Secret civil justice undermines employee rights

Pintera Studios

A story investigated by ProPublica and featured on Planet Money highlights the problem of secret justice in perpetuating the willful abuse of at-home gig workers.

I expected that "Call Center Call Out," reported by Planet Money's Amanda Aronczyk and ProPublica's Ariana Tobin, Ken Armstrong, and Justin Elliott, based on the ProPublica story, would be a sad and frustrating tale of work-from-home gig economy labor being exploited, principally by the misclassification of employees as independent contractors to reap savings in compensation, work conditions, and employee benefits.

Turns out, there is even worse dissimulation afoot.  And there are worrisome implications for the health of the civil justice system.

To work these call-center jobs, for intermediary contractors such as Arise Virtual Solutions, the not-quite-employees are compelled to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), arbitration agreements, and class action waivers.  These all are enforceable, even when the workers do not fully understand their implications.

When a worker has the temerity to commence arbitration proceedings, challenging misclassification as an independent contractor, the worker wins.  In one example in the story, a worker easily qualified as an employee under the labor test applied by the arbiter.  A worker can win thousands of dollars in reimbursement of expenses—they have to pay out-of-pocket for the privilege of their training and then buy their own computers and telecomm equipment—and back wages to bring their compensation history up to minimum wage.  

But here's the rub: the workers already are bound by their NDAs, and the arbitration is secret, too.  So there is no public record of the misdeeds of the employer.  The arbitration-winning complainant cannot even tell other mistreated workers that their labor rights are being violated.

According to the reporters, the secret justice system of arbitration is actually part of the business model for enterprises such as Arise.  They can pay liability to a small percentage of workers while willfully exploiting most others.  Because of the NDAs, arbitration clauses, and, most importantly, class action waivers, a lawyer said in the program, she can fight this abuse only behind a veil of secrecy, one case at a time, amounting to thousands of cases, even though every case is winnable on precisely the same analysis.

There's a classic scene from Fight Club (1999) when the Narrator (Ed Norton) is telling an airliner seatmate about his car company's "formula" for issuing a recall only when it's cost effective, regardless of the cost of human life.  (Think GM ignition switch recall.)

"Which car company do you work for?" the seatmate asks.

The Narrator pauses, staring her in the eyes.  Then, nodding knowingly, he answers,

"A major one."

So what companies use these call centers to take advantage of the cheap and ill-begotten labor forces organized by companies such as Arise?

Major ones.  Ones you've talked to.

Have a magical day.

 

The stories are Amanda Aronczyk & Ariana Tobin, Call Center Call Out, Planet Money, Oct. 2, 2020; and Ken Armstrong, Justin Elliott, & Ariana Tobin, Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You, ProPublica, Oct. 2, 2020.

Ciao and shalom, it's Columbus Day

It was painful and offensive to me to see the Columbus statue in Baltimore ripped down and thrown into the harbor on the Fourth of July.

I appreciated Trevor Noah's Daily Show commentary on Columbus Day, aired last week, because he recognized the meaning of the holiday to the Italian-American community.

Noah excerpted a Vox video (story), from 2018, which gave a good concise summary of how the Columbus holiday came to be.

The video describes "the legend of Columbus," and it is a legend.  Italian-American immigrants, such as my grandparents, came to embrace a legendary Columbus who bore little resemblance to the real historical figure.  Which is not to say that the legend lacked real meaning for real people.  There was a time when Italian-Americans were a "non-white" minority in America, Noah acknowledged.  The community reached out to adopt, and partly to create, a galvanizing icon.  

I studied Columbus quite a bit as an undergrad majoring in Spanish-language literature during the quincentenary of "the Discovery."  As best as we can know Columbus, which is not much, given a paucity of surviving and conflicting accounts, the truth must be that he was complicated.  People are.  He had a multiplicity of motives, some more morally laudable than others.  And probably he wasn't the sweetest sort of guy.  Crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a potentially mutinous crew of adventurers in 1492 was a rugged business, if not recklessly suicidal.  But Columbus did not invent Euro-centrism, Caucasian supremacy, or slavery.  The cultural arrogances and inhumane institutions of the 15th century were certain to encircle the globe aboard every ship that departed the continent.

