi Companies Have ‘No Right To Block Competition’ From Uber” [Nick Sibilla, Forbes]
“Not even consumer law professors routinely read consumer contracts and disclosures” [Jeff Sovern, CL&P]

Tags: ADA filing mills, attorneys general, contracts of adhesion, guns, Minnesota, politics, taxis and ridesharing

August 15 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

University of Minnesota’s pronoun prescription

Walter Olson — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 10:02:31 +0000

Not using someone’s preferred pronoun — “whether it’s he, she, ‘ze’ or something else” — could become a disciplinary offense, escalating up to firing and expulsion, at the University of Minnesota under a proposed policy [Maura Lerner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune] I’m quoted as saying that although protecting transgender members of its community from purposeful insult or breach of privacy is a legitimate purpose, the university is likely to fare poorly in court if it presumes to punish community members for not using new-coined gender pronouns on demand [Sarah George, The College Fix]:

“As a public institution with an educational mission to uphold, Minnesota can appropriately make some demands of its members, such as respecting norms of collegiality, refraining from insult, observing consistent standards in filling out paperwork, and so forth,” Olson told The Fix via email.

“But this does not constitute a blank check to police and punish language use generally, especially not in politically charged areas of speech, and most especially when the policy departs from viewpoint neutrality to side with some controversial views over others.”…

“Before presuming to force university members to mouth or endorse politically controversial language as a condition of keeping their jobs or remaining enrolled, the university must show that such coerced expression is essential to its functioning as an educational institution. It has not, and I suspect cannot, made such a showing,” he said.

Earlier on pronoun prescription: Canada, New York City, Oregon, more.

Tags: colleges and universities, free speech, Minnesota, transgender

University of Minnesota’s pronoun prescription is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

School discipline roundup

Walter Olson — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 09:58:27 +0000

Critique of Obama-era Education Department initiative on racial disparities in school discipline [Gail Heriot and Alison Somin, Texas Review of Law and Politics forthcoming/SSRN] Minnesota among states riding herd on local disparities [Roger Clegg; related, Federalist Society podcast with Roger Clegg and Jason Riley]
Pointed questions asked about Broward County handling of future shooter before rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school [Paul Sperry, Real Clear Investigations; Max Eden, City Journal; Valerie Richardson, Washington Times; earlier]
A contrasting view: “Parkland Shooting Doesn’t Justify More Cops and Harsh Discipline” [RiShawn Biddle, Dropout Nation]
“Philly Schools Tormented by Decision to Reduce Suspensions” [Max Eden, Philadelphia Inquirer/Manhattan Institute]
DeVos urged to rescind Obama guidelines [Bloomberg editors (“School Discipline Isn’t Washington’s Business,” calling current policy “a classic case of Washington overreach”); Valerie Richardson, Washington Times]
Authorities often refuse to back up teachers assaulted by students [Madeline Will, Education Week]

Tags: Florida, Minnesota, Philadelphia, school discipline

School discipline roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

$850 million Minnesota 3M settlement

Walter Olson — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 19:49:40 +0000

In a $850 million settlement of environmental claims by the state of Minnesota against 3M, private attorneys hired by the state will get $125 million, and the settlement fund is structured so as to evade the legislative appropriations power [Youssef Rddad, AP/St. Paul Pioneer Press]

Tags: attorneys general, constitutional law, environment, Minnesota, settlement

$850 million Minnesota 3M settlement is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system