- I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty tying together prosecutors’ demands for business forfeiture for immigration violations with proposals to criminalize employee misclassification;
- I can’t believe it’s not a lawsuit: margarine class action melts away [Cal Biz Lit]
- Guess what, your asbestos trial is scheduled in 11 days [Korris, MC Record]
- “This website has to be removed”: mayor of Bordentown, N.J. wants to shut down online critic [Citizen Media Law]
- What is a think tank and what does it do? I and others contribute answers at Allen McDuffee’s Think Tanked blog;
- No surprise here: Insurer offers policy to cover things that go wrong in medical tourism, but won’t cover USA residents or facilities [Treatment Abroad via White Coat]
- Pennsylvania law curbing med-mal forum-shopping disappoints lawyers who used to head for Philly or Wilkes-Barre [Sunbury, Pa. Daily Item via, again, White Coat]
- New Haven pizzeria busted: owners let their kids work at restaurant [Amy Alkon]
Posts Tagged ‘restaurants’
“Hooters Sued for Weight Discrimination”
The complainant says management proposed to place her on “weight probation” when she had trouble fitting into her uniform at the winks-and-wings eatery. She’s suing under Michigan discrimination law, which is unusual in making weight a protected category. [WSJ Law Blog]
Subway descends
“If you sell sandwiches that happen to be, oh, 12 inches long, and you dare to refer to said sandwiches as being a ‘footlong,’ then Subway would like to have a word with you.” [Bruce Carton, Legal Blog Watch; cease and desist letter, PDF, via NPR]
California county bans Happy Meals
Officials of Santa Clara County “vote to ban toys and other promotions that restaurants offer with high-calorie children’s meals.” [L.A. Times] More: Alkon (“There is a solution to this sort of thing. It’s called parents.”), Cavanaugh/Reason.
Federal calorie labeling mandate, cont’d
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air checks out what it will mean for Davanni’s, a 21-outlet pizza chain in the Twin Cities. Earlier here, etc.
Sorry, locavores
We know you’re looking for small-scale, locally produced meat, but it’s been marginalized thanks to regulation among other causes:
The state [Vermont] has seven operating slaughterhouses, down from around 25 in the mid-1980s, [state meat inspection official Randy] Quenneville said. One is a state-inspected facility, meaning that meat inspected there cannot be sold over state lines. …
Mr. Quenneville said a number of small, family-owned slaughterhouses started closing when strict federal rules regarding health control went into effect in 1999.
Not entirely unrelatedly, here’s an article on underground restaurants in Boston, a trend that has spread from Portland, Ore.
Health bill requires vending, restaurant-chain calorie counts
Why, wonders Joe Weisenthal, are we only finding out about this now? The National Restaurant Association sought the measure — which constricts the freedom of its own membership — in hopes of gaining uniformity instead of “a potential patchwork of conflicting requirements adopted by states and cities,” to quote the Times. It can be reliably predicted, though, that the ever-growing battalions of “food policy advocates” will 
not feel constrained by any supposed national deal to refrain from pushing for further piecemeal extension of state and local requirements, thus rendering any seeming uniformity but temporary.
The requirement kicks in when a restaurant chain reaches ten units, and will foreseeably make it harder for 15-unit local chains to compete with the 1,500-unit behemoths who can spread the nontrivial costs of compliance over a much larger base. Like earlier calorie-labeling laws, it will also encourage standardization by making it hazardous for owners not to prescribe and control, e.g., precisely how much topping local employees are to spread on each sandwich or pizza. Earlier here. More: Richard Goldfarb at Food Liability Law Blog has more details, and reports that the threshold for number of outlets is 20 rather than 15. There also some pre-emption of state and local regulation, although localities can still impose added requirements in the name of food safety.
Ferran Adria, stay away?
The Italian government passes a law against “molecular cuisine”, barring use of liquid nitrogen and chemical additives in restaurant kitchens. It expires in less than a year, though. [Caput Mundi Cibus via Tyler Cowen]
Madison County class action: Blimpie subs not meaty enough
BL1Y wonders whether the numbers add up, though (via Above the Law, Courthouse News). The class action firm filing the case is Lakin Chapman; it and its predecessor firm are well-known to longtime Overlawyered readers. More: Lowering the Bar.