Columbus statue (Brent Moore CC BY 2.0)

So my family, arriving in America in the 20th century, embraced a legend.  It wasn't a terrible choice of legend.  The first Italians to populate Baltimore sailed from Genoa, which is where Columbus probably was from.  My grandparents, who also came to America by boat, from Tuscany, revered Columbus well before the dedication of his Little Italy statue in 1984.  Through their Italian-American organizations, they contributed to the creation of the statue, which was made of marble and crafted by an Italian sculptor.  President Reagan and the mayor of Baltimore dedicated the statue in Baltimore's Little Italy, where my family first lived after immigrating.  When I was a kid, I was taken to Little Italy when my family volunteered and participated in religious rites and Italian-American festivals.  Later, and for many years, my uncle played the character of Columbus in Baltimore's Columbus Day parade, which started and ended at the Columbus statue.  I remember him decked out in cartoonish royal robes, standing atop a float mock-up of the Santa Maria, waving to smiling people, of all colors, who lined the streets.  

He stopped when it became dangerous to be Columbus.  Dangerous to celebrate our history in America, however reimagined and romanticized.

I'm not opposed to taking down statues of Columbus.  I've advocated for "fallen monument" parks, as abound in former Soviet states, Hungary's being the most well known.  They're immeasurably valuable to teach history.  They proffer powerful evidence that, try as we might to be good and to do right, morality has proven a stubbornly mutable ambition in the human experience.  

But taking down Columbus in Little Italy should have been a decision made by a cross-section of community stakeholders, not by a mob.  An effort had been under way in the Italian-American community already to raise money to move Columbus elsewhere.  The mayor of Baltimore promised prosecution of the vandals on July 9, but I've found no report of any arrest or charge to date.  The Italian-Americans who contribute still, vitally, to Baltimore's identity deserve better.  They deserve respect, right alongside every other community that has built Baltimore as a vibrant and diverse city.

As Noah observed, American history is now populated by many Italian-Americans who don't need aggrandizing legends to demonstrate greatness.  It's not too late to create the commission that should have been and to start talking about how to honor immigrant history and the City of Baltimore at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and President Street.  I don't know who, or what, might, or should, stand in "Columbus" square.  I do believe that if we work at it, we can find, or make, an icon that my grandparents would have appreciated, and at the same time raise a testament to a new story.

Oops. We accidentally linked healthcare to your job.

mohamed_hassan (pixabay.com)

I stand with the rest of the world in awestruck horror of America's stubborn insistence that access to healthcare should be a function of both one's wealth and the largesse of one's employer.

Critics of the free market are quick to conclude that it has failed the American worker.  Economic libertarians are just as quick to tout the essentiality of free contract.  Before we make any decisions about the free labor market, maybe we should try it out.  A market in which a worker can't change jobs for fear of a recurring cancer or a bankrupting accident is not a free labor market.

For the NPR podcast Throughline, Lawrence Wu set out recently to explain how we arrived at the problem of employer-dependent healthcare.  The description of the episode, "The Everlasting Problem" (Oct. 1, 2020), reads:

Health insurance for millions of Americans is dependent on their jobs. But it's not like that everywhere. So, how did the U.S. end up with such a fragile system that leaves so many vulnerable or with no health insurance at all? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem.

For This American Life and Planet Money, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson also addressed this subject back in 2009.  Their bit ran only 11 minutes, but I have never forgotten the shocking fact that "four accidental steps led to enacting the very questionable system of employers paying for health care."

Arkansas defense of healthcare law invites Supreme Court justices to weigh in on federal preemption

The State of Arkansas defended a state healthcare law in the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday.

The state argued against federal ERISA and Medicare part D preemption of state regulation of pharmacy benefits managers, the companies that manage most Americans' prescription drug benefits.  The case affords an opportunity to see what newer justices have to say about preemption.

