Saturday, June 14, 2025
Auto Clubs and the Lost Origins of the Access-to-Justice Crisis
Lots of stuff I've missed here ... but this article is truly fascinating, about how bar associations try to make it more difficult to exist to gin up business, more or less.
In the early 1900s, the country’s 1,100 automobile clubs did far more than provide the roadside assistance, maps, and towing services familiar to AAA members of today. Auto clubs also provided, free to their members, a wide range of legal services. Teams of auto club lawyers defended members charged with driving-related misdemeanors and even felonies. They filed suits that, mirroring contemporary impact litigation, were expressly designed to effect policy change. And they brought and defended tens of thousands of civil claims for vehicle-related harm. In the throes of the Great Depression, however, local bar associations abruptly turned on the clubs and filed scores of suits, accusing them of violating nascent legal ethics rules concerning the unauthorized practice of law (UPL). In state after state, the bar prevailed—and, within a few short years, auto clubs’ legal departments were kaput.
Labels: law
Monday, May 25, 2020
Adjourned: Overlawyered to cease publication May 31
A sad day but after 21 years of regular blogging, the rest is well deserved. Come to think of it this blog is 17 years old but I post once a month these days, though for the first few years I was daily.
Labels: law, metablogging
Monday, June 03, 2019
Double Jeopardy is bad no matter who you're trying
New York’s legislators are about to make a terrible mistake. They are going to repeal New York’s double jeopardy protections to stick it to Donald Trump. Maybe they will succeed. The price of their success will be imperiling every other criminal defendant in New York long after Trump is gone.
Labels: law
Monday, July 20, 2015
That's some ambiguous law
The fundamental mistake in Mount Laurel was to leave intact the local zoning laws that kept out low income residents, and instead force the township to come up with positive programs to create exceptions to its basic zoning wall—which it did, after a fashion, by rear guard actions that included designating for the new housing a wetland located behind an industrial park far removed from water and sewer connections. Ultimately, when affordable housing was built in Mount Laurel, few members of minority groups wanted to stray so far from their home base. Local widows occupied a large number of the units.I never really understood how zoning was compatible with property rights. I guess the disaster extends further than I thought.
The sad truth is that this unbroken level of failure will be taken to a new level by HUD’s Final Rule. Yet HUD is unable to explain how the huge conditions attached to its grants will build a single unit of new housing for anyone anywhere. What is needed is a complete reorientation in approach that starts from the proposition that it is far easier and more sensible to remove barriers to entry than it is to subsidize forced entry by judicial decree once those local barriers are allowed to remain in place. Indeed, the only winners out of HUD’s new initiative are government administrators, lawyers, and pro-housing activist groups that salivate at the prospect of hauling the next Westchester County into court.
Labels: law
Friday, May 08, 2015
Feds above the law
Who do they work for?
If I seize someone, handcuff them, lock them in a room, and leave them to die, I will suffer severe consequences. I will lose my job, especially if I acted while performing my duties. I will go to jail. I will suffer catastrophic personal financial losses. My name will be broadcast far and wide.Popehat calling it like it is, as always.
That's the difference between me and a federal employee.
The DEA agents who arrested Andrew Chong for smoking dope and left him to die got reprimands or suspensions that were shorter than my last tension headache.
Labels: law
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
The right to be forgotten forgets about many things
The problem is, the person trying to get the information suppressed knows why it's bad for them, but that's supposed to be balanced against the benefits. But, the benefits are widespread and in the future, so the people involved can't contest the issue.
Labels: international law, law
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
A law that I agree with on policy grounds, but oppose on legal grounds
The Rape Survivor Child Custody Act. Seems like a home run:
Kiessling is also on the board of directors of Hope After Rape Conception, which is fighting a crucial battle to reform child custody laws. A majority of states have no laws preventing rapists from obtaining custody or visitation of the children conceived through their violence. Absent such laws, a mother choosing life after rape faces the horrifying prospect of an 18-year co-parenting relationship with her rapist. Very understandably, people in that impossible situation are under tremendous pressure to abort.but
The RSCCA rewards states that protect survivors from custody claims with federal grant money, which will hopefully speed along the process of getting appropriate legislation enacted in all 50 states.So they're trying to get Congress to use grant money to prod states to legislate. Bad bad idea. I will probably be writing to my state legislators to support state action on this matter, and to my congressmen to oppose federal action on this matter.
