Tag: in-the-news

A couple of years ago, I wrote about [here] a simmering trademark dispute between OSU (Oregon State Univ.), OSU (Oklahoma State University), and OSU (the university known as “The Ohio State University”) over the right to use the “OSU” brand on t-shirts, mugs, hats, etc.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: As reported first by trademark attorney Josh Gergen (here) and confirmed by university officials, OSU-Columbus—i.e., The Ohio State University—has filed a trademark application on the word “The.”  [Its application is #88571984, if you want to navigate the Trademark Office’s terribly antiquated searchable database to see it for yourself].

Apparently, OSU-Columbus sells hats, mugs, t-shirts, etc. with “THE”—nothing more, just “THE”—splashed prominently across the front (see the video, which has examples of the branded merchandise), and they want the right to stop others from doing so—at least, from doing so in a manner “likely to cause confusion” among consumers.

It’s a tricky little trademark question, and I’m not at all sure whether the Trademark Office will grant the application.  It seems, intuitively, absurd to think that someone could own trademark rights in a word that is not just a common word, but “The word,” the most common word in the language.  But on the other hand, it’s not clear which, if any, exception to trademarkability would apply to support a rejection of the application, and it may well get through.

There is an important “functionality” doctrine in trademark law, which declares that “functional” features of a product—features that affect the cost or quality of the product, or those which competitors may need to use for reasons having nothing to do with trademark law—can’t be the subject of trademark protection; John Deere would not receive trademark protection for the distinctive green color of its products if that color somehow affected the performance of the machines (it doesn’t).  There may be a way to argue that the “The” qualifier similarly needs to be available to competitors, i.e. other institutions that want to demonstrate their supposedly unique status:  not just any University of Michigan but THE University of Michigan (ouch!), not just any National Rifle Association but THE National Rifle Association, etc. [And not just any Volokh Conspiracy, but The Volokh Conspiracy? Would consumers be confused by the VC’s new line of “THE” mugs, coming this Christmas?]

 

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As I mentioned yesterday, the U.S. District Court in New Jersey in Bonner v. Justia, Inc. denied plaintiff’s request for a sealed opinion in that case. I had moved to intervened to oppose the motion, and the court granted my motion.

But not at first: In March, when I first filed a letter brief opposing the motion to seal, the court rejected it, writing “In order for Mr. Volokh’s letter to be considered he must be represented by counsel or … be retained as an expert by a party to the action.” And it’s true that (1) I’m not a member of the bar of the District of New Jersey, and (2) I wasn’t represented by a member of that bar.

Yet I thought I didn’t need a lawyer, because I was representing myself, asserting my own personal right of access to court records. I therefore asked the court to reconsider its denial, arguing,

Proposed intervenors may appear pro se to assert their own rights, just as plaintiff may appear pro se to assert his own claimed rights. Indeed, District Courts have allowed such pro se intervention in cases seeking unsealing of documents. [Citations omitted.] …

The Hawaii Supreme Court has recently analyzed the matter in more detail, and likewise concluded that a writer could move pro se to unseal a case, without representing his publication, even though he was planning to write an article in that publication. “Any member of the public may assert a personal right to access judicial proceedings and records,” the court concluded, and “the right of self-representation exists in both criminal and civil proceedings”; because of this, “Grube was permitted to prosecute his own cause before the [state trial] court, and the court erred by requiring him to retain counsel to enforce his personal right.” Grube v. Trader, 420 P.3d 343, 359-60 (Haw. 2018). The same analysis should apply in federal court, to pro se intervention in order to oppose sealing of documents.

And while I likely could have gotten someone to represent me pro bono and avoid this whole problem, that’s because I have the luxury of a pretty substantial network of lawyer friends and associates (stemming in large part from this very blog). Many others lack that, and they ought to be able to intervene representing themselves:

Journalists and other commentators usually seek to intervene to unseal cases without having a financial stake in the dispute. They (and their employers) profit only indirectly and speculatively, if at all, from getting access to the documents. If journalists always had to pay a lawyer to assert their own rights of access, they would often be practically unable to seek unsealing, even though they had the First Amendment right to do so; and while pro bono local counsel are sometimes available, but journalists cannot count on such largesse. Journalists and other writers should thus be at least as able to intervene pro se as plaintiffs are able to file their complaints pro se.