Preemption is a curious area of law.  Ostensibly statutory interpretation, it has overtones of federalism, as judges are called on to chart the scope of congressional intent as exercised in a power domain shared with state legislatures.  Confounding theories of interpretation, textualism is often insufficient to resolve preemption problems, because statutory schemes, such as the framework for employment-benefit regulation, may be left ambiguous as to what the scheme does not regulate, yet can be undermined by state laws with incompatible purposes.  As a result, preemption cases in the U.S. Supreme Court have been known to render splintered decisions and odd-bedfellow pairings of justices.  More than once, preemption precedent has been criticized as inconsistent and messy.

In an op-ed in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (ADG) in 2015, I wrote that Arkansas Act 900 raised serious and compelling questions of federalism.  I didn't pick sides—indeed, each side claims to be on the side of consumers—but I did describe the Arkansas Attorney General's dismissive response to challenge of the statute as glib.  The Eighth Circuit subsequently held the law preempted.  Forty-five states, D.C., and the Trump Administration have sided with the appellant AG, according to the ADG.

The case is Rutledge v. Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, No. 18-540 (argued U.S. Oct. 6, 2020).  Ronald Mann wrote an excellent analysis of the case, on the merits and implications, at SCOTUSblog.

Could 'inverse' First Amendment save us from ourselves?

Journalism professor Stephen Bates, J.D., University of Nevada Las Vegas, has published a fascinating article in The Atlantic on "the inverted First Amendment," as envisioned by philosopher William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) in the 1940s.

Hocking on National
Educational Television

As Bates explains, Hocking posited that a correct interpretation of the First Amendment command, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," incorporates the command that, sometimes, Congress must make laws that further the freedom of speech.

Post-war America was beset with the perception that mass media were out of control, contributing, as Bates describes, to "polarization, echo chambers, and provocateurs."  That's a good reminder for our times that since the Spanish-American War and subsequent, in part consequent, invention of modern journalism, it's never quite been the idyllic institution of our imaginations.  Hocking contributed a key study to the work of the U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press, on which he served.

The commission, otherwise known as the Hutchins Commission after chair and University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, produced a landmark 1947 report.  Concluding that the press is a vital institution in American democracy, the Hutchins Report could have been read as justification for government regulation in furtherance of social responsibility.  The report was read to bolster the controversial development of journalism professionalization and ethics codes.

Hocking's inverse, or positive, First Amendment would have compelled the government affirmatively to protect free speech and even to promote journalism.  This model of positive speech regulation is not unknown in American media law.  In the broadcast medium, because it was not afforded full First Amendment protection, the dubiously constitutional fairness doctrine was instigated by the Hutchins Commission.  In the same vein and medium, we still have, however increasingly irrelevant it is, the equal time rule.  There is some debate over whether there is not some minimal positive requirement in the First Amendment penumbra.  For example, due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments may be read to require that a court respond to a complainant's filing—a petition for redress of grievance—if only to dismiss it.

A positive First Amendment could have been the basis for a constitutional right of freedom of information, or access to information, in lieu of the later enacted and oft beleaguered Freedom of Information Act of 1967.  Some states and many countries, not to mention international human rights systems, declare a constitutional or human right of access to information, which may require government transparency and even the affirmative publication of information.

Pres. Roosevelt
proposes a Second
Bill of Rights in
January 1944.

More broadly, the notion of positive civil rights, as opposed to the mostly negative commands of the U.S. Bill of Rights, animates constitutional law in many other countries, especially in association with what are sometimes called "second" and "third generation," or "red" and "green" rights, guaranteeing socioeconomic interests, such as employment, food, housing, and a safe environment, as opposed to "first generation," "blue" rights of a political nature.  ("Generations" models of human rights have been criticized fairly as inadequate, if not patronizing, to describe socio-legal development, but the model is still usefully descriptive in some contexts.)  In fact, some positive, "second generation" rights would have been enshrined in U.S. law, had President Franklin Roosevelt's "Second Bill of Rights" gained traction.  The famously expansive constitution of South Africa well models the codification of socioeconomic rights, while the experience of the courts and the people of South Africa speaks simultaneously to the challenges of making the model work, and the arguable perils of constitutionalizing aspiration.

