Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

Sometimes legal restrictions have unintended screening effects. The City Council of McKinney, TX (somewhere near Dallas) last week repealed city ordinances that prohibited certain groups - churches, synagogues and religious groups - from having services in a home. A nascent church group had been attracting 20 or 30 people to Sunday services in a home, and municipal authorities ordered them to cease (an unfriendly neighbor had complained). The group went to court alleging the local ordinance was unconstitutional, because it targeted only religious groups; homeowners hosting non-religious gatherings faced no such restrictions. The City settled, repealing the restrictions and reimbursing the church’s legal fees to date. The Liberty Legal Institute , legal advocates for religious-freedom issues, handled the case and heralded it as a victory. Apparently similar cases are arising around the country. (Congrats to LLI, by the way - this is an example of the type of lawyer activism I was try...

I mentioned this article earlier in passing. The link in the title leads to the relatively even-handed treatment of Jerry Falwell's new Christian law school in Legal Affairs. (The first class of students there must have completed their first set of final exams by now). I would not be interested in teaching there myself, and worry about their bar passage rate, etc., but most of the criticisms in the media have been overblown. I like special interest law schools. They form a nice complement to the rest of our institutions, the 200 or so law schools that collectively graduate nearly 40,000 new but mostly generic practitioners every year. It enriches our legal system to have a subset of lawyers whose skills are devoted to and oriented around a particular social cause, instead of whatever case walks in the door and pays the bills. (My stint as a legal aid lawyer left me biased, though). It enriches social movements and NGO's to have lawyers who do more than take occasional pro bo...

This is not about other posts on the Internet, but rather the reeling of my tired brain while I was stuck in traffic today....and boy, I hope this post - more than any other - elicits comments... (But feel free to scroll down to the next post if this starts to put you to sleep).... Last summer I finally read Daniel Ellsberg's classic, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision (just republished in hardcover), which includes the famous Ellsberg Paradox and the "balls-in-the-urns" experiments. (Simplified explanation for those unfamiliar: these were experiments documenting that people are more averse to uncertainty than they are to regular risks of known proportions, usually to an irrational degree). I was confused, honestly, that I could not find a reference to Frank Knight's earlier classic, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit anywhere in Ellsberg's book. This seemed strange because Knight is generally credited with being the first to draw a conceptual distinction between risk...

I posted a lengthy response to a comment I received on this, and decided to republish the post... YES! News reports say that Bull's Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma agreed to pay $2 million to survivors and families of victims of the notorious Washington, DC snipers (John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo). Gun maker Bushmaster Firearms Inc. of Windham, Maine, will pay $500,000. It apparently marks the first time a gun maker has agreed to pay such a settlement. This is real progress in the march toward having gun prices reflect their true "cost" more accurately. Up to now the social cost of murder victims was externalized onto nonusers. If the idea catches on, gun makers and shops will start insuring against the liability, and pass the cost of the premiums through to buyers; buyers will then be paying a more realistic price for the product instead of getting a susbidy from innocent bystanders. Read my comments for more explanation....

my son jonathan My brother and I

In an interesting decision today, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that a Florida death row inmate was not entitled to a new trial - even though his attorney admitted his guilt during the trial (at the beginning of trial, actually) apparently without the client's consent. The best coverage I've found so far was at the AP , although I first came across it on the Jurist Paperchase website. The case is captioned Florida v. Nixon . The facts are indeed gruesome- the defendant allegedly bound his victim to a tree with jumper cables and set her on fire. Defense counsel pleaded with the defendant to enter a plea bargain, knowing the jury would be outraged at the facts, but to no avail. So counsel decided the best trial strategy was to punt to admit his client's responsible for the "horrible, horrible death," and hope for a life prison term instead of the death penalty. It didn't work. The jury still gave the death penalty. Somewhat understandably, the defendant cl...

Get statistics about the declining crime rates in 2004 here . It's unlikely to be caused by the "great" economy, given that it's been a rough year. Maybe people were too preoccupied with the election, or we somehow channel our collective agressiveness into the war overseas, or maybe (as a prominent Chicago economist speculated in a recent article) we managed to round up most of the troublemakers on other charges before they could do something dangerous....

If you're going to kidnap a wealthy widow and hold her ransom, it might be better not to pick your own boss' wife, no matter how disgruntled you were as an employee. KPRC in Houston reports that disgruntled former employee Jesus Prieto and Adrian de La Cruz kidnapped their former boss' widow, Shirley Cashiola (too good to be a tag name in a novel), and held her for two days demanding a half-million ransom. Police had already figured out that Prieto was involved when they agreed to drop the ransom in a remote location. They had him under surveillance as he started driving to the spot. Unaware of the special ops that were underway, a local deputy pulled him over for a routine stop. This rattled Prieto's cage so much that he drove back to the hideout where the victim was being kept bound & gagged. Police knocked on the door and his partner opened (on the first knock) and readily let them in. "(We) took him down," Officer Maxey said. At common law, kidna...

The most famous tort case of all time has a " rest of the story " that is worth reading - about the subsequent mishaps (would-be torts) that befell Plaintiff Palsgraf and her descendants in steady succession. I hate to smile at others' misfortunes, but irony can be irrisistible. Multigenerational curses are somewhat untenable for the biblically literate (see Ezek. 18) and skeptics alike, of course. Nevertheless, the stories add a layer of richness to the oft-told story about the explosion on the Long Island Railroad .