John Culbreath Blog

As booming demand to live and work in the most sought-after cities runs into not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) restrictions on new housing construction, the ideas of Henry George are getting back into the conversation. Who will invest in civic amenities, even the most basic, if their effect is to cause rents to rise even further? [ Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg ; related and more on New Zealand cities where strict controls on building have contributed to unaffordable prices] Related: “Why Is Japanese Zoning More Liberal Than US Zoning?” [ Nolan Gray, Market Urbanism ] Tags: Japan , land use and zoning , New Zealand , prop Rising city land costs and the NIMBY factor curated from Overlawyered

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is suing Twitter and several critics, including the anonymous proprietors of accounts styling themselves “Devin Nunes’s Mom” and “Devin Nunes’s Cow,” claiming defamation and other torts. Section 230, which protects Internet companies from liability for users’ postings, is likely to prove an obstacle to his claims against Twitter. [ ABA Journal ; Eugene Volokh, first (Section 230), second (“fighting words” doctrine inapplicable), and third (injunction that suspends entire Twitter account likely overbroad remedy) posts; Mike Godwin and Elizabeth Nolan Brown , Reason] It’s worth emphasizing, in addition, that although the suit claims bias on Twitter’s part against political conservatives, were Nunes somehow to establish as a matter of law that the social media provider is obliged to intervene to remove harsh, unfair personal criticism of public figures, it would engage in much *more* removal of conservatives’ tweets and accounts than it does now. Meanwhil...

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New from me and Cato colleague Ryan Bourne in the Washington Post : One thing we’ve learned in this year’s debate over a statewide $15 minimum wage, now set to become law after the legislature overrode Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) veto today, is that affluent central Maryland doesn’t want to listen to hard-hit rural Maryland…. In the debate over the $15 minimum wage, lawmakers from [already high-wage] Montgomery County, Baltimore City and Howard County were nearly unanimously in favor, with most delegates supporting strong versions of the scheme. Meanwhile, most lawmakers from depressed parts of the state were passionately opposed. Guess who had the numbers to outvote whom?… Affluent sections of Maryland can vote for $15 without much worry that a large share of their job base will disappear. Poor counties can’t. Whole thing here . Related: Highly informative Jacob Vigdor/Russ Roberts interview on the Seattle studies, and on the strategies that employers (restaurants in particular) use...

Federal prosecutors in New York have charged celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti with trying to extort $20 million from Nike by threatening to vent allegations that he threatened would knock billions off its market capitalization. A simultaneous federal indictment in California charges Avenatti with embezzling from a client and defrauding a bank. [ Chris Dolmetsch and Erik Larson, Bloomberg ] Two tweets 47 minutes apart tell quite a story [ Joe Weisenthal ] The complaint filed in New York also describes an unnamed co-cpnspirator, who is not charged with any wrongdoing; Wall Street Journal reporting says that figure is California-based celebrity attorney Mark Geragos, a longtime Overlawyered favorite who has lately represented Jussie Smollett and Colin Kaepernick and until this week was billed as a legal commentator at CNN, where Avenatti too has made frequent guest appearances. As in many other situations, the question arises: what would the legal difference be between extortion an...

The late and widely mourned Princeton economist was celebrated for his work across many areas, especially in empirical applications. But some of those who cite him on the effects of minimum wage laws do not always well understand his views, as manifested in for example this 2015 New York Times piece . More from David Henderson , NPR , New York Times . [Headline via Peter Isztin ] Krueger’s work, often with Morris Kleiner, was instrumental in the revived wave of interest in recent years in the costs of occupational licensure policies, a welcome development in which both the Obama administration and free-market groups have played a role. [ Eric Boehm, Reason ; Brookings] Tags: minimum wage , occupational licensure “The article Alan Krueger wrote that I wish Fight For 15 advocates would read” curated from Overlawyered