Prof. Bates

An inverted First Amendment could empower the government to combat misinformation, or "fake news," today in ways that the First Amendment as presently understood forbids.  However, Bates recognizes, such a positive First Amendment would have a dark side to contend with.  A strong interpretation of a positive First Amendment could justify government regulation that would suppress speech in the interest of furthering other speech, just as the fairness doctrine was said to have done.  Critiquing contemporary calls to regulate the internet, Paul Matzko for the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in 2019:

In one of her early newsletters, Ayn Rand excoriated the public interest standard as an excuse covering “the right of some men (those who, by some undefined criterion, are the public) to sacrifice the interests of other men (of those who, for unspecified reasons are not the public)” [1962].

Rand’s words were meant particularly for FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who, in what may be the only famous speech by an FCC commissioner, had described television as a “vast wasteland” and called for limits on the number of game shows, Westerns, and cartoons aired....

.... The more serious danger was the routine weaponization of the public interest standard to advance private or partisan interests. For example, during the early 1940s, the Roosevelt administration pushed for a ban on newspaper ownership of radio stations, ostensibly because of the public’s interest in preventing cross-media consolidation, but also to prevent anti-New Deal newspaper owners from having a radio platform from which to criticize the President’s policies. The FCC during Richard Nixon’s administration would use a similar rule to try and pressure the Washington Post into abandoning its investigation of the Watergate scandal. 

Sometimes the government does, itself, get into the business of journalism.  Yet recent rancor between President Trump and the Voice of America over what the President seems to perceive as partisan disloyalty shows that VOA's very credibility throughout the world depends on its statutorily mandated editorial independence.

The line between government action to protect a negative First Amendment, such as an artistic-value savings provision in indecency law, and government regulation to further a positive First Amendment, such as leveling the free speech marketplace with a must-publish or must-censor rule, is much finer in practice than in theory.  As Bates observes, "Hocking was a philosopher, not a lawyer."

The article is Stephen Bates, The Man Who Wanted to Save the First Amendment by Inverting It, The Atlantic, Oct. 7, 2020.

Texas indictment surfaces problem of elected prosecutors; First Amendment protects Netflix film

Actor, model, and District Attorney Lucas Babin
(Steve Stewart CC BY 4.0)

A Tyler County, Texas, grand jury has indicted Netflix for lewd depiction of TV girls in the French film, Cuties (2020).  Sadly, the indictment says more about Texas and American criminal justice dysfunction than about Netflix or contemporary media.  

The film plainly is protected by the First Amendment, rendering the indictment more political stunt than serious legal maneuver.  I wasn't going to watch Cuties, but now I feel like I should, so score one for Netflix, nil for District Attorney Lucas Babin.  Or, I should acknowledge, this might be good campaign fodder for an elected D.A. in East Texas, so it's win-win, minus transaction costs.  

Using the criminal justice system as a means to political ends is a deeply disturbing phenomenon; John Oliver featured the issue in 2018 commentary on Last Week.

Besides being an attorney, Babin is himself, or was, an actor and a model.  His father is dentist and U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.).

The September 23 indictment (image from Reason) relies on Texas Penal Code § 43.262, Possession or Promotion of Lewd Visual Material Depicting Child.  The statute reads:

(b) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly possesses, accesses with intent to view, or promotes visual material that:

     (1) depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of an unclothed, partially clothed, or clothed child who is younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created;

     (2) appeals to the prurient interest in sex;  and

     (3) has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The latter conjunctive element (3), lacking in serious value, is a typical savings provision meant to bring the law into conformity with the First Amendment, which certainly protects the film.

