Law

(Ilya Somin) This Vancouver Sun article reports that dogs are much more effective at sniffing out meat than drugs [HT: Steve Bainbridge]: Federal search dogs at international border entry points have a penchant for sniffing out one thing more than anything else: meat. In fact, dogs trained to find animal products turn up meat around 20 times more frequently than drug-sniffing dogs find narcotics, according to government documents obtained by Postmedia News under access-to-information legislation. The release of the data comes as federal officials question the necessity and effectiveness of the dogs, with the Canada Border Services Agency dismantling some of its search-dog teams over the past year – a move the federal union believes will erode the ability to quickly search incoming cargo and seize drugs and firearms. The article gives lots of explanations for this entirely unsurprising finding. But it ignores the obvious points that dogs like meat a lot more than drugs. Meat is edible while drugs (usually) are not. Thus, your average canine has evolved to be a much better meat detector than drug detector. In addition, as I discussed in this post, drug-sniffing dogs often err because their main objective is to please their human handlers rather than find the drugs as such; as a result they tend to signal “false positives” if they sense that that’s what the handler wants. By contrast, meat-sniffing dogs have reasons of their own for finding meat. The point is so glaringly obvious that this could be considered a dog-bites-man story – except that it is actually much more common for dogs to bite pieces of meat than humans. Unfortunately, there is a more serious side to the story. Despite the fact that drug-sniffing dogs have a high error rate, government policy – and even Supreme Court decisions - are often based on the assumption that they are far more accurate than the evidence shows.

(Eugene Volokh) Lenta.ru so reports. The bill would criminalize “actions in public, demonstrating clear disrespect to society and committed with the intent to insult the religious feelings of believers,” with the maximum punishment being one year in prison, or three years if they are committed. The final vote on the law is expected by the end of the week. Thanks to my father Vladimir Volokh for the pointer.

From the New York Times: After listening to two months of testimony on the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin left little doubt about her views of their effectiveness in helping detect criminal behavior. . ....

RECENT HITS (for all papers announced in the last 60 days) TOP 10 Papers for Journal of Contracts & Commercial Law eJournal March 22, 2013 to May 21, 2013 RankDownloadsPaper Title 1 340 The Fiduciary Obligations of Financial Advisors Under...

This is the eighth in a series of posts reviewing Margaret Radin's Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights and the Rule of Law. Daniel Schwarcz is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota School of Law. One...

The petition of the day is: Planned Parenthood of Indiana, Inc. v. Secretary of the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration12-1159Issue: Whether the Indiana statute that disqualifies a health care provider from participating in a government program because, outside that program and with wholly private funds, it provides abortion care imposes an unconstitutional condition in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In association with Bloomberg Law

(Kenneth Anderson) At the Lawfare blog, a communication from an unidentified “senior national security official” in the Obama administration on the leak investigation against Fox News’ James Rosen.  It’s striking that a senior official would decide to communicate these views via a blog – though Lawfare (whose editor-in-chief is the former Washington Post journalist turned Brookings scholar Benjamin Wittes) has evolved into something closer to an edited magazine than a blog, with a readership that includes the key national security community in DC.  The unnamed official’s comments raise issues touched on by some of the analyses here; I leave it to others here at VC more expert than I in these areas to say what it means. An excerpt: [T]he Administration has been roundly [criticized] for suggesting that a reporter who knowingly solicits classified information might be committing a crime. At the risk of violating the old adage about not picking a fight with someone who buys printer’s ink by the barrel, I want to take this on. The Department of Justice did not claim that the Fox News reporter in the [Stephen Jin-Woo] Kim case committed a crime merely by publishing classified information. According to the Government’s filing in the case, the reporter in question actively asked people with access to classified information to break the law by providing him classified information he could publish. He used false names and “dead drop” email accounts to do so. In other words, he wasn’t someone to whom a whistleblower came to disclose information; he was actively asking people to violate the law, and enabling them to do so.

(Eugene Volokh) Apropos the recent posts on the Administration’s leak investigations and the press, I thought I’d note three items by our own Jonathan Adler from when a similar issue arose during the Bush Administration: Reporting Is Not a Crime: Conservatives Should Think Twice About Criminalizing Journalism (National Review Online), A Troubling Prosecution: United States v. Rosen Has Its Thorns (National Review Online), and Prosecuting the Press (a chain of posts on the subject here at the Conspiracy).

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Daniel Greene, Georgia State University - Department of Finance, Omesh Kini, Georgia State University and Jaideep Shenoy, Tulane University - Department of Finance discuss Buyer Power in Conglomerate Acquisitions. ABSTRACT: There is a burgeoning literature...

Chauncee D. Smith (Fordham University School of Law) has posted Deconstructing the Pipeline: Evaluating School-to-Prison Pipeline Equal Protection Cases Through a Structural Racism Framework on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article posits that a wide range of U.S. education and criminal justice policies and practices -- such as zero tolerance regimes, academic sorting, and school district financing methods -- collectively result in students of color being disparately pushed out of school and into prison. Vast empirical and qualitative research indicates that this dynamic process, known as the "school-to-prison pipeline", wreaks havoc upon today's minority population. Both anti-pipeline legal scholarship and equal protection case law tend to examine school-to-prison pipeline problems through an isolated, or perhaps overly-restricted, lens which inhibits the development of a jurisprudence that allows the pipeline's systemic invidiousness to meaningfully redressed. This article attempts to advance normative viewpoints and legal doctrine by deconstructing the pipeline through a structural racism framework.