Monday, December 08, 2014
Life without parole - not so great
Kenneth E. Hartman, who is serving life without parole in California, agrees with such an assessment—and for that reason, strongly opposed the referendum to replace capital punishment with life without parole. Hartman runs, from prison, a campaign called the Other Death Penalty Project, on the premise that a sentence of life without parole amounts to “a long, slow, dissipating death sentence without any of the legal or administrative safeguards rightly awarded to those condemned to the traditional forms of execution.”
“Though I will never be strapped down onto a gurney with life-stopping drugs pumped into my veins,” Hartmann has written, “be assured I have already begun the slow drip of my execution [which] won’t come to full effect for 50, maybe 60 years.” Like William Blake in New York, he states: “I have often wondered if that 15 or 20 minutes of terror found to be cruel and unusual wouldn’t be a better option.”
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
How the law works in New York City
Another HN h/t.
The judge denied reconsideration of his own incredibly wrong decision and I was left unable to explain to my clients why they were being penalized for doing exactly what the contract required them to do. The most awful feeling I had in ten years of law practice was that "Mr. Jones" feeling, from the Bob Dylan song: "There's something happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" All too often, in state court, there was the feeling that what happened had nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the inner workings of a club of which I was not a member. The New York state courts, in New York City, are owned by the Democratic party. Judges are elected for fourteen year terms in elections where they are faced with no serious opposition; endorsement by the local Democratic club ensures election. The people who are selected are all too often not intellectual luminaries or legal scholars (unlike in the federal system) but are attorneys who have been associated with the Democratic party for many years and are up for a reward (typically, they are the ones who do not have enough on the ball to be elected to the state legislature or city council). They see the same lawyers every day, many of whom are also involved with the party, and if you are a complete outsider, as I was, you will probably not win the same number of your cases, or at least of your motions, as an insider.
Friday, June 27, 2014
A dash of common sense!
Two unanimous Supreme Court decisions - you still have first amendment rights if you're unpopular, and the Senate isn't in recess if the Senate isn't in recess. The 9-0 nature of the decisions are somewhat refreshing, as both appeared blindingly obvious to me, I'm glad to see it wasn't just me.
Labels: law, politics, prolife
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Uganda criminalizes homosexuality, and that's not good
Some good UN related links in there. On a side note, I don't know why everyone keeps talking about the Indian court decision, their ruling seems quite correct as a matter of Indian law, regardless of whether it's a good idea or not.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Liberty and power
Here we come to the fundamental paradox of modern liberalism. On the one hand, liberalism in all its stages has always treated human freedom as sacred. On the other hand, modern liberals also believe that in order to guarantee their freedom, they can in practice use the state’s coercive power to compel others to do what they believe is wrong.From The Public Discourse. The solution, as the article point out, is that rights are supposed to protect obligations, not autonomy.
This is the logical consequence of liberalism’s autonomy view of rights. Since the state is supposed to be “value-neutral” about what each party desires, in cases where human autonomy is at stake it really has no principled way to decide between competing claims. The result, more often than not, is not a fair contract between the two parties but an arbitrary exercise of political power, justified by the myth that we have a right to technological progress and convenience.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Open disdain
In his July 31 decision, the judge also said the law posed an undue burden on women and that it ran afoul of the Supreme Court’s “Casey” decision.Perhaps if judges showed less open disdain for the actual federal Constitution, people would show less disdain for the rights they claim are clearly protected by it.
...