Promotional image of Cuties French release

Cuties, or Mignonnes in the French original, is a 96-minute drama about a Senegalese-French girl coming of age in contemporary Paris.  She struggles to reconcile her conservative Muslim upbringing with the popular culture of her schoolyard peers in the social-media era.

A Sundance 2020 award winner in dramatic world cinema, the film was written and directed by Parisian born Maïmouna Doucouré, herself of Senegalese heritage.  In a September 15 op-ed in The Washington Post (now behind pay wall), Doucouré wrote:

This film is my own story. All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French. As a result, people often ask me about the oppression of women in more traditional societies. And I always ask: But isn't the objectification of women's bodies in Western Europe and the United States another kind of oppression? When girls feel so judged at such a young age, how much freedom will they ever truly have in life?

The sexualization of the girls in the film is already familiar in the life experience of an 11- or 12-year-old, Doucouré further wrote. Still, a counselor was on set, and French child protection authorities signed off on the film.

Some of the flap over Cuties, and probably precipitating the Texas indictment, was Netflix's initial promotion of the film with an image of the child stars in sexually suggestive outfits and pose (see Bustle).  Netflix apologized publicly and to Doucouré and withdrew the portrayal.

Here is the trailer for Cuties.

The case is State v. Netflix, Inc., No. 13,731 (filed Tex. Dist. Ct. Tyler County Sept. 23, 2020).

Ted Lasso heads to UK, will coach AFC Richmond

From The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Oct. 6, 2020)

A new Apple TV+ show has Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudekis playing southern-drawl-wielding American football coach "Ted Lasso," as he is recruited to coach an English Premier League (PL) soccer squad.

Lasso's fictitious team in the Ted Lasso comedy series is "AFC Richmond," but Sudekis wore an authentic Manchester City FC (my team) hoodie for his interview with Trevor Noah on last night's Daily Show.

Financially regrettably, this show compels my wife and me to re-subscribe to Apple TV+.  We shelved the channel, pending new content, after we finished the highly gratifying For All Mankind (blog), and after I finished the sufficiently compelling if after all tritely pedantic Morning Show (both shows 2019, second seasons forthcoming).

Ted Lasso is a co-creation of Scrubs (2001-2010) creator Bill Lawrence, which scores dispositively in my playbook, though I don't think Lawrence has since re-created that Scrubs magic.  Ted Lasso is a spin-off, or spin-up, of NBC Sports promotional shorts imagining Lasso's appointment as head coach of Tottenhan Hotspur.

 

Incidentally, I'm a consistent critic of NBC's intellectual-property monopoly over PL broadcast rights in the United States.  NBC carves up the PL season so that one would have to subscribe to an impossible, and impossibly expensive, range of commonly owned services to follow a favorite team.  Americans would never tolerate such exploitation of American football broadcast rights.  NBC and the PL are greedily short-sighted, because inculcating loyalty to a single side is essential to sell British soccer to the American viewer in the long term.  It remains to be seen how UK regulators would react were NBC, since merging with Sky, to dare to try such such shenanigans there, where team loyalty is a multi-generational sacrament.  Other sports-loving countries won't have it.

Sports comedy is supremely watchable when it's well executed.  I thoroughly enjoyed Hank Azaria's Brockmire (2017-2020), though I have not watched baseball in many years.  And who can forget comedy-drama Sports Night (1998-2000)?  The West Wing (1999-2006) is too often credited for Aaron Sorkin's introduction of fast cuts and fast-paced dialog into small-screen canon, but it was on Sports Night that he pioneered the art.

The Sudekis interview appeared on The Daily Show just a day after Trevor Noah opened with some Premier League humor (cue to 1:13), noting Aston Villa's defeat of both Manchester United and Liverpool, the latter 7-2.  Noah is a Liverpool supporter.

Here is the trailer for Ted Lasso.

Tesla owner may keep 'FKGAS' license plate for now

⚠ Warning: Explicit language ahead.

