Articles

A new approach to species protection

September 30, 2014 | By ETHAN BLEVINS

Laws can worsen the problem they aim to fix. For example, in colonial India, the British government placed a bounty on cobras to rid Delhi of a snake infestation. When entrepreneurs began to breed cobras to cash in on the bounty, the government scrapped the program. So the snake breeders released their cobras into the … ...

Articles

Must BP compensate people who were never harmed by BP?

September 29, 2014 | By ANASTASIA BODEN

60 minutes has a fascinating piece that illustrates many of the problems with the civil justice system today.  After the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, BP entered into a settlement agreement in which it agreed to pay businesses for losses to that arose following the oil spill.  But plaintiffs’ attorneys interpreted that clause to mean &# ...

Articles

Seawall and staircase decision draws local outcry

September 29, 2014 | By PAUL BEARD

Over the weekend, San Diego journalist, Thomas K. Arnold, penned a stinging rebuke of the 2-1 court of appeal decision in Lynch v. California Coastal Commission, which threatens bluff-top homeowners’ property rights—including the right to protect their homes with seawalls. Arnold rightly criticizes the Coastal Commission’s “ ...

Articles

President’s weekly report — September 26, 2014

September 27, 2014 | By ROB RIVETT

Property Rights — Suction Dredge Ban Undermined The California Court of Appeal has issued a decision that seriously undermines California’s ban on suction dredge mining. Adopting the argument of our amicus brief, the Court held that a state ban forbidding all commercially beneficial use of a federal mining claim is preempted by federal ...

Articles

A new, and unconstitutional, approach to contract law

September 26, 2014 | By DEBORAH LA FETRA

Patricia Atalese signed a contract with a financial services firm, in which she agreed that “any claim or dispute” between herself and the firm, related to the services provided, “shall be submitted to binding arbitration upon the request of either party” and “any decision of the arbitrator shall be final and may be en ...

Articles

Arizona can't avoid a supermajority voting requirement just because it wants to

September 26, 2014 | By ANASTASIA BODEN

Today we filed an amicus brief in a case challenging Arizona’s Medicaid expansion.  Like California (and many other states), Arizona’s constitution requires that all taxes be passed by a supermajority vote—in this case, 2/3 of the legislature.  The Medicaid expansion included a tax on hospitals in order to pay for the program, but ...

Articles

Defending property owners along the Great Lakes

September 25, 2014 | By MARK MILLER

Longtime readers know that Pacific Legal Foundation has defended property owners along the Great Lakes for many years.  These states have a history of trying to grab land for free from private property owners (see here for an example in Michigan, and here for an example in Ohio), using an ersatz version of the centuries-old public trust doc ...

Articles

Permit needed to keep trespassers off private property

September 25, 2014 | By PAUL BEARD

Yesterday, a San Mateo Superior Court judge issued a stunning tentative ruling in one of the two Martins Beach lawsuits pending against coastal landowner Vinod Khosla. The judge concluded that the decision to disallow the public to trespass onto private property–after allowing the public to do so for a fee–constitutes “de ...

Articles

PLF's Timothy Sandefur discusses occupational licensing and economic freedom on Cato's Daily Podcast

September 25, 2014 | By TIMOTHY SANDEFUR

In this Cato Daily Podcast, I discuss two PLF cases involving occupational licensing laws and the right to earn a living: our case on behalf of California entrepreneur Leslie Young and her business, elist.me, in which the state of Nebraska is arguing that you have to have a state real estate broker license before you … ...