Profiles in Fecklessness, part, ummm, I’ve lost count

Congressional Democrats once again do what they do best: fold like a cheap suit.
After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s program [...]

NASCAR discrimination lawsuit follow-up

SI.com reports that NASCAR has suspended two of the officials named in the Mauricia Grant race and gender discrimination lawsuit. According to SI.com, the two officials, whom NASCAR declined to identify, “have been placed on administrative leave for violating company policy”.
The SI.com story also contains this chuckle-inducing tidbit: one of the officials Grant accuses of [...]

Former NASCAR employee sues over racist, sexist treatment

A lawsuit by a former NASCAR employee alleges a disturbing pattern of racist and sexist harassment and discrimination, including co-workers who referred to her as “Nappy Headed Mo” and “Queen Sheba” and told her she worked on “colored people time”, and a supervisor who made repeated references to the Ku Klux Klan. Mauricia Grant, an [...]

Rescuitating antitrust

Writing in The Nation, Harry First — whose course in Antitrust was among my favorites at NYU Law School (he quipped that he was going to change the name of the course to “History of Antitrust”) — argues for an antitrust revival, freed from the shibboleths of neo-classical economic ideology:
The answer to the “What happened [...]

Judge to suspended student: Tough noogies

A New York State judge has ruled against a 9th grader who sued over a nine-month suspension he received for giving his teacher “noogies”. Legal experts are divided on whether the decision would affect atomic wedgies, wet willies, nipple cripples, swirlies, or other popular junior high school pranks.

Something to cheer about

Though I’m now a few thousand miles from San Francisco, I join in celebrating the state Supreme Court’s ruling in the same-sex marriage case. My personal view is that the government ought to get out of the business of certifying anyone’s personal relationship (and, concomitantly, stop conditioning legal rights, privileges, and benefits on marital status). [...]

Andy Stern’s big sell-out

The Wall Street Journal reports on a highly unusual development in the area of labor relations law:
Two of the nation’s largest labor unions [SEIU and UNITE-HERE] have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.
The [...]

There’s more than one way to skin a fatcat

IOZ offers a sensible proposal for corporate law reform:
Clearly the solution [to exhorbitant CEO pay] is not to seek legal tools through which executive compensation may be regulated based on some performance metric or blah blah blah, but rather is to make CEOs themselves illegal. My estimation, based on my experience with CEOs of all [...]

A police department, a district attorney, and a court with apparently nothing to do

Thanks to my good friend (and loyal Debris reader) Stuart Lichten for bringing this decision to my attention (and also suggesting the post title). It seems like an April Fool’s joke, but it is absolutely real. The case involved a man charged with criminal damage to property, under the most absurd circumstances:
[T]he alleged facts are [...]

KBR uses off-shore shell companies to evade U.S. taxes on Iraq contracts

The Boston Globe reports:
More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in [...]