Vehicle license plate cases occupy their own bizarre niche of First Amendment law.  Many a law student has frolicked in the casenote garden of free speech doctrine to ponder these curious shout-outs of individuality in the midst of their seeming imprimatur of state authority.

Are license plates government or private speech?  Can obscenity occur in a word?  Has indecency even been regulable since Mark Harmon said "deep shit" on Chicago Hope?  Is the license plate a limited public forum?  Is public forum doctrine still a thing?  Oh, the vanity!

In the latest installment of this immortal combat, the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction against the Rhode Island (my home state) Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) over its license plate approval standard: "connotations offensive to good taste and decency."

The plaintiff challenged the Rhode Island standard both facially and as applied under the First Amendment after his plate, "FKGAS," was recalled upon a citizen complaint to the DMV.  To the self-described "outdoorsy" plaintiff, according to his complaint in the litigation, the plate means "fake gas," appropriately adorning his electric Tesla.  (But see also court's footnote 10, below.)  Opining on plaintiff's motion to restrain and defendant's motion to dismiss, the court wholly rejected the DMV's effort to employ government speech doctrine, ruling instead that the plaintiff's First Amendment challenge held water under (non)public forum, overbreadth, and vagueness doctrines.

"The very essence of vanity plates is personal expression," the court wrote, citing classic precedents from "Fuck the Draft" on Cohen's courthouse jacket, to "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at the Olympic torch relay, to the recent "Slants" rock'n'roll trademark.  At the same time, the DMV might in the future muster the requisite "reasonable" and viewpoint-neutral support for its list of banned plates.

"Although [state law] authorized the DMV to promulgate rules and regulations giving further guidance on what is not allowed, there is no indication at this stage of the litigation that the DMV has exercised that opportunity," the court wrote. "Instead, its history of granting and rejecting vanity plate requests leaves the observant to try to glean some governing principles."

But wait; there's more.

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy wrote a delightfully playful introductory paragraph to the memorandum opinion, worth sharing here in full, with footnotes.

The American love affair with the automobile is well-known.[FN1] With some densely urban exceptions, we are a nation of drivers, not bus takers.[FN2] We drive when we could walk. For some, the automobile is a symbol of prestige,[FN3] for others a utilitarian way to get around.[FN4] For some, it is an instrument of grand adventure,[FN5] for others a tried-and-true way of putting a baby to sleep.[FN6] Sometimes it is a repository for personal goods;[FN7] for unfortunate others, sometimes it is a home.[FN8] For Sean Carroll it is, no doubt among other things, a vehicle for personal expression: this Rhode Island resident has a strong commitment to the environment and it is because of that attitude that he has become embroiled in this controversy with the Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles (“DMV”), the state arbiter of license plate alphanumeric assignments. Mr. Carroll, as a manifestation of his views, bought himself an electrically powered TESLA automobile and, in August of 2019, requested from the DMV[FN9] the license plate "FKGAS."[FN10] It was issued in the ordinary course of such requests, but several months later, after the DMV received a complaint, it recalled the plate on threat of a revocation of his vehicle registration were Mr. Carroll not to return it. Mr. Carroll chose to put his energy where his mouth is, and commenced this litigation, seeking to enjoin the DMV from recalling the plate and from revoking his registration.

1 Jeremy Hsu, Why America’s Love Affair with Cars is no Accident, Scientific American (May 24, 2012)....

2 According to ongoing studies by the United States Department of Transportation, “87% of daily trips take place in personal vehicles and 91% of people commuting to work use personal vehicles.” U.S. Dept. of Transportation, National Household Travel Survey Daily Travel Quick Facts, Bureau of Transportation Statistics ... (Aug. 19, 2020).

3 “A rise in tangible luxury offerings in vehicles, shifting consumer preferences from sedan to SUVs, and increasing disposable incomes of consumers have been propelling the demand for luxury cars around the world.” [Mordor Intelligence] (Aug. 19, 2020).

