Showing posts with label lawyers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lawyers. Show all posts

Conrad Black: Blind Justice

Justice is blind, just not in the way it was intended.  An article in the Wall Street Journal last week having pointed out that 97 percent of U.S. criminal prosecutions are now guilty-plea bargains, and that 85 percent of the remaining 3 percent are trials that return guilty verdicts, I return to the spavined bĂȘte noire of the justice system. These are totalitarian   ... MORE

New Hampshire Jury Exercises Its Nullification Powers

Empowered jury just says 'no' -- to the law.     In a developing story that has hit Reason.com, an NH jury has acquitted a man facing a felony for growing cannabis! It’s our first real-life case of jury nullification here in NH and the jury nullification law hasn’t even gone into effect yet. Kudos to the judge for reading a fair and easy-to-understand jury  ... MORE

Little League Lawsuit Epitomizes A Big League Problem

by Anthony W. Hager.  Some things can't be fully appreciated unless compared to their opposites.  We hold light dear because its absence is darkness.  Crisp autumn mornings are sweeter when compared to summer's searing heat.  Likewise, reward can't be fully valued without risk.  The connection between risk and reward is a common element in    ... MORE

The Economist: Jury Nullification Rights In New Hampshire

The "live free or die" state chooses the former. Before I dive into the subject of this post, let me warn you that it has absolutely nothing to do with John Roberts, the commerce clause, cultivated crops of the Brassica oleracea species or how Americans get their health care. In honour of independence day (which I'm spending indoors revelling in the one  ... MORE

Bob Dorigo Jones: Silly Labels, Serious Consequences

Frivolous lawsuits increase product dangers.  Have you ever shaved while sleeping? Or used a map on a desktop globe to navigate a boat? Perhaps a better question is: Do you really need to be warned against doing either of those things? Chances are, you answered “no” to these questions. Nevertheless, the manufacturer of a 7-inch  ... MORE

Melissa Langsam Braunstein: The Nanny Tax

Hiring a nanny? Prepare for plenty of red tape. There are certain laws everybody breaks.  Everybody jaywalks, nobody respects the speed limit, and nobody pays taxes for the children’s nanny.  But would more parents follow nanny-related laws if the system were more straightforward? As a new mother, I wonder. I had spent several years as a full-time   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Technically, That's Illegal


Politicians keep Americans in a perpetual state of lawbreaking.

Daniel Allott: The Hate Crimes Farce

The threshold for a hate crime continues to decline. Have you ever used a racial slur? You may have two answers to that question. There's your initial visceral response: No! Of course not! Never! But then there's the response you'd give if you were being a little more honest: maybe... once or twice. So, if you have, does it make you a racist? In the court of     ... MORE

John Stossel: Everyone Out Of The Pool

More money for lawyers! Every year, federal government bureaucrats work hard to come up with some 80,000 pages of new and proposed regulations. That's a lot of pages -- 23 feet high if you stack them in one pile. One rule that just went effect, which you can find by flipping to page 56,236 of the 2010 regulations, will require all hotels with a pool    ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Illegal Everything - Pt 2


Lobbyists pay politicians to regulate away their competition.

Ira Stoll: Why Capitalism Isn't Going Anywhere

Only system know to increase both growth and freedom. At the height of the financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009, a wave of articles declared the end of capitalism. A half-dozen reporters writing about the issue called Allan Meltzer, who since 1957 has been teaching about capitalism at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.       ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: The Real Cain Scandal


There is no cost to making false allegations.  The real scandal in the accusations against Herman Cain is the corruption of the law, the media and politics. Let's start with the law. Some people may think the fact that the National Restaurant Association reportedly paid $45,000 to settle a claim made by one of its employees against Mr. Cain is incriminating. Most of us are ... MORE

Greg Beato: Twelve Apathetic Men

Why no one wants to get convicted of jury duty. Recently I spent the morning in a large room at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice along with several hundred others watching Ideals Made Real, the world’s least convincing infomercial. A 14-minute anesthetic that the state of California administers to anxious citizens to ease the pain of imminent       ... MORE

John Stossel: The FDA Kills

It would be nice if politicians and regulators left us alone.  But they don't. They always want to do more. Recently, there have been shortages of some medicines. Cancer patients can't get drugs they need. Why not? One reason is that a big drugmaker shut down for a year in part to meet Food and Drug Administration rules. The FDA makes it so expensive and difficult to sell ... MORE