Photo Credit: Souvik Banerjee, Unsplash.com Consider an accountant who lies about her personal internet use during work hours, or a manager who conceals a forbidden relationship with a subordinate, or a social worker who conceals a DUI record. . . . If there is no difference between the honest employee and dishonest employee in terms of performance or pay – that is, if the employer receives the benefit of its bargain – criminalizing the lies of a dishonest employee would create an intangible right to honest services in just the way McNally renounces. And because deceits of the sort describe ..read more

Photo Credit: Christopher Carson, Unsplash.com Companies that choose to sell products in various States must normally comply with the laws of those various States. Assuredly, under this Court’s dormant Commerce Clause decisions, no State may use its laws to discriminate purposefully against out-of-state economic interests. But the pork producers do not suggest that California’s law offends this principle. Instead, they invite us to fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of States to regulate goods sold within their borders. We decline that invitation ..read more

Photo Credit: Mediamodifier, Unsplash.com “In sum, while some of the training attendees may have been outraged or offended by Dodge’s political expression, no evidence of actual or tangible disruption to school operations has been presented. Political speech is the quintessential example of protected speech, and it is inherently controversial. That some may not like the political message being conveyed is par for the course and cannot itself be a basis for finding disruption of a kind that outweighs the speaker’s First Amendment rights.” Judge Danielle Forrest, Dodge v. Evergreen School Dis ..read more

Photo Credit: Tim Mossholder, Unsplash.com “It turns out that “and” has more meanings than one might suppose. By way of background, grammatical rules are an archetype of rules of conduct with which we often comply without conscious awareness of doing so. Small children comply with any number of grammatical rules without awareness even of their existence; and adults comply with rules concerning the pluperfect and subjunctive tenses, for example, without consciously knowing what those rules are. We likewise understand language according to these same grammatical rules, again often without awa ..read more

Photo Credit: Melanie @tuinfosalid.com, Unsplash.com This week’s newsletter is on its way tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, it has been quite a while since I published any more in-depth case analysis. So I wanted to share an article my co-authors, Colin Callahan and Marco Attisano, and I published in this month’s issue of the NACDL’s Champion Magazine. An image of the first page is below, and a copy of the for article article is available for download if you click the link. Defending Hippocrates Nacdl Champion 2022 For Website 3.36MB ∙ PDF File Download Download This article is po ..read more