4 Whether an owned vehicle, a rental one, or a Zip-car, the automobile is the preferred method for getting around. DeBord, Matthew, “The car is about to transform society – for the second time” [Business Insider] (March 28, 2016)....

5 Hunter S. Thompson described the feeling behind his trip in the Red Shark in this way: “Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream [Rolling Stone] (1971).

6 “New parents drive an average of 1,322 miles per year to put their kids to sleep, according to a 2012 UK study. Dads averaged up to 1,827 miles in the study, and half of all the parents surveyed admitted to driving their kids around to get them to sleep at least once a week.” Ben Radding, Why Driving In A Car Puts Your Baby to Sleep, Fatherly (Aug. 26, 2019)....

7 See People v. Taylor, 614 N.E.2d 1272, 1277 (Ill.App. 1993) (for defendant, who was a passenger in her boyfriend’s car during a cross-country trip, “[t]he interior of the Volvo was in a sense their ‘home’ for the duration of the trip.”).

8 In one American city as recently as a year ago, 1,794 people were living out of their vehicles – an increase of 45% from two years before. Vivian Ho, The Californians forced to live in cars and RVs, The Guardian (Aug. 18 12:29 PM)....

9 Mr. Craddock has been sued in his official capacity as Administrator of the Division of Motor Vehicles. The defendant is referred to at various places in this memorandum as “Mr. Craddock,” “the DMV,” and “the Registry.”

10 Mr. Carroll alleges, and at this early stage of litigation the Registry does not dispute, that FKGAS was his daughter’s suggestion, intending a meaning of “fake gas” to refer to the electric car. He does not contest, however, that the plate could also be perceived as sending the message, “fuck gas” and he embraces that second meaning.

A compelling question arises as to what plate combinations have failed to qualify for R.I. DMV approval.  The FOIA advocates of the Government Attic endeavored to collect banned license plate lists from the states a few years back.  The fruits of their labors are collected online for your downloading gratification.  In response to Government Attic's request, the R.I. DMV responded: "The RI DMV does not have a list of prohibited plates, nor does it have instructions regarding screening of personalized plates," attorney Marcy Coleman wrote in 2012.

In the complaint in the instant case, in 2020, the plaintiff alleged:

14. On information and belief, the DMV maintains and makes use of a list of prohibited vanity plates, which includes courtesy plates that may convey political or social connotation but which it designates not for approval if requested, including: AIDS, CHRIST, CHUBBY, DIABLO, DOOBIE, DRUNK, GAY, GUN, HAJJI, HELL, HOOSIER, JESUS, JOCKY, LESBIAN, REDNECK, SLOB, TROLL, and YANKEE, among others.

15. On information and belief, the same list also purports to ban various common words such as APPLE, BANANA, HOOT, METER, and YELLOW, among others.

16. On information and belief, Defendant has on occasion, without any additional standards, approved courtesy plates with words that appear on its list of prohibited plates, including APPLE, CHRIST, TROLL, YANKEE, and YELLOW. 

17. On information and belief, the DMV has specifically denied requests for other special courtesy plates which arguably convey political or social connotation, including: BONG, HOOKAH, NYSKS, and REDNCK, among others. Conversely, on information and belief, the DMV has approved these special courtesy plates: DOGDOO, FACIAL, FATTY, FCCING, FKNFST, FKS, FLSHR8, FRELOV, FRIAR, FUBAR, HEAVEN, GUNS, JEWISH, NEAT, OLDFRT, PISTL, REDNEC, REDNEK, REDNK, SABER, SKCK, SNAFU, and TIPSY, among others.

18. In other words, Defendant bans as “offensive to good taste and decency” the license plate CHUBBY but not FATTY; DRUNK but not TIPSY; HAJJI and HELL, but not HEAVEN or JEWISH; GUN but not GUNS or PISTL or SABER; HOOSIER but not FRIAR; REDNECK, but not REDNEK, REDNK OR REDNEC; and SLOB but not NEAT.