I’m pleased to say that the court in Bonner ultimately agreed with me on this:

Professor Volokh has identified several cases in which courts have permitted an interested party like himself to file similar motions to intervene pro se. See, e.g., In re Application-cr-1101 (ILG), 891 F. Supp. 2d 296 , 297-98 (E.D.N.Y. 2012); FTC v. OSF Healthcare Sys., [2012 BL 82337], 2012 WL 1144620 , at 1 (N.D. Ill. April 5, 2012); In re Sealed Search Warrants Issued June 4 and 5, 2008, [2008 BL 160272], 2008 WL 5667021 (N.D.N.Y. 2008). Professor Volokh has also cited cases in which he has intervened pro se to oppose a motion to seal or to file a motion to unseal. See Furtado v. Henderson, [2018 BL 463193], 2018 WL 6521914 (D. Mass. Nov. 26, 2018); Barrow v. Living Word Church, No. 3:15-CV-341 (S.D. Ohio Aug. 16, 2016); Doe v. Does, No. 1:16-CV-7359 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 11, 2019); Parson v. Farley, 352 F. Supp. 3d 1141, 1147 Okla. 2018 )….

“Any interested person may move to intervene pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 24(b) before the return date of any motion to seal or otherwise restrict public access or to obtain public access to materials or judicial proceedings filed under seal.” L. Civ. R. 5.3(c)(5) . The Third Circuit has “routinely found, as have other courts, that third parties have standing to challenge protective orders and confidentiality orders in an effort to obtain access to information or judicial proceedings.” Pansy v. Borough of Stroudsburg, 23 F.3d 772, 777 (3d Cir. 1994). “[T]he procedural device of permissive intervention is appropriately used to enable a litigant who was not an original party to an action to challenge protective or confidentiality orders entered in that action.” Id. at 778….

The court did add, “Professor Volokh’s motion to intervene pro se is more like an application to appear as amicus curiae, as he has special knowledge of this area of law. As such, Professor Volokh is allowed to file a brief and argue the merits of the motion to seal.” I’d quibble with that: Though I like to think my arguments were helpful to the court, I was trying to intervene to assert my own rights, and I think my rights in this respect were no greater than the rights of anyone else who seeks a right of access to court records, regardless of whether that person “has special knowledge of this area of the law.” (Again, see Grube v. Trader, where the Hawaii Supreme Court allowed pro se intervention by a journalist who appeared to have no specialized legal knowledge.)

But in any event, I think the Bonner decision, and the cases it cites, might be helpful to people who want to intervene pro se to oppose the sealing of court records.

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A Bartow County, Georgia, sheriff’s deputy has been fired, and he and his fiance are facing charges after they were caught on video cursing a neighbor who asked them to turn their music down. Brison Strickland has been charged with simple assault and disorderly house, and  Kristen Smith has been charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct. Shortly after midnight, a woman who lived in their apartment complex knocked at their door and told them their music was keeping her nephew awake. The video shows Smith and Strickland telling her to “f*** off” and demanding she tell them where she lives. When the woman says she will call the police, Smith responded, “We are the f****** police, b****. They seem to lunge at her.

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The dismissal of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, five years after he participated in the fatal arrest of Eric Garner, hinged on a second-by-second analysis of cellphone video showing him subduing the suspected cigarette seller, who was about the same height but weighed almost twice as much. An administrative judge concluded, and Police Commissioner James O’Neill agreed, that Pantaleo recklessly used a prohibited chokehold, applying pressure to Garner’s neck in a way that inflicted injury and helped trigger an asthma attack.

The factors that led to Garner’s death go beyond the misconduct of one officer, however. They include policies and practices that resulted in a violent confrontation that never should have happened.

Garner was arrested for selling cigarettes without paying the legally required excise taxes, which in New York City total nearly $6 a pack (not counting the standard sales tax of almost 9 percent). The cigarette tax in Virginia, by contrast, is 30 cents a pack.

By imposing excise taxes almost 20 times as high as those collected in a state that’s a four-hour drive away, legislators invited the sort of entrepreneurial activity that got Garner into legal trouble. Something like half of the cigarettes sold in New York City are smuggled from lower-tax jurisdictions.

From Garner’s perspective, he was performing a valued service for his neighbors by helping them avoid the country’s heaviest cigarette taxes. From the city’s perspective, he was depriving politicians of their cut, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 or up to a year in jail.

Given that sales of untaxed cigarettes are rampant in New York City, you might wonder why a small-time operator like Garner, who was arrested in March and May of 2014 before his final, fatal encounter with police that July, merited so much attention. As Rosemarie Maldonado, the deputy commissioner who oversaw Pantaleo’s administrative trial, explained in her ruling, the obsession with Staten Island loosie dealers grew out of a March 2014 meeting at One Police Plaza “focusing on quality-of-life conditions.”