The Maryland gerrymander case, back for its third trip to the Supreme Court, was argued March 26. This Federalist Society animated video about the case has me as narrator . Jon Levitan at SCOTUSBlog rounds up commentary on the oral argument. The Brennan Center offers an annotated guide to the amicus briefs . Tags: Federalist Society , Maryland , on TV and radio , redistricting reform Lamone v. Benisek, brought to life on video curated from Overlawyered

U.S. Department of Justice files brief in Kisor v. Wilkie somewhat critical of Auer deference, i.e. of deference to the federal government’s own positions. That’s pretty special, and commendable [ William Yeatman, Cato ; Jonathan Adler , earlier here and here ] Parsonage exemption (i.e., favored treatment of allowance for religious housing) does not violate Establishment Clause, rules Seventh Circuit panel [ Gaylor v. Mnuchin ; background, Kelsey Dallas, Deseret News ; earlier ] Showing middle finger to police officer counts as constitutionally protected speech, and Sixth Circuit says every reasonable officer should know that already [ Eugene Volokh ] Home-share hospitality is here to stay, unless regulators get it very wrong [ Federalist Society video with Gwendolyn Smith, Matthew Feeney, and Pete Clarke] “Tens of thousands of people in Missouri cannot drive as a result of their licenses being suspended over child support they are unable to pay.” A newly filed lawsuit challenge...

My new piece for Real Clear Policy examines and rejects the argument that the college admissions scandal retrospectively validates the use of racial preferences in college admissions. If racial preference in college admissions is unjust, it doesn’t magically become just because people identify some other injustice that has different beneficiaries. Many of those arguing that the admissions scandal somehow vindicates racial preferences seem unaware that Singer repeatedly falsified students’ ethnicities to get them into affirmative action categories…. If you’re an applicant who doesn’t fit in *either* the celebrities-and-cheaters pool or the racial-preference pool, things definitely aren’t somehow canceling out. You’re competing with other families like yours for an artificially small number of remaining admission seats…. Public universities should not discriminate by race, especially not on the excuse that someone managed to game the system on other grounds. Two injustices do not a...

Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh has filed suit seeking to seize the famed Preakness Stakes race — trademarks, business deals, and all — through eminent domain. I’ve got a few things to say about that in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (paywall, sorry). For those just catching up with the underlying story, Pamela Wood covers it at the Baltimore Sun/Capital Gazette . See also my 2014 Cato take on an earlier episode in Maryland’s history of “smash and grab” eminent domain methods. Tags: Baltimore , eminent domain , sports , WO writings Baltimore moves to seize Preakness Stakes race curated from Overlawyered

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Supreme Court remands Frank v. Gaos to lower court on standing issue, thus sidestepping cy pres question; dissenting from per curiam ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that cy pres payments are “not a form of relief to the absent class members and should not be treated as such (including when calculating attorney’s fees)” [ opinion ; Ronald Mann, SCOTUSBlog ] New Manhattan Institute report details problems with cy pres, including its use to support ideologically fraught groups and those advancing plaintiffs’-side interests [ James Copland, Trial Lawyers Inc. Update 2019: Cy Pres ] “Apricot scrub” product was marketed as an exfoliant, court recognizes, and abrasive properties of crushed walnut shells as ingredient are feature not bug [ Eric Alexander, Drug and Device Law ] Cough drop action could provide soothing relief for counsel’s bank account [ David Andreatta, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle ] “Don’t import US-style class action abuses – think-tank” [ Law Society Gazette...

