Lawyers ready to pounce if companies forget IoT privacy

Jim Dempsey quoted by Bloomberg BNA, Feb. 17, 2017

“We live in an always-on world, of ubiquitous data collection through a variety of services, the most powerful of which is a mobile phone,” Dempsey said. Consumers tend to ignore risks to gain perceived value of a new technology in a kind of “desensitization” of privacy and security risks that go along with IoT technology, he said. The “technology is so compelling, so convenient and so easy to use that most people can’t and don’t want and shouldn’t have to resist it,” he said.

Senate confirms Scott Pruitt as EPA chief despite concerns

Daniel Farber interviewed by KTVU Fox 2 News, Feb. 17, 2017

“Some of those lawsuits are still out there so he’s going to be in the position of supposedly leading the agency in defending or responding to lawsuits he himself was involved in,” Farber said. Farber says as head of the EPA, Pruitt won’t be able to change the laws. “In the area of regulation, he’s very much subject to oversight by the courts,” Farber said, noting there are other ways, however, that Pruitt can scale back the EPA’s reach.

Arizona unveils new death penalty plan: bring your own lethal injection drugs

Megan McCracken quoted by The Guardian, Feb. 15, 2017

Megan McCracken, a lethal injection expert at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said the clause is “unