By Joseph Schuman

American farmers challenge new child-labor laws

12/5/11

A potential legal fight is brewing over proposed labor restrictions for children on farms. And for Summary Judgment's money, there's a small culture war in there as well.

The U.S. Labor Department says it is trying to assure children's safety in a perilous industry by barring farm hands younger than 16 years from operating combines and other power equipment, the Wall Street Journal reports. "Children are banned from working in coal mines, construction and even at the meat slicer in a deli," U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a Los Angeles Democrat, tells the Journal. Dangerous farm work "should be no different." The rate of childhood injuries on farms has plummeted over the past decade, but farming still suffers a fatality rate for young workers that is second only to mining, and the rate is almost six-times worse than the average for all industries.

But farmers say urban-living lawmakers and government officials don't know what they're talking about. "Are we going to outlaw children helping mom bake cookies in the kitchen because they might get their hand in the blender?" farmer Scott Neufeld, of Major County, Oklahoma says. Neufeld says that when he was just 14, he was working 10-hour days driving a combine. Other farms say the new rules will hurt their families by keeping kids from driving tractors or riding horses to round up cattle on ranches.

The Labor Department says the new rules would apply only to youngsters who work at farms not owned and operated by their parents, but it would still affect the many teens who work for farms that don't belong to their immediate family. Neufeld says that he'd be kept from hiring kids to move hay or tow his grain carts during harvest. You can also hear an echo of the legal fight over immigration laws in this debate: Washington state cherry farmer Lorinda Carlson defends her use of 13-year-olds and 15-year-olds to load cherries as a way to employ kids for tasks most adults don't want to do. As a 9-year-old, she adds, picking cherries didn't hurt her, though she once fell out of a tree.

"I felt abused at the time," she tells the Journal, "but I learned a good work ethic."

Junior associates' bonuses may be safer than they think

12/5/11

All you junior associates out there losing sleep over end-of-the-year bonuses, take a deep breath and relax. There's been a lot of talk about penny-pinching since Cravath, Swain & Moore announced its relatively miserly bonus policy last month, and some other big New York firms followed. But Bruce MacEwen, a former in-house lawyer on Wall Street who now runs the Adam Smith consulting group, tells the ABA Journal that despite the challenging economy, firms can't afford NOT to pay respectable bonuses.

"I think for firms to, heaven forfend, eliminate bonuses or substantially cut them back would be seen by the market as a sign of weakness," MacEwen says in reference to most Wall Street firms. "Even a $10,000 bonus would be viewed as the functional equivalent of zero."

The reason, he says, is that clients are watching. "Clients are probably the constituency with the least voice in all of this, or the voice that's least listened to in any event, but the people that the firms are playing to, their audience, if you will are primarily lateral associates," MacEwen says. "Lateral associates want to be attracted to firms that seem to be on top of the game, on top of the market." What's more, there is evidence that legal spending is growing both internally and on outside counsel, according to this Summary Judgments look at a survey of in-house lawyers.

Of course, it isn't that managing partners haven't played with the idea of trimming bonuses, and a bunch of firm leader even told MacEwen off the record that big bonuses in this environment are "insane." But no one has the guts to go first. "We are sheep as an industry, and it's extremely hard for any firm to depart from the pack, even if it's the most sensible business thing to do," MacEwen says. "So from a funny perspective, I find the whole concept of associate bonuses confirmation that law firms are not yet run like businesses."

Study shows white convicts got pardons much more than minorities

12/5/11

Statistics rarely tell a whole story, but they can paint in bold relief a truth that can't be ignored. Take the findings of ProPublica's investigation into the racial disparities of presidential pardons over the past decade.

Though the system aims to be fair, white convicts were nearly four times as likely to receive pardons than minority petitioners, especially if they were black. That held true even when the type of crime, sentences and other factors were taken into account, according to ProPublica, which pored over previously unreleased records and related data for its findings. During his presidency, George W. Bush used his constitutional right to pardon or decline pardons to criminals in 1,918 cases, mostly for nonviolent drug crimes or financial misdeeds.