Police officers in Wisconsin “drew Gerald Mitchell’s blood while he was unconscious—to test his blood alcohol content after a drunk-driving arrest. The state has attempted to excuse the officers by citing an implied-consent statute, which provides that simply driving on state roads constitutes consent to such searches.” Although the right to privacy are not absolute, there are problems with that approach, made worse by a strange Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion extending to highway searches a Fourth Amendment search exception for “pervasively regulated businesses.” [ Ilya Shapiro and Patrick Moran on Cato cert amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to review Mitchell v. Wisconsin] Tags: Fourth Amendment , privacy , Wisconsin “Unconscious People Can’t Consent to Police Searches” curated from Overlawyered

Meritless lawsuits should not be welcome in our legal system: a woman who says she is descended from a slave photographed on the 1850 orders of scientist Louis Agassiz is suing Harvard for recovery of the early photo and for unspecified damages. [ Joey Garrison, USA Today ] Tags: Harvard , photography , reparations , statutes of limitations Harvard sued over slave daguerreotypes curated from Overlawyered

Bloodstain analysis convinced a jury Julie Rea killed her 10-year-old son. It took four years for her to be acquitted on retrial, and another four to be exonerated. Has anything been learned? [ Pamela Colloff, ProPublica ] Forensics’ alternative-facts problem [ Radley Balko ] The chemists and the coverup: inside the Massachusetts drug lab scandal [ Shawn Musgrave, Reason , earlier here , here , here , etc.] “I would say, you know, as a parting gift, if you’d like to throw in some iPhones every year, we would be super jazzed about that…. So, you know, a hundred, 200 a year.” A window on the unusual business of prison-phone service [ Ben Conarck, Florida Times-Union , state Department of Corrections] Should juries be forbidden to hear any evidence or argument about their power of conscientious acquittal? [ Jay Schweikart on Cato amicus in case of U.S. v. Manzano, Second Circuit; related, David Boaz on 1960s-era jury nullification of sodomy charges] This hardly ever happens: prosecu...

Roslyn Layton, AEI, in November : The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), along with similarly heavy-handed regimes such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act, entrenches established platforms that have the resources to meet their onerous compliance requirements. Since the GDPR’s implementation in May, the rank and market share of small- and medium-sized ad tech companies has declined by 18 to 32 percent in the EU, while these measures have increased for Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Via Alex Stamos thread on Twitter (“Anybody wonder why the big tech companies didn’t really fight that hard against GDPR? It isn’t due to a newfound love of regulation”) by way of James Pethokoukis ; more, Antonio García Martínez . Tags: Amazon , Europe , Facebook , Google , privacy , technology Does European data privacy regulation help entrench U.S. tech firms? curated from Overlawyered

Tuesday’s 6-3 decision in Air & Liquid Systems v. DeVries took an expansive view of asbestos liability in the maritime context. I discuss at Cato at Liberty : …By requiring makers of components to pay for damages they did not cause in the name of warnings that the U.S. Navy almost certainly would not have heeded, the Court yields to an impulse to round up deep pockets lest a sympathetic set of litigants otherwise go uncompensated…. In his dissent, Gorsuch points out that [the new standard formulated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the majority] not only has no evident grounding in existing tort doctrine but is not in fact easy to apply or predict. … But it seems almost quaint to ask whether a newly announced legal standard can readily be applied and predicted in the context of asbestos law, a sui generis creation in which the courts regularly extract vast sums from defendants on the basis of legal standards assuredly not recognized in law at the time those defendants acted in t...

Sports betting: best to ignore the leagues’ special pleadings and let federalism work [ Patrick Moran, Cato , related podcast ] Everything you thought you knew about corporate personhood in the law is wrong [ David Bernstein reviews Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations] Federal judge John Kane, on lawyer’s filings: “I have described them as prolix, meandering, full of unfounded supposition and speculation, repetitive and convoluted almost to the point of being maddening.” And he’s just getting started [ Scott Greenfield ] “Florida Voters Join Chevron Revolt And Strike A Blow Against Judicial Bias” [ Mark Chenoweth, Federalist Society Blog ] Plus video panel on “The States and Administrative Law” with Nestor Davidson, Chris Green, Miriam Seifter, Hon. Jeffrey Sutton, and Hon. Michael Scudder; Argument that Congressionally extended extension of copyright on (among other works) Atlas Shrugged violates Ayn Rand’s own ethical code [ Edward Sisson ] “More Legislation, More Violence? Th...