At that meeting, Lt. Christopher Bannon of the 120th Precinct “was specifically tasked with addressing the illegal sale of untaxed cigarettes in the vicinity of 200 Bay Street, Staten Island, near Tompkinsville Park.” It was Bannon who, after observing people “huddled” near the park on the afternoon of July 17, summoned the precinct’s “quality-of-life coordinator,” Officer Justin Damico, who arrived at the scene with Pantaleo.

The officers saw Garner, who was familiar to both of them, standing outside a beauty supply store on Bay Street, and Damico claimed he witnessed a cigarette sale. When confronted, Garner adamantly and repeatedly denied that he had been selling cigarettes that afternoon, saying he had just broken up a fight while hanging out with a friend—an account confirmed by two witnesses.

While Maldonado and O’Neill both faulted Garner for failing to “comply” with police orders, his resistance is understandable in light of his manifestly sincere anger at being busted for a crime he had not committed. “Who’d I sell a cigarette to?” he asked. “I didn’t sell anything…. Every time you see me, you wanna harass me, you wanna stop me…. I’m minding my business, Officer.”

As Garner saw it, the police were the aggressors in this situation, and all he did was resist their unprovoked assault on him. Even if you accept the premise that loosie sellers create a public nuisance, such violence clearly has a more severe impact on the “quality of life.”

Damico and Pantaleo could have let Garner off with a warning, as Damico had done two weeks earlier after observing a cigarette sale, or they could have issued an appearance ticket instead of insisting on taking him into custody. A New York law enacted this year generally requires appearance tickets, rather than arrests, for misdemeanors.

If properly constrained, police would not only eschew especially dangerous restraint techniques. They would strive, first and foremost, to avoid violence unless it is necessary and proportionate.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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President Donald Trump promised he’d get rid of bad rules.

“Remove the anchor dragging us down!” he said when campaigning for president. “We’re going to cancel every needless job-killing regulation!”

Trump was a developer, so he knew that the thicket of rules government imposes often makes it impossible to get things done.

But would he keep his deregulation promise? I was skeptical.

Republicans often talk deregulation but then add rules. People called President George W. Bush an “anti-regulator.” But once he was president, he hired 90,000 new regulators!

Trump has been different.

When he took office, he hired regulation skeptics. He told government agencies: Get rid of two regulations for every new one you add.

I think his anti-regulation attitude is why stock prices rose and unemployment dropped. Trump sent a message to business: Government will no longer try to crush you. Businesses then started hiring.

Of course, the media wasn’t happy. Reporters love regulation.

They call Trump’s moves “an attack on the environment” and on “workers’ health.” The New York Times ran the headline “Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You!”

What the media don’t get is that regulations have unintended side effects that often outweigh the good they’re intended to do.

Cars built smaller to comply with President Obama’s rules that require doubling of gas mileage cause increased deaths because smaller cars provide less protection.

“Should the government tell you what kind of car to buy?” asks Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in my new video about Trump.

Norquist says that Trump has largely kept his deregulation promise, and that’s been great for America.

For example, Trump repealed the Obama-era plan to classify franchise businesses like McDonald’s as one single business. Why?

“The trial lawyers want to be able to sue all of McDonald’s, not just the local McDonald’s, if they spill coffee on themselves,” says Norquist. “And the labor unions want to unionize all McDonald’s, not just the one store. That would have been a disaster.”

Trump’s FCC repealed Obama’s “net neutrality” rule, which would have limited internet providers’ freedom to charge different prices.

Democrats and other regulation-lovers predicted repeal would mean that rich people would dominate the internet. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) even tweeted that repeal would mean “the end of the internet as we know it.”

Of course, none of those things happened. Or as Norquist puts it: “None of it! None of it!”

But some Obama regulations sounded so important.

Norquist laughs at that. “The names for these regulations are written by regulators. They’re advertisements for themselves.”

Of course, unlike advertisers, regulators don’t list side effects of their rules, which Norquist says should read: “May cause unemployment, may reduce wages, may raise the cost of energy, may make your car not driveable.”

Trump’s deregulation record would be better were he not so eager to add regulations, such as tariffs, at the same time.

“There is a challenge. Trump is a protectionist in many ways,” says Norquist, sadly. “Tariffs are taxes, and regulations on the border are regulations on consumers.”

