Kelo vs. New London revisited

Remember the case of Kelo vs. New London? Briefly, it was a case in which homeowners including Susette Kelo sued their municipality to stop it from taking their homes using the power of eminent domain. The city wanted to raze the homes and redevelop the area, making it shiny and new to complement the anticipated Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility. After all, one musn't allow the shabby dwellings of the peasantry to mar the image of success and corporate uniformity that one is trying to project:

So, the politicians picked a 24-acre lot and sold it Pfizer for $10, adding on special tax breaks. Also, state and local governments promised $26 million to clean up contamination on the lot and a nearby junkyard. But Pfizer executive David Burnett thought New London needed to do some more cleaning. "Pfizer wants a nice place to operate," the Hartford Courant quoted Burnett in 2001. "We don't want to be surrounded by tenements." The old Victorian houses in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood next door did not match Pfizer's vision - a high-rise hotel or luxury condominiums would be more fitting.

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California court declines to publish anti-camera decision

Many of us have been caught by those increasingly ubiquitous red-light cameras. Police departments and local governments argue that these sorts of cameras improve safety and increase revenue. Studies are increasingly putting the lie to the safety claim, but nobody's disputing that these traffic enforcement mechanisms bring in revenue. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that

... a study in last month's Journal of Law and Economics concluded that, as many motorists have long suspected, "governments use traffic tickets as a means of generating revenue." The authors, Thomas Garrett of the St. Louis Fed and Gary Wagner of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, studied 14 years of traffic-ticket data from 96 counties in North Carolina. They found that when local-government revenue declines, police issue more tickets in the following year. Officials at the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police didn't respond to requests for comment.
California state law prohibits compensation to operators of these red-light cameras based on the number of tickets issued. Localities have been side-stepping this law through "cost-neutrality" provisions, which allow the cities to pay the operators up to a certain monthly amount. After that cap is reached, the city keeps all the revenue beyond that point. The intent of the law is to remove an incentive to ticket as a means of increasing revenue to the private operators. There is now a second appellate court ruling that has struck down the red-light programs as illegal under the state law.

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Rage and Injustice

When people ask why laws must be changed to protect behavior that seems "outside" social norms, it can sometimes be difficult to make the point that rights must accrue to individuals and their choices or they mean nothing. So when a woman is stoned in some backwater country for adultery (whether she is in fact married or not) or a young girl has her clitoris snipped off without having any say in the matter or when a child is allowed to die from a treatable illness because his or her parents believe that only prayer can save them or when people are denied basic civil rights because they don't play the social game the same way as everyone else or--- If this were an issue of a racially mixed marriage, everyone would be aware and outraged. In this case it is not, it is a lesbian couple with children, who suffered a dual outrage---the first being denial of partner's rights at the hospital where one perished and the second being the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the survivor against those who callously disregarded their basic humanity. The assumption by strangers that because they didn't fit some cookie-cutter definition of Normal that their fundamental humanity could be abridged in a life and death situation is not something that is redressable other than by law, because without a law people will make up any old justification to be assholes. And without a law, the rest of us will let them get away with it. Read the story. Be outraged. But do not be silent.

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Scalia’s thought process: “Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway.”

Way back in 1989, I happened to be watching Episode Two of a PBS series entitled "Ethics in America." It was a terrific 10-part series that considered compelling topics in ethics. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a participant in Episode Two. You can see all of the episodes, including Episode Two here (click on the little "VoD" button next to Episode 2). You might be wondering how I could possibly remember a particular comment from a particular episode from 20 years ago. I do remember: it was burned into my memory because it was so utterly bizarre. At about the 31-minute mark, the moderator (Charles Ogletree, Jr.) posed a hypothetical. What if you were an attorney and your client told you that he committed a murder a couple years ago? The clear answer is that the attorney-client privilege protects that admission; if you were that man's attorney, you could not tell anyone else what your client told you in the course of your consultation with him. Things got much more interesting, as the moderator elaborated on the hypothetical. Assume that your client tells you that after he committed the murder, the police erroneously arrested the wrong man. Further, assume that man has been found guilty by a jury and he is scheduled to be executed. As the attorney, what can you do to protect the life of an innocent man who is about to be executed for a crime committed by your own client who is confessing his guilt to you? This is a tough issue, right? At the moment where the moderator indicated that the innocent man was about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit, Justice Scalia spoke up: "Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway." You can see and hear this statement for yourself at 31:50 in the video. Although I'm certain that Justice Scalia would claim that his utterance was a "joke," (after all, other participants laughed), it makes you wonder, especially in light of a recent case decided by the United States Supreme Court, In re Davis.