The Supreme Court’s Janus decision on public sector union fees was not received in a spirit of total cooperation by all public sector unions and employers. Two Cato Daily Podcasts from late last year, one with Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute, the other with Ken Girardin of The Empire Center: Related: Federalist Society podcast with William Messenger and panel with Messenger, Steven Greenhut, Hon. Chuck Reed, and Hon. Ryan Nelson; William Baude (critical of Janus). And now, citing the First Amendment and the Janus precedent, “three conservative lawyers are seeking to overturn Texas laws that require attorneys to join the State Bar of Texas and pay annual dues;” in Texas, as in many states, bar dues go to various ideologically fraught issues and causes [ Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman ] Just for fun: Cato’s amicus brief in Janus v. AFSCME is an answer on Jeopardy ! Tags: bar associations , labor unions , public employment Janus: what comes after curated from...

Mike Masnick at TechDirt examines claims that YouTube, Facebook, and other social media companies irresponsibly refrained from deleting user-posted copies of the March 14 mass murder at Christchurch, New Zealand mosques. Tags: Facebook , social media , terrorism , YouTube Blaming Internet companies for spread of New Zealand massacre video curated from Overlawyered

Oops! “Tulane sophomore unknowingly named as plaintiff in lawsuit over college bribery scandal” [ John Simerman, New Orleans Advocate ] “Admissions scandal class action is ‘fascinating’ but likely doomed – experts” [ Alison Frankel, Reuters ] Plus advice from Ken at Popehat ; Some problems with the idea of a sweeping presidential order to decree free speech on campus — and a promising if more modest step the White House could take instead [ Donald Downs, Cato ] Two more views on how universities can “fend off outside intervention and, more importantly, be true to their own mission… [by] nurturing a better free speech culture” [Keith Whittington, parts one and two ; John McGinnis ] “‘If racial preference [in college admissions] is unjust, then it doesn’t magically become just because people notice some other injustice that has different beneficiaries,’ Olson said. ‘Two things can be unjust at the same time, and two injustices do not add up to one justice.'” [ John Blake, CNN , q...

Over a dissent from three of its seven justices, the Connecticut Supreme Court has green-lighted a suit over purportedly negligent marketing of the Bushmaster rifle used in the Sandy Hook massacre, even though the firearm in question was never marketed or sold to the killer, who stole it from his mother who had purchased it lawfully long before. To do so, it had to get around a specific federal law (the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA) intended to stop exactly this kind of suit, which stretches available legal materials to an extreme so as to enable gun control objectives to be pursued through tort lawsuits. It resorted to ruling that the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA), a state unfair-trade-practices law, is included as a “predicate statute” in an exception to PLCAA allowing suit in cases where guns have been sold in violation of a law or regulation. [Soto v. Bushmaster, majority opinion and dissent ; Chris Woodyard, USA Today ] Writes Kevin Willia...

“Epic can of worms”: a North Carolina judge has ruled that because of racially gerrymandered districts the state’s lawmakers have no legitimate authority to propose amendments to the state’s constitution. The effect is potentially to nullify two amendments that the state’s voters approved in November, one on voter ID and one on capping state income taxes. [ Alan Greenblatt, Governing ] But wait: wouldn’t declaring a legislature illegitimate mean nullifying a lot of legislative actions that are pleasing to progressives, such as funding and expanding the public sector in various ways? Conveniently, it seems Wake County Superior Court Judge G. Bryan Collins has not signaled any willingness to strike down decisions made by a simple legislative majority, which would therefore be regarded as legitimate and allowed to stand. Gerrymanders, of course, do have a direct influence on whether a legislature adopts measures subject to simple majority vote, even as they do not have a direct influen...