So are Trump’s “buy American” rules.

“That sounds like a good idea, but it’s a dumb idea, and I wish he hadn’t done it,” says Norquist. “That is not deregulation. The good news is that the vast majority of the acts have been deregulatory and tremendously helpful.”

Recently, Trump announced, “We have cut 22 regulations for every new regulation!”

He exaggerated, as he often does. The real number is about five. But that’s still pretty good. Better than Ronald Reagan did.

I wish Trump would do more.

I wish he’d remove his tariffs and agricultural subsidies and kill the Export-Import Bank, drug prohibition, and the onerous rules that encourage illegal immigration by making it almost impossible for foreigners to work here legally.

Keep your promise, President Trump! Repeal 22 regulations for every new one!

Nevertheless, so far, mostly good.

Every excessive rule repealed is a step in the right direction: toward freedom.

COPYRIGHT 2019 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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Today the Fifth Circuit issued a divided en banc decision in Cole v. Hunter. The case considered whether two police officers who shot the Plaintiff were entitled to qualified immunity. Nine out the sixteen judges on the en banc court found that qualified immunity was warranted. Judges Ho and Andrew wrote a joint dissent, which was joined by Judge Smith (see pp. 54-64). Their decision warrants a careful study. It considers how lower court judges should, and should not be originalists.

First, the duo notes that modern qualified immunity doctrine has been criticized as “ahistorical and contrary to the Founders’ Constitution.” They cite Will Baude’s article in the California Law Review, as well as a rejoinder from Aaron Nielson and Chris Walker.

Ho and Oldham, as lower-court judges, see no role in this debate:

As originalists, we welcome the discussion. But separate and apart from the fact that we are bound as a lower court to follow Supreme Court precedent, a principled commitment to originalism provides no basis for subjecting these officers to trial.

In other words, if the courts approached civil rights litigation from an originalist perspective, qualified immunity would not be the only doctrine to go. There are lots of doctrines that would constrain the ability of individuals to recover.

Third, Ho and Oldham critique “the unprincipled practice of originalism.” In many cases, being an originalist, through and through, make it tougher for civil rights plaintiffs to recover:

Subjecting these officers to trial on originalist grounds is precisely the unprincipled practice of originalism that Justices Scalia and Thomas railed against. And not just for the procedural reasons they identified in Crawford- El. What about the original understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which the plaintiffs here invoke as their purported substantive theory of liability in this case? Does the majority seriously believe that it is an “unreasonable seizure,” as those words were originally understood at the Founding, for a police officer to stop an armed and mentally unstable teenager from shooting innocent officers, students, and teachers?

Fourth, Ho and Oldham provide a policy reason in support of their position:

And make no mistake: Principled originalism is not just a matter of intellectual precision and purity. There are profound practical consequences here as well, given the important and delicate balance that qualified immunity is supposed to strike. As the Supreme Court has explained, qualified immunity ensures that liability reaches only “the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Mullenix, 136 S. Ct. at 308 (quotation omitted). And absent plain incompetence or intentional violations, qualified immunity must attach, because the “social costs” of any other rule are too high

Fifth, Judge Oldham quotes his former boss, who rejected “halfway originalism”:

To quote Justice Alito: “We will not engage in this halfway originalism.” Janus v. Am. Fed’n of State, Cty., & Mun. Emps., Council 31, 138 S. Ct. 2448, 2470 (2018). See also id. (criticizing litigants for “apply[ing] the Constitution’s supposed original meaning only when it suits them”); Gundy v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 2116, 2131 (2019) (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment) (“[I]t would be freakish to single out the provision at issue here for special treatment.”

The duo close with a jab to fellow originalists on the Fifth Circuit, and elsewhere:

Our circuit, like too many others, has been summarily reversed for ignoring the Supreme Court’s repeated admonitions regarding qualified immunity. There’s no excuse for ignoring the Supreme Court again today. And certainly none based on a principled commitment to originalism.

Originalism for plaintiffs, but not for police officers, is not principled judging. Originalism for me, but not for thee, is not originalism at all. We respectfully dissent.