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U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.

On September 4, 2009, Bill Moyers hosted Trevor Potter, president and general counsel of The Campaign Legal Center (and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission), and Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment attorney. You can view the entire discussion here. The topic is whether longstanding federal election laws should be held unconstitutional so that corporations can freely spend unlimited amounts of money (e.g., in the form of movies, books, and other private initiatives) in order to directly affect the outcome of federal political campaigns. The case is Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission. Many legal commentators are suggesting the Supreme Court has already suggested that it leaning in favor of the corporations on this issue. And we can almost guarantee how Chief Justice John Roberts is going to vote on this issue (and see here). I highly recommend viewing this discussion. I thought that Abrams looked very much like a man who was being paid big money to take position he knew to be reprehensible. On the other hand, Trevor Potter is taking a position that looks out for people like you and me. I realize that powerful corporate interests have already made puppets out of Congress, the SEC, the FDA and many other federal agencies (see these recent examples regarding tobacco legislation and the rejection of the bankruptcy cram-down option). With this as the context, I believe that Citizens United boils down to a simple question: Should our government be at least somewhat run by ordinary people or should corporate money flow even more freely at election time (much more than it flows already), allowing our federal government to be taken over entirely by powerful corporations driven almost entirely by the profit motive? Here are a few excerpts from Moyers’ discussion with Potter and Abrams:

TREVOR POTTER: This is a case about corporate money. If this case is won by the corporation, we will be in the ironic situation where corporations will have no limits on what they can spend in elections and unions still will. So, it's important to remember we're talking about corporations. Corporations exist solely to make money. Amassing economic power. They want, if they could get it out of government, monopolies. They want the ability to defeat their competitors. And if they can use government to do that, they will. Individuals have a whole range of interests. Individuals go to church, they care about religious and social issues, they care about the future of the country. They're voters.

So, they have a range of issues at stake that corporations don't have. Corporations just want to make money. So, if you let the corporation with a privileged economic legal position loose in the political sphere, when we're deciding who to elect, I think you are giving them an enormous advantage over individuals and not a healthy one for our democracy. . . . [C]orporations have a different status. And they ought to be focused on the economic marketplace and not the political marketplace.

FLOYD ABRAMS: You're opening the faucet, so to speak, so that more speech can occur. I don't think it's a can of worms to say that corporations, and it is unions as well, ought to be able to participate in the give and take of the democratic processes in the country. From my perspective, at least, the notion of saying that corporations and unions should be out of the picture either because they're too powerful, or because of the way their money has been created, is so inconsistent with the sort of First Amendment approach that we take in everything else, where we say over and over again, we don't care who the speaker is, we don't care where the speaker's coming from. And speech, we think, is, as a generality, a good thing . . .

BILL MOYERS: But we're not talking about free press issues here. We're talking about the power of an organized economic interest to spend vast sums of money that individuals can't spend . . . Would you disagree with the claim that big business dominates the political discussion today? Whether it's the drug industry or the health insurance industry? Big business is the dominant force in Washington. I mean, I see that as a journalist . . . we're not talking about free press issues here. We're talking about the power of an organized economic interest to spend vast sums of money that individuals can't spend.

It is important to deny powerful profit-seeking organizations the right to skew federal election results even more than they do currently. If the Supreme Court goes the wrong way on this issue, it would even make a mockery out of clean-money initiatives, such as this plan being promoted by Common Cause and this plan by Public Citizen.

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