Was this an entry in a contest to draft the most unconstitutional bill? “Florida Bill Would Make It a Crime for Minors to Post Pictures of Guns on Social Media” [ Eugene Volokh ] “Everyone involved in politics has bad days, when one’s interests conflict with one’s ideals.” But conservatives should resist the temptation to call in government to regulate the Internet [ John Samples ] New Republican interest in antitrust explainable by wish to bust corporations considered unfriendly to Republicans [ Steven Greenhut ] Lafayette, La. mother jailed after posting video to social media showing fight between two high school students [ Megan Wyatt, The Advocate ; editorial ; Dave Cohen, WWL ] Suit over online harassment could puncture liability protections of Section 230, some hope and others fear [ Elizabeth Nolan Brown ] “So, to be blunt here, Warren’s campaign screwed up with its ad design [by] including the [Facebook] logo.” The really bad part, though, was the spinning afterward [ Scot...

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“The Trump Justice Department, following a tougher policy toward dubious False Claims Act lawsuits by private citizens, has moved to dismiss a pair of lawsuits by a former hedge-fund manager who shorted stock in pharmaceutical companies he accused of a wide-ranging price-fixing conspiracy.” [ Daniel Fisher, Legal NewsLine/Forbes ] Tags: pharmaceuticals , qui tam , whistleblowers DoJ snubs whistleblower who shorted stocks of target firms curated from Overlawyered

For 20 years I’ve been writing about how the gaming of disability diagnoses in schools helps affluent families. And I was hardly alone: in 2004 Craig Lerner wrote a paper entitled : “‘Accommodations’ for the Learning Disabled: A Level Playing Field or Affirmative Action for Elites?” There hasn’t been much interest in fixing things. Now test accommodations have surfaced as one key theme in the big and colorful new college-admissions scandal. “Particularly glaring in the 204-page indictment is that the majority of the children, whose parents were charged Tuesday, had seamlessly secured disability accommodations on their standardized tests. This enabled them to have additional time on the exams and to take them alone with the proctor at a private testing facility that was located, in some cases, thousands of miles from the test-takers’ residences.” [ Michelle Robertson, SFGate/New Haven Register ] More: Akira Olivia Kumamoto, Sacramento Bee ; FBI affidavit . Tags: colleges and univers...

“Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, ‘So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?’ It’s a good question.” [ Geoffrey Manne and Alec Stapp, Truth on the Market/CNBC ] Floral arrangements as constitutionally protected expression: Cato files amicus on behalf of First Amendment rights of Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman not to serve a wedding of which she disapproves [ Ilya Shapiro and Patrick Moran , Washington Supreme Court] “Over several months, man repeatedly threatens his next-door neighbor with profanity, racial epithets. The police investigate, warn the man to stop, and then arrest him when he does not. Eventually, the man leaves the apartment complex after the landlord declines to renew his lease. Can the neighbor sue the landlord for failing to intervene sooner? The Second Circuit says yes, the neighbor’s Fair Housing Act claims should not have been dismissed. Dissent: The FHA doesn’t say...

“The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday agreed to settle a pivotal and contentious case on the property rights of homeless people — a decision that is likely to limit the seizure and destruction of encampments on skid row.” Since 2016 the city has been in litigation with civil rights lawyers representing homeless persons “and two Skid Row anti-poverty groups.” Subsequently, “U.S. District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles issued an injunction [that] barred the city from seizing and destroying homeless people’s property on skid row unless officials could show it had been abandoned, threatened public health or safety, or consisted of contraband or evidence of a crime.” [ Gale Holland, L.A. Times ; Susan Shelley, L.A. Daily News ] An estimated 2,000 persons live in the downtown L.A. encampments, and diseases little seen in peacetime in the modern era, including flea-borne typhus, have been making a comeback. [ Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News/The Atlantic ; KCOP ; earlier ] L.A. shou...

