The Onion has an interesting take one industry that can be expected to lobby hard for their right to spam.
(Anyone want to start a pool on how long it takes a Chinese newspaper to report that as true?)
Day: July 18, 2002
Is It Constitutional to Make Fliers Identify Themselves?
EFF co-founder John Gilmore is filing a lawsuit attempting to overturn regulations requiring people to show their identification at airports. Gilmore says such requirements are unconstitutional.
It is difficult to imagine any scenario in which a court does not simply point to Sept. 11 and rule that requiring identification or air travelers is well within the government’s powers to ensure public health and safety.
In fact, I suspect the judge or judges who ruled in favor of Gilmore’s contention would likely face impeachment hearings in the Senate.
Finally, I don’t think Gilmore will find much support for his argument that allowing terrorist acts to occur might be economically efficient,
In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. (http://www.bts.gov/publications/airactstats2000/tables/AirportTable1.htm) If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.
Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life *every year* as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.
Inconveniencing hundreds of millions of innocents, trying to catch dozens, or save thousands, RAISES the costs to society, rather than lowering them. Another way to think about it is that if we did away with the increased “security” and went back to letting people catch planes on 30 minutes’ notice, we would gain back as much time every year as was taken from our citizens in the 9/11 attacks.
This is a foolish argument. It makes no sense at all to compare years spent waiting in line with years spent dead.
Such a cost benefit analysis makes sense if we’re comparing the same unit. For example, a regulation to require infants to have their own seat on an airplane might save the lives of a few infants who are belted in properly when an airplane crashes, but it might cause even more infants to die in automobile accidents when their parents decided not to fly because it’s too expensive to buy another seat for the infant. And it might be useful to compare the benefits of different regulations that impact waiting times at airports.
But it makes no sense at all to compare hours spent waiting to hours spent being dead. Almost everybody — except Gilmore apparently — would prefer to spend two hours waiting in line than spend two hours being dead.
Source:
Does Michigan’s Sexual Harassment Law Violate the First Amendment?
Wayne State University Law School professor Kingsley Browne wrote an op-ed in the Detroit News earlier this month arguing that Michigan’s sexual harassment statute violates the First Amendment. He was specifically referring to Burns v. City of Detroit in which a woman won a $1 million judgment against the City of Detroit for the insulting and vulgar speech directed at her by co-workers. But, according to Browne, both the verdict and the statute are in violation of Constitutional protections of free speech.
A major problem with the Burns v. City of Detroit case, according to Browne, is that the jury heard testimony about both constitutionally protected speech and speech that was not constitutionally protected. But the jury was not informed that it could only decide on liability for speech that was not constitutionally protected.
Moreover, so far rulings on sexual harassment have engaged in obvious viewpoint discrimination. Browne writes,
Judicial scrutiny is at its highest when the government restricts speech based upon the viewpoint expressed, which is precisely what the harassment law does. Progressive statements about women are fine; Neanderthal statements are not. Statements praising women as a group raise no issue; statements critical of women do.
As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which covers Michigan, has said, harassment law requires “that an employer take prompt action to prevent . . . bigots from expressing their opinions in a way that abuses or offends their co-workers.” This is classic viewpoint regulating, which is almost always impermissible.
But the truly bizarre nature of sexual harassment statutes comes in with the whole idea of a “hostile environment.” As Browne notes, the hostile environment theory makes it all but impossible for individuals to tell whether or not their speech will break the law. Browne writes,
The vagueness of the harassment statute is made worse by the “totality of the circumstances” standard. A hostile environment can be created by a collection of different speech by different speakers even though no single statement by itself would violate the law.
One cannot know, therefore, whether a hostile environment exists without knowing the entire array of speech that will be challenged. Speakers are supposed to be given an advance warning of what can be said and what cannot, but the hostile environment standard is always assessed after the fact.
So how to fix sexual harassment statutes? Simple, says Browne — require that plaintiffs prove intent. Browne notes that a Michigan anti-stalking law was upheld because rather than simply describing behaviors that qualified as stalking, it also required that plaintiffs show the defendant engaged in “willful” conduct to harass the alleged victim. Such a similar standard should also be incorporated into sexual harassment statutes.
Source:
Harassment law chills free speech. Kingsley Browne, The Detroit News, July 9, 2002.
Outrage Over Idaho’s Topless Car Wash
The Associated Press ran a story earlier this month about efforts by civic and community leaders in the Moscow, Idaho, to shut down a topless car wash.
The controversy actually started several years ago with another group of women who decided to walk bare-chested through downtown Moscow. They were arrested, but in the ensuing legal fight Moscow’s ordinance that banned topless women but allowed topless men was ruled unconstitutionally vague.
Daisy Mace and her friends, including several men, are apparently the first to try to take commercial advantage of the lack of a specific statute. Their topless car wash operates irregularly and patrons are asked only for donations, but the car wash is lucrative enough to anger both civic leaders as well as competing car washes who complain that the topless attraction is stealing their business.
The Associated Press quoted local car wash owner Tony Heath complaining that he’s lost more than $100/day in business since the topless car wash folks set up shop, and that the whole enterprise is unfair because, “Guys can’t go around topless and make money.”
The car washers have been evicted from their apartment at least twice for holding car washes there, but so far efforts to craft an ordinance that would let the city squash the topless car washers have bogged down into debates over just how much of the breast — whether male or female — should be covered up. The current proposal would require both men and women to have at least a thin strip of cloth to cover up the nipples.
Source:
Topless car wash raises money and tempers in Idaho. Nicholas K. Geranios, Associated Press, July 11, 2002.