Why riparianism persists in California
Riparian lands are irrigated naturally by the waters percolating through the soil and dissolving its fertilizing properties. This is sufficiently apparent from the consequences which ordinarily follow from a continual cessation of the flow of a stream.
If, in accordance with the law, such lands may be deprived of the natural irrigation without compensation to the owners, we must so hold; but we fail to discover the principles of “public policy” which are of themselves of paramount authority and demand that the law shall be so declared.
In our opinion, it does not require a prophetic vision to anticipate that the adoption of the rule, so called, of “appropriation” would result in time in a monopoly of all the waters of the state by comparatively few individuals, or combinations of individuals controlling aggregated capital, who could either apply the water to purposes useful to themselves, or sell it to those from whom they had taken it away, as well as to others.
Whether the fact that the power of fixing rates would be in the supervisors, etc., would be a sufficient guaranty against over-charges would remain to be tested by experience. Whatever the rule laid down, a monopoly or concentration of the waters in a few hands may occur in the future. But surely it is not requiring too much to demand that the owners of lands shall be compensated for the natural advantages of which they are to be deprived.
–Lux v Hagin, the foundational California water law case (paragraphs added; emphasis original).
Hunter v Hamilton County
Interesting election law case.
Ohio law prohibits counting provisional ballots which are cast in the wrong precinct, even if they are cast in the wrong precinct as a result of poll worker error.
Harsh, but ok.
Despite this law, the Secretary of State entered into a consent decree requiring that the board of election count miscast votes by provisional voters (a) using their SSN as ID (b) which are miscast as a result of pollworker error.
The losing candidate in a race for county judge sued: this violates equal protection, because similarly situated provisional ballots miscast as a result of pollworker error are being treated differently based on the arbitrary criteria of whether or not they fall under the consent decree.
This issue has not yet been decided, but the Sixth Circuit said there is a likely enough chance of victory that the injunction against the certification of the election should stand while the underlying issue is resolved.
The Hamilton County Board of Elections is appealing. It’s a bit odd to appeal to the Supreme Court an order sustaining a preliminary injunction pending resolution of the underlying issue, but in an election case it makes sense – every day which passes is another day the judicial office isn’t filled.
That said, I would be astonished if the Supreme Court hears the case.
An absurd solution to an election law problem
The Board thus began investigating the disputed ballots and subpoenaed over four-hundred poll workers. R.38-7 (E-mail correspondence at 2). At Board meetings held on December 16 and 17, the Board interviewed over seventy poll workers. R.38-2 (Dec. 16, 2010 Board Meeting Tr.); R.38-3 (Dec. 17, 2010 Board Meeting Tr.).
However, on December 20, the Board contacted the Secretary of State and indicated that it still needed to issue approximately 1500 subpoenas to poll workers. R.38-7 (E-mail correspondence at 2). The Board asked that the Secretary permit it to stop interviewing the poll workers and instead send questionnaires to the poll workers. Id. The Secretary agreed. Id. at 1. After sending out questionnaires to the remaining poll workers, the Board received back 830 completed questionnaires. R.38-4 (Dec. 28, 2010 Board Meeting Tr. at 69).
–Hunter v Hamilton County, US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, 2011
The underlying problem is that Ohio law only allows out-of-precinct provisional ballots to be counted if they were cast out-of-precinct as a result of pollworker error. So, to establish the presence or absence of pollworker error, the district court decided that it should subpoeana all of the poll workers in precincts with out-of-precinct provisional ballots, and interrogate them about the circumstances of the casting of each.
This is just not going to work. On the average election day that I’ve worked, I’ve processed between two and three dozen provisional ballots. If you ask me the next day, I might remember details about some of them; if you ask me five, six weeks later, I’m going to stare at you blankly and tell you that, beyond what I wrote down at the time, I remember nothing.
I understand that the presence or absence of pollworker error may be indeterminable absent something like this. But this process – wherein hundreds of pollworkers may be subpoeaned – doesn’t render the question answerable; it just consumes the time of the pollworkers and the courts.
A better solution would be to say that out-of-precinct provisional votes should be counted for those races for which the provisional voter had the right to vote, and not for others.
The essence of legal libertarianism
That the interests of the public should receive a more favorable consideration than those of any individual, or that the legal rights of the humblest person in the state should be sacrificed to the weal of the many, is a doctrine which it is to be hoped will never receive sanction from the tribunals of this country. The public is in nothing more interested than in scrupulously protecting each individual citizen in every right guaranteed to him by the law, and in sacrificing none, not even the most trivial, to further its own interests.
–Vansickle v. Haines, in the mid-19th century.
Apparently, Florida abolished parole in 1983, and nobody sentenced since then is eligible for parole. This played a major role in this year’s Supreme Court decision throwing out life-without-parole sentences for juveniles.
In an average year, federal, state, and local governments make more than 15 million arrests and obtain around 1 million felony convictions and several million additional misdemeanor convictions.
–Sentencing Law & Policy
That’s 5% of the country arrested each year, with 1/3 of 1% receiving felony convictions.
Seattle Box I
Seattle Box had a patent on a method of bundling pipes for shipment which specified that a spacer used in the bundling process must have a height “greater than the diameter of the pipe”. It was issued on July 11, 1978.
They got it reissued on August 19, 1980, specifying that the spacer’s height must be “substantially equal to or greater than the thickness of the tier of pipe length.”
According to the Federal Circuit, the reissue meant that Seattle Box could not sue Industrial Crating & Packing for infringement which occurred before August 19, 1980. The reissued patent only extends back to the date of the original patent to the extent that claims are identical, and “greater than the diameter” is not identical to “substantially equal to or greater than [the diameter]“.
This seems … peculiar … to me.
Particularly because the court proceeded to say that: had Industrial Crating & Packing been infringing the original patent in 1979, the reissuance without an identical claim meant that it could no longer be prosecuted for continuing to do what it had been doing in 1979; it had acquired a right which could not be voided by the reissued patent.
WTF? I mean, I suppose this serves to discourage attempts to get patents reissued, which might be an independent good, but I really doubt it is what Congress intended. It seems to create a situation wherein willful, deliberate infringement turns into a right of use simply because the owner discovered they made a mistake and sought to correct it.
[x 'comprising' y, z, a] indicates that y, z, a is an open set which may contain elements not listed. meanwhile [x 'consisting of' y, z, a] indicates that y z a is a closed, exhaustive set.
wtf?
This is somewhat outrageous:
An unemployed man in Philadelphia got angry at Sen. Bunning after the Senator complained about a debate on unemployment benefits preventing him from seeing a Kentucky basketball game.
So he wrote several angry emails, in which he claimed to live in Kentucky.
Someone referred the emails to the FBI (which suggests that the Huffington Post’s article downplays the content of the email – I assume that sane political staffers wouldn’t refer email to the FBI unless it were truly obnoxious or threatening).
The FBI obtained an indictment: it’s a felony under US law to use a telecommunications devise with the intent to annoy, threaten, and harass the recipient, without disclosing your identity.
So: anonymous angry emails to Congressmen are illegal.
How this comports with the first amendment I’m not sure – and we won’t find out in this case, as the man is pleading guilty.
According to a memorandum opinion handed down by the US District Court for DC today (and I have no reason to doubt it), the Balanced Budget Downpayment Act of 1996 prohibits the use of federal funds for research in which a human embroy (or embryos) are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero.
Seems a little bit off-topic for such an act, doesn’t it?
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