Of all those candidates, 189 received pardons, and all but 13 of them were white. Seven black criminals and four Hispanic criminals were pardoned, while one Asian and one Native American got the restoration of their full citizen rights that a pardon brings.

"I'm just astounded by those numbers," Roger Adams, head of the Justice Department's pardons office from 1998 to 2008, tells ProPublica, adding that he could think of no department practice that would have skewed the results. "I can recall several African Americans getting pardons." Following a pardon scandal at the end of the Clinton administration, Bush said soon after he took office that the White House would mostly rely on the pardon recommendations of career attorneys at the Office of the Pardon Attorney. In nearly every case, Bush followed the recommendation of the office, and Obama has adhered to the policy.

During this time, the Office of the Pardon Attorney was allowed to consider subjective criteria, including "attitude," marital status, financial stability, a candidate's candor and other factors that defy statistical measurement. The Justice Department pointed this out in a statement issued to ProPublica on Friday. "Nonetheless, we take the concerns seriously," the DOJ said. "We will continue to evaluate the statistical analysis and, of course, are always working to improve the clemency process and ensure that every applicant gets a fair, merit-based evaluation."

A Google-EU sit-down looms amid uncertainty for both sides

12/5/11

Google's European lawyers must be working overtime right now ahead of a planned meeting this week between Eric Schmidt, chairman of the uber-Internet giant, and European Union Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia. The reason is the Commission could present Schmidt with a list of concerns about Google's business practices -- or plans for an actual antitrust complaint.

The Financial Times reports that the Commission's antitrust team in Brussels is narrowing its focus to specific practices, such as how Google's search engine demotes the ranking of rival websites while promoting its own. Google denies any deliberate anti-rival bias is at play in the rankings. But the FT says this marks a turning point in the nearly two-year-old inquiry. Speaking to reporters last week, Almunia suggested the meeting with Schmidt wouldn't be a showdown, but rather a detailed "exchange of views."

That's probably not going to make the get-together any easier for Schmidt and his legal posse. In the past as Microsoft so infamously learned the targets of European antitrust litigation usually don't learn details of the case against them until a formal case is laid out. And by that point, they're faced with the choice of settling, or going to the mattresses to fight demanding financial sanctions.

What better way to follow laundered money that launder it yourself?

12/5/11

The Drug Enforcement Administration is one of the U.S. government's lead bloodhounds in the global hunt for laundered money. The DEA is also, it turns out, a major facilitator of money laundering as part of a secret effort to track the funds of Mexican narcotraffickers.

The idea is for the good guys to follow the money -- which in this case, means for the feds to move the money themselves to destinations handpicked by criminals. Current and former law enforcement officials tell the New York Times that undercover DEA agents have been shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit cash across borders to accounts chosen by members of drug cartels or to shell accounts set up the DEA.

While the agency has had such operations in other countries for years, the approach in neighboring Mexico is fairly new and has raised some delicate diplomatic concerns, the Times points out. the practice also evokes past government operations that blurred the line between surveillance and abetting crime that had disastrous results.

It's impossible to read the Times story without wondering how it will echo this week in Washington, where congressional critics in recent months pounced on a similar cross-border effort that went bad. House Republicans just last week were still railing against the now notorious Fast and Furious operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - which allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico in a bid to stalk gun trafficking, but lost track of the guns. Will they jump on the facilitated money laundering as well?

One former DEA official acknowledges that during the operation, his rule "was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the DEA could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths." Current DEA officials refused to go on the record. But all the former officials who spoke to the paper rejected comparisons between Fast and Furious and the money laundering. That's partly because money poses less of a public threat than guns, but also because money can more easily be traced to the criminal leaders.

"These are not the people whose faces are known on the street," ex-undercover agent and author Robert Mazur tells the Times. "They are super-insulated. And the only way to get to them is to follow their money."

Summary Judgments for Dec. 2

Summary Judgments for Dec. 1

Summary Judgments for Nov. 30

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