19. Defendant’s attempt to ban Plaintiff’s FKGAS plate as offensive stands in contrast to his allowance of such plates as FCCING, FKNFST, FKS, FUBAR, SKCK, and SNAFU, as well as such plates as DOGDOO, FACIAL, and OLDFRT.

20. On information and belief, Defendant has issued standard license plates to car owners that contained the letters FK or FU followed by three numbers.

The case is Carroll v. Craddock, No. 1:20-cv-00126-MSM-LDA (D.R.I. Oct. 2, 2020).  The R.I. ACLU is representing plaintiff Sean M. Carroll.  Commissioned in the judiciary just one year ago, Judge McElroy has the distinction of being nominated to the bench by both President Obama, in 2015, when her nomination was left formally incomplete in the Senate, and President Trump, in 2018 and 2019.  With a B.A. from Providence College and J.D. from Suffolk Law, she worked previously as a public defender and in private practice in Providence, Rhode Island.

U.S. White Paper on 'Schrems II': Emperor still clothed

A new U.S. white paper on data protection means favorably to supplement the record on U.S. surveillance practices that, in part, fueled the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision in "Schrems II," in July, rejecting the adequacy of the Privacy Shield Framework to secure EU-to-US data transfers.

From the U.S. Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the white paper suggests that the ECJ ruling was interim in nature, pending investigation of U.S. national security practices to better understand whether they comport with EU General Data Protection Regulation norms, such as data minimization, which means collecting only data necessary to the legitimate purpose at hand.  The paper states:

A wide range of information about privacy protections in current U.S. law and practice relating to government access to data for national security purposes is publicly available.  The United States government has prepared this White Paper to provide a detailed discussion of that information, focusing in particular on the issues that appear to have concerned the ECJ in Schrems II, for consideration by companies transferring personal data from the EU to the United States. The White Paper provides an up-to-date and contextualized discussion of this complex area of U.S. law and practice, as well as citations to source documents providing additional relevant information. It also provides some initial observations concerning the relevance of this area of U.S. law and practice that may bear on many companies’ analyses. The White Paper is not intended to provide companies guidance about EU law or what positions to take before European courts or regulators. 

Armed with this additional information, then, the message to the private sector seems to be, Keep Calm and Carry On, using the very same "standard contractual clauses" (SCCs) that the ECJ invalidated.  Yet if the information featured in the white paper has been publicly available, why assume that the ECJ was ill informed?  (Read more about SCC revisions under way, and their likely shortcomings, at IAPP.)

Unfortunately for the U.S. position, the ECJ opinion was not, to my reading, in any way temporary, or malleable, pending further development of the record.  The white paper comes off as another installment in the now quarter-century-old U.S. policy that the emperor is fully clothed.

I hope this white paper is only a stop-gap.  As I said in a Boston Bar CLE recently, no privacy bill now pending in Congress will bridge the divide between the continents on the subject of U.S. security surveillance.  A political negotiation, which might involve some give from the American side at least in transparency, seems now to be our only way forward.

The white paper is Information on U.S. Privacy Safeguards Relevant to SCCs and Other EU Legal Bases for EU-U.S. Data Transfers after Schrems II (Sept. 2020).

'Hidden Brain' tackles Ford Pinto product liability, hindsight bias, inevitable accident

Classic yellow Ford Pinto
(Michael Dorausch CC BY-SA 2.0)

In a two-for-one bonus for torts teachers, Shankar Vedantam at National Public Radio analyzed the Ford Pinto product liability case to the end of understanding hindsight bias and inevitable accident in his podcast, Hidden Brain.  The item includes an interview with Denny Giola, a Ford decision-maker who raised concerns about the Pinto, but at a crucial decision point, voted against recall.

The story is Shankar Vedantam, Cat Schuknecht, Tara Boyle, Rhaina Cohen, & Parth Shah, The Halo Effect: Why It's So Difficult To Understand The Past, Hidden Brain, Sept. 21, 2020.  A real-life Pinto anchors a featured case exhibit at the American Museum of Tort Law.