Laws on hate crimes raise longstanding questions of fairness both in theory and practice, including (when enacted at the federal level) dangers of overextension of federal criminal law and inroads on the prohibition against double jeopardy. The role of hate crimes as culture war rallying points can make things worse. In the Jussie Smollett episode, journalists came under fire for raising questions about unlikely elements of the actor’s story — Smollett had been “doubly victimized as the subject of speculation by the media industry and broader culture,” said the head of one progressive outfit — and even for hedging their stories about with words like “allegedly.” After Smollett’s story fell apart, some advocates argued that no matter what might have happened this one time, data show that hate crimes are sharply on the rise and reports of them hardly ever prove unfounded. Is that the case? I tackle the question in a new piece at Inside Sources An oft-repeated talking point is that...

Progressive sentiment vs. actual progress: Philadelphia bans cashless stores [ Jeffrey Miron ; related, Billy Binion, Reason (council member thinks city should legislate against “elitism”), Joe Setyon, Reason (NYC)] Meanwhile, heading in the opposite direction: “California bill would require businesses to offer e-receipts” [ Don Thompson, Associated Press ] “Overhaul CRA? Why Not Eliminate It?” [ Diego Zuluaga, American Banker ; video of panel on CRA at Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention with Bert Ely, Deepak Gupta, Keith Noreika, and Jesse Van Tol, moderated by Hon. Joan Larsen] SEC should see its role as fostering, not just reining in, risk taking [Cato audio with Commissioner Hester Peirce ; more from Peirce, Cato Journal ] Your taxes pay for bad mortgage loans [ Hans Bader ] “With Emulex Corp., Supreme Court Could Raise Bar for ‘Merger Tax’ Securities Suits” [ Stephen Bainbridge, WLF ; Emulex Corp. v. Varjabedian ] In car insurance, credit scores “effectively p...

“The scientists and doctors would get excited….But as soon as their lawyers heard ‘sick, pregnant women,’ nothing happened,” Moore said. “There’s such a sense of liability.” [ Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post/Bartlesville, Okla., Examiner-Enterprise ] Tags: pharmaceuticals , product liability , safety Research on medical conditions of pregnancy curated from Overlawyered

H.R. 1, the political regulation omnibus bill, contains “provisions that unconstitutionally infringe the freedoms of speech and association,” and which “will have the effect of harming our public discourse by silencing necessary voices that would otherwise speak out about the public issues of the day.” That’s not just my opinion; it’s the view of the American Civil Liberties Union, expressed in this March 1 letter ( more ). For example, the bill would apply speech-chilling new restrictions to issue ads that mention individual lawmakers. The House of Representatives nonetheless voted on Friday along party lines to pass the bill , which was sponsored by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD). For now, it has no prospect of passage in the Senate. The issues raised in the ACLU letter aside, H.R. 1 contains many other provisions that likely are unconstitutional, unwise, or both. On gerrymandering, for example, an issue on which the Constitution does grant Congress a power to prescribe standards whic...

“Firings and lawsuits follow discovery of secret bugging devices at law firm; ‘It’s very John Grisham'” [Palm Beach County, Fla.; 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 [ 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 pl...

Another valued little piece of financial privacy being lost: in the name of enforcing money laundering and know your customer regulations, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has expanded a program the effect of which is to require disclosure of your identity if you buy a home in some parts of country [ Kathleen Pender, San Francisco Chronicle ] Related: British financial regulators adopt new approach of “shifting the burden of proof onto foreign investors; they must now prove their wealth is legitimate.” [ Jeffrey Miron, Cato ] Tags: banks , Bay Area , privacy , real estate Buying a home? Feds want to know your identity curated from Overlawyered

An app billed as blocking unwanted calls was set up to funnel potential clients to lawyers filing suits under the bounty-hunting Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) [ John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine/Forbes ] Tags: cellphones , chasing clients Frontiers in client-chasing curated from Overlawyered

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A longtime progressive objects to the diversity pledge (applying to personal and professional lives alike) soon to be expected of Ontario lawyers and paralegals as a condition of their licenses [ Murray Klippenstein with Bruce Pardy, Quillette ] More on Cato’s First Amendment challenge to SEC gag-order settlements [ Cato Daily Podcast with Clark Neily, Robert McNamara, and Caleb Brown] “Federal judge sanctions lead lawyer in Roundup trial for opening statement ‘misconduct'” [ Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal ] Unanimous high court (Sotomayor concurring in judgment) rules Ninth Circuit may not count Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s vote in decisions issued after his decease: “Federal Judges Are Appointed for Life, Not for Eternity” [ Eugene Volokh ] Copyright law firm has “a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands” for payment [ Paul Levy, CL&P ] “Genealogists shouldn’t have to become technophobes,” yet to spit in a cup is now to enter oneself and...

