On this, the communists and paleo-conservatives can agree:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. Preamble, The Communist Manifesto
(Of course, Marx had no love for ancien regime, while the conservatives did.)
You would think so, but Congress has occasionally done things like this, like pass the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, both of which impose restrictions on government access to information beyond what the Courts at the time required under the Fourth Amendment.
One concerning development is how much the Democratic Party, which used to be a major proponent of restrictions on government searches, has cozied up to the defense and intelligence establishments since 2016 because of a shared interest in stopping populist right-wing movements that also happen to be anti-interventionist. They're also less keen on digital rights these days because they want to censor right-wingers online.
>Because that's what's really happening here. Once you sell your data to Facebook, Twitter, etc, it's no longer "in your house." If you granted third parties license to collect and sell your data under terms of service, then that data no longer belongs to you, and you agreed to that.
That's the general thrust of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and is called the "third-party doctrine". But the Carpenter decision in 2018 is a big exception to that, and it's likely that more are to come.
It depends. If someone breaks into your house with government encouragement, that’s a Fourth Amendment violation. If he breaks into your house because he’s a burglar, and then happens upon something he knows the government would want, and then sells that information to the government, it’s not a Fourth Amendment violation.
I could respond with something equally condescending and sarcastic like “You Europeans should try not legislating yourselves into laughably low salaries,” but that would be rude and counterproductive.
Can you find a source saying that Georgia Pacific or any other company was able to use this process to shield the parent company from liability? I’m not finding anything to that effect. Everything I see complains about them using the process to improperly consolidate the cases.
>Georgia Pacific did this. Pledged $1B, ended up funding $175M. The entity went bankrupt three months later with 62,000 claims fighting over those scraps for mesothelioma (i.e. an average claimant getting less than $3,000 - before legal costs).
A source would be helpful here too. Is it because the judge ultimately only found them liable for a total of $175M? Or did the judge find them liable for more but was only able to find $175M in actual money to pay out with?
Of course it would benefit J&J too. You get to consolidate your cases in one court. You get to be in federal court, which is by conventional wisdom believed to be more defendant-friendly. You get to achieve legal certainty in a shorter period of time. It also benefits all the plaintiffs who weren't early to the party, since they are guaranteed a slice of the pie (if they win), instead of the first few successful plaintiffs eating the whole thing.
That's not true. Judges can't just take cases from different districts and different states, different court systems altogether, and consolidate them. Plaintiffs can choose to file a class action, but you can't force them into one. If all the cases are in federal court, you can kind of consolidate into an MDL (multi-district litigation), but that just consolidates certain pre-trial procedures. Unless they settle, the cases still get sent back out to the districts they came from for resolution by the original judges and separate juries.
>Second, it is a bit rich that this legal maneuver is framed at "protecting claimants" when it blocks those claimants from pursuing cases that maximizes their damages.
This is purposefully obtuse. If a few courts award 5 plaintiffs the entire pot of gold, then there's nothing left for all the other claimants. And of course it's in J&J's interest to consolidate the cases. It's also in the plaintiffs' interests, especially those who weren't first.
How would you like it if you were a plaintiff suffering severe lifelong emotional distress but the jury saw that the medical bills were only $1000? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
No, wrong. That's not what happened and it's not what the article says. The court didn't like the idea of them using the bankruptcy system to consolidate the cases.
This is the top-voted comment but as many of the other replies have pointed out, it's totally wrong outrage-bait. J&J, the parent company, is still ultimately liable for the full amount. The bankruptcy process just allows the courts to manage all of the claims together under the authority of one judge, instead of having different courts in every state issue incompatible damages awards in a race to judgment.
If you weren't allowed to see medical bills and such, then you were probably tasked with determining other kinds of damages (e.g. emotional distress) that are totally unrelated to those.
It's just recognition by a UN body. If you'll indulge some cynicism, all it really means is that a bunch of people spent your tax money (which funds the UN through member-state contributions) to sit around (and expense a bunch of pointless travel) pontificating on what's worthy of recognition.
I'm not confused. But you are introducing unnecessary concepts here. A firm needs to make some profit in the long run, whatever you want to call it, to be able to sustain investment. If there's too many firms in the market, that can be undermined. That's why you don't see five dry cleaners right next to each other in the same strip mall.
And your second paragraph fails to address my point too. I acknowledged that in the long run, the health of the industry could be restored by some of the firms failing. But that can take way too long, and in the meantime, all of them are capital-starved and unable to invest in improving their businesses.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. Preamble, The Communist Manifesto
(Of course, Marx had no love for ancien regime, while the conservatives did.)