Judge Willett responds to the Ho/Oldham joint production:

As for the sidelong critique of me in the dissenting opinion of Judges Ho and Oldham, it is, respectfully, a pyromaniac in a field of straw men. I have not raised originalist concerns with qualified immunity. My concerns, repeated today, are doctrinal, procedural, and pragmatic in nature. Nor has my unease with modern immunity practice led me to wage “war with the Supreme Court’s qualified-immunity jurisprudence.” I am a fellow dissenter today, notwithstanding my unease, precisely because I believe the Court’s precedent compels it. In short, I have not urged that qualified immunity be repealed. I have urged that it be rethought. Justice Thomas—no “halfway originalist”—has done the same. Ziglar, 137 S. Ct. at 1872 (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“In an appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence.”).

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A paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey has been accused of using government computers to identify cooperating witnesses in a case against her son’s street gang. Tawanna Hilliard has been charged with witness tampering, obstruction of justice and obtaining information from a government computer. Her son Tyquan, a member of the Bloods, has also been charged. Tyquan Hilliard is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for robbery.

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Democratic presidential hopeful and former congressman Beto O’Rourke announced on Friday that he would like to remove legal protections from tech companies if they fail to police hate speech online. As with previous attempts to interfere with internet speech, the move would be an assault on the First Amendment.

O’Rourke joins a growing chorus of lawmakers and political activists who would like to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms from facing lawsuits over potentially defamatory statements posted to those platforms by users.

The Texas Democrat sees such protection as untenable in the wake of recent mass shootings, such as this month’s incident in El Paso, which the shooter carried out after posting an anti-immigrant diatribe online. “We must connect the dots between internet communities providing a platform for online radicalization and white supremacy, as propaganda outlets like Fox News fuel that fire, and the fact that hate crimes against Black and LGBTQ+ Americans are on the rise,” the O’Rourke plan states.

As such, he would mandate that internet platforms “ban hateful activities, defined as those that incite or engage in violence, intimidation, harassment, threats, or defamation targeting an individual or group based on their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.”

In essence, O’Rourke wants the government to suppress speech that he finds distasteful. But as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear, “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment.

Most recently, the Court affirmed that principle in Matal v. Tam, which ruled 8-0 that the Asian-American band The Slants could trademark its name, even though some people found the name to be racially objectionable. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful.” However, “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”

If O’Rourke’s plan were to go into effect, tech companies would be forced to clamp down on seemingly hateful comments, should those companies want to keep their liability protections under Section 230. But as the case of The Slants illustrates, those boundaries are impossible to police. The federal government told the Supreme Court that the band’s name was too offensive to be trademarked, while Simon Tam, the band’s Asian-American founder, said just the opposite, telling the Court that he wanted to “take ownership” of Asian stereotypes. Who can say decisively what is too offensive for public consumption?

A similar debate surrounds pro-life rhetoric. After the 2015 shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, for example, politicians and activists placed some of the blame on pro-life protesters, accusing them of inciting violence. Reproaction, a self-described “reproductive justice” group, still has an active petition demanding “an end to abortion terrorism and harassment, and the hate speech and lies fueling them.”

As Justice Alito pointed out in Matal v. Tam, certain speech can certainly be unsavory, depending on the listener. That much is clear. But the First Amendment also makes clear that it is not the government’s job to decide what is beyond the pale. Regrettably, Beto O’Rourke’s plan would empower the government to do that very thing.

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A new study of California’s “red flag” law describes 21 cases in which fear of a mass shooting prompted police or relatives to seek “gun violence restraining orders” (GVROs) from 2016 (when the law took effect) through 2018. Judging from “print, broadcast, and Internet media searches using Google,” the authors say, the respondents in those cases did not subsequently commit any noteworthy violent crimes.

“It is impossible to know whether violence would have occurred had GVROs not been issued, and we make no claim of a causal relationship,” write University of California, Davis, gun violence researcher Garen Wintemute and his co-authors in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Nonetheless, the cases suggest that this urgent, individualized intervention can play a role in efforts to prevent mass shootings.”

Wintemute et al. say GVROs were sought in 414 cases during the three years covered by their study. The New York Times reports that San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott “has obtained about 300 orders in the past two years,”which implies that one city accounts for something like three-quarters of GVROs.

So far Wintemute et al.  have been able to obtain court records for only 159 GVRO cases, of which 21, or 13 percent, involved attempts to prevent mass shootings. “The cases are not taken from the full population of 414 and may not be  representative of all GVROs involving threatened mass shootings,” they note. “The seemingly high proportion of threatened mass shootings among GVRO cases (13% in this study) may also not be representative.”

Of the 21 cases identified by Wintemute et al., seven involved threats of violence at work, five involved the targeting of children or schools, four involved “a medical or mental health condition,” and five involved a “political, social, or domestic motivation.” By and large, the warning signs described in the study seem legitimately alarming, although it is not clear how many of the threats were serious or how determined the respondents were to carry them out.