“The legislature has shown open disdain for the rights clearly protected by the federal Constitution,” Corwin wrote.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Clarence Thomas as a liberal
Some principles cut across the left/right political divide. For example, CT has his own way of looking at things. Of course it's a Slate article so they see things through a rather particular lens, but it does get to the core of the issue:
All of these votes arise from the same philosophy that drives Thomas to rule for unlimited and anonymous corporate electioneering, astonishingly torturous methods of capital punishment, and the deprivation of gay people’s rights. More than any justice in history, Thomas is an originalist, ruling exclusively by the letter of what he views as the Founders’ original intent in writing the Constitution. Because the Founders, for example, condoned “public dissection” and the “embowelling [sic] alive, beheading, and quartering” of prisoners, so too does Thomas. But because, in Thomas’ view, the Founders felt Americans had a right to view graphic sexual material, we still hold that right today. Liberal justices attempt to apply the Constitution’s strictures to the present, adapting its liberties to the needs of modern society. When society proposes a new liberty, like a right to be gay, Thomas rejects it out of hand. But when it begins to encroach on an old one—private property, for instance—Thomas emerges as a defender of freedom.If you want to amend the Constitution, amend the Constitution, I say. The needs of modern society should be determined through a political process, not by five dudes or chicks being lobbied. Regardless, I'm more an admirer of Thomas sticking to his guns than his particular positions.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Law and WordPerfect
Add a disgruntled federal judge, and I'm in heaven!
Labels: law, technology
Monday, April 22, 2013
Quote of the day - never!
If you're thinking that seems to mean the feds can charge anyone with use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction based on the use of anything that can be described as a "bomb," you'd be right. However, as an American, I live in confidence that the government would never exaggerate the existence of WMDs.From Popehat.
The rule of law in trying times
“ROPER: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
“MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
“ROPER: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
“MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
“Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Monday, March 18, 2013
Solitary confinement
Worse by far than the prison situation in general, which isn't very good at all.
There is no pretense that this is a temporary affair. Instead it is long-term, severe behavior modification, and it is the most vile, mind and spirit-deforming use of solitary confinement. Control units represent the darkest side of behavior modification. Inside a control unit, the prisoner usually has no idea how long he or she will be there. It is an indeterminate sentence, and usually the rules or guidelines for exiting are unclear at best and impossible to comprehend at worst. It is a hell without any apparent end.I'm not sure why people see that the death penalty is rather bad but don't get so upset at this. A living death, it is.
Being sent to a control unit prison is tantamount to torture, as acknowledged by many human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Prisoners are held under conditions that today are not considered ‘humane’ even for animals. They are an extreme abuse of state power.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Increasing the power of the king
From the first book of Utopia:
Another proposes that the judges must be made sure, that they may declare always in favor of the prerogative, that they must be often sent for to court, that the King may hear them argue those points in which he is concerned; since how unjust soever any of his pretensions may be, yet still some one or other of them, either out of contradiction to others or the pride of singularity or to make their court, would find out some pretence or other to give the King a fair color to carry the point: for if the judges but differ in opinion, the clearest thing in the world is made by that means disputable, and truth being once brought in question, the King may then take advantage to expound the law for his own profit; while the judges that stand out will be brought over, either out of fear or modesty; and they being thus gained, all of them may be sent to the bench to give sentence boldly, as the King would have it; for fair pretences will never be wanting when sentence is to be given in the prince's favor. It will either be said that equity lies on his side, or some words in the law will be found sounding that way, or some forced sense will be put on them; and when all other things fail, the King's undoubted prerogative will be pretended, as that which is above all law; and to which a religious judge ought to have a special regard.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Language and costs
The Harvard International Law Journal has an article, really a series, on the drawbacks of the international language rights situation, which as far as I can tell talks a very big game but which people have avoided implementing due to the high costs. Opinio Juris published one in full, and this passage caught my eye:
When cases bearing on language reach major human rights courts and quasi-judicial institutions, and especially the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), these enforcement institutions do not in fact demand that states accommodate substantive diversity. The UNHRC and the ECtHR are not prepared to force states to swallow the dramatic costs entailed by a true diversity-protecting regime. Although they operate under different doctrinal structures, these two adjudicative bodies reach a similar legal outcome: they consistently allow the state to incentivize assimilation in the public sphere (on fair terms) into the dominant culture and language of the majority.Both because it seems like a fair balancing act, and because it seems to me that the better approach would be to make that sort of balancing when negotiating the treaty, rather than hoping that ECtHR notices that there's a problem and does something about it. But overall, an interesting look into a world that I don't know very much about.
Labels: international law, law