Spoiler: all the rights created by this measure will be held by lawyers and other human beings. [ Nicole Javorsky, CityLab ; Daniel McGraw, Guardian ] Tags: environment Toledo voters approve ballot measure giving legal rights to Lake Erie curated from Overlawyered

“In his deposition, [plaintiff] Porterfield said he may have bitten someone’s ear, but he didn’t know whose.” The suit by a now-West Virginia lawmaker, still pending after years, seeks to hold a now-defunct Indiana bar legally responsible for the catastrophic injuries he suffered during the affray. [ Jake Zuckerman, Gazette Mail ] Tags: personal responsibility , West Virginia Great moments in negligent security suits curated from Overlawyered

“Everything would be all renewable all the time if we could just pass the right laws.” The wishful underpinnings of the Green New Deal [ Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb Brown and Regulation Magazine editor Peter Van Doren] “The U.S. rail system is optimized for freight, vs. European and Japanese systems that are optimized for passengers (it is hard to do both well with the same network). The U.S. situation is actually better, much better, for energy conservation.” [ Coyote ] Federalist Society discussions of climate litigation based on public nuisance theories: National Lawyers Convention panel with David Bookbinder, Eric Grant, James Huffman, Mark W. Smith, moderated by Hon. John K. Bush; “Originally Speaking” written debate with John Baker, Richard Faulk, Dan Lungren, Donald Kochan, Pat Parenteau, David Bookbinder; Boston Lawyers Chapter panel on municipal litigation with Steven Ferrey, Phil Goldberg, Donald Kochan, James R. May, Kenneth Reich] Climate nuisance suits have met wi...

Naomi Schaefer Riley explains at AEI . Tags: foster care How does one child end up with more than 100 foster care placements? curated from Overlawyered

Atticus Grinch: “From Massachusetts to Utah, small community theater productions of To Kill a Mockingbird are being shut down under threat of a lawsuit by the producer of the new Broadway production. “It doesn’t matter that the new version, penned by Aaron Sorkin, is completely different from the Christopher Sergel play that’s been performed by high school students and community theater actors for decades. Nor does it matter that the community theaters paid a licensing fee of at least $100 per performance to the Dramatic Publishing Company, which owns the rights to the earlier version of the play. “What matters, lawyers for Broadway producer Scott Rudin say, is that according to the contract between Dramatic and the Harper Lee estate, most amateur performances can’t proceed now that a new version of the story is on Broadway.” [ Matthew S. Schwartz, NPR ] Tags: copyright “Community Theaters Kill ‘Mockingbird’ Productions After Lawsuit Threat” curated from Overlawyered

Home In-Depth Reporting Law firms hiring CEOs without law degrees… Law Firms Law firms hiring CEOs without law degrees reignites debate about turning over the reins to business professionals By Danielle Braff March 2019 Photo of Angela Hickey by Organic Headshots According to Angela Hickey, as CEO of Levenfeld Pearlstein, she works long hours, does the heavy lifting and is responsible for charting long-term strategies for the Chicago-based firm. One thing she cannot do is practice law. Hickey was named CEO in 2018, after working for four years as the firm’s executive director and previously as its director of finance since 1999. According to Hickey, the lawyers at her firm stick to legal work while the nonlawyers handle the nonlegal stuff, and everyone works together harmoniously. “Lawyers are trained to be lawyers and not to be businesspeople,” says Hickey, who doesn’t like the term nonlawyer. “It was and remains a sound business model to engage business professional...