At one extreme, for example, there is a “31-year-old man who was known in his Muslim community as a supporter of the Islamic State,” who was “on the Terrorist Screening Center Watchlist,” who “made repeated threats of mass violence,” and who had recently purchased an FN Five-seven semi-automatic pistol. A GVRO prevented him from picking up the gun after California’s 10-day waiting period.

At the other extreme, perhaps, is the 14-year-old high school student “with a history of racist comments at school” who posted “videos on Instagram of himself using firearms, favorable comments about school violence and shootings, racist comments, and suggestions of animal cruelty.” After he was taken into custody for a psychiatric screening, he “claimed that he had been joking.” Police nevertheless seized his father’s guns.

There is also the 62-year-old woman who menaced five kids with “a paper towel roll wrapped in black duct tape,” threatening to “blow their heads off.” Police confiscated her (real) revolver, which she kept in her living room, and obtained a GVRO barring her from possessing guns for a year.

In between, maybe, are several people with work-related grudges whose threats may or may not have been in earnest. The week before he was fired by a car dealership, for example, a 65-year-old veteran came to work wearing an empty holster “to frighten the manager.” When police officers asked whether there was any reason to worry that he might hurt his former co-workers, he replied, “If we were back on the border of Syria and Israel, then hell [yeah].” A judge issued a one-year GVRO against him.

Since none of these people (even the more serious-sounding ones) appear to have obtained guns by indirect means after they were barred from legally buying or possessing them, it seems fair to say they were not highly motivated. Then again, that is the only sort of would-be mass murderer who could be stymied by a red flag law.

As Wintemute et al. note, a fuller picture of what California’s red flag law is doing would emerge from an examination of all the GVROs issued so far, rather than a subsample of a subsample. Contrary to the impression left by these 21 cases, the experiences of other states suggests that gun confiscation orders are usually aimed at preventing suicide rather than homicide. And even when a respondent is deemed a threat to others, the evidentiary burden on the government may be pretty light in practice.

Under California’s law, an initial, ex parte GVRO lasting up to three weeks can be issued based either on “reasonable cause” to believe the respondent poses an “immediate and present danger” to himself or others, or on a “substantial likelihood” that the respondent poses a “significant danger” in the “near future.” After a hearing, a GVRO lasting up to year (unless it’s renewed) can be issued based on “clear and convincing evidence” that the respondent poses a “significant danger.” The danger need not be imminent, and it’s not clear what “significant” means.

To get a better idea of how those standards work in practice, it would be helpful to know how often initial orders are issued (almost always, I’d guess, based on the experience in Maryland and Florida) and how often they are followed by final orders (also almost always, judging from the sample described by this study, which may not be representative in that regard). These 21 cases give us a sense of the harm that California’s red flag law might prevent, although that benefit is based entirely on counterfactual speculation, as Wintemute et al. concede. For a sense of the harm that the law causes (by unjustly suspending the Second Amendment rights of people who pose no real threat to others), we would need a broader look at the people it affects.

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Four contractors will plead guilty to participating in a prison bribing scheme that took down a former Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) commissioner.

In 2014, former MDOC Commissioner Christopher B. Epps was indicted by a federal grand jury on 49 counts of receiving bribes and kickbacks in exchange for MDOC contracts. Epps entered a guilty plea to the charges and was sentenced to 19 years in federal prison. Since the initial indictment, others have been charged in connection with the scheme, including a doctor and the wife of a former state representative. The most recent to face charges for their involvement are four Louisiana businessmen who used bribes to ensure government contracts for their phone and commissary services.

An October press release by the Department of Justice for the Southern District of Mississippi detailed the case against Michael LeBlanc Sr., 70, Michael LeBlanc Jr., 40, Tawasky L. Ventroy, 59, and Jacque B. Jackson, 50, all hailing from Louisiana. The men were charged with bribing Epps with at least $2,000 in cash and a gift of at least $5,000 in value in exchange for jail contracts with the Kemper County Regional Correctional Facility and other facilities in the state. They were also charged with using $2,000 in casino chips to bribe Kemper County Sheriff James Moore, who, unbeknownst to them, was actually working undercover with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and with federal prosecutors.

All four were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and with bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that the men have filed notices in federal court that they will change their previous not guilty pleas and now plead guilty. If convicted on all charges, they could each spend up to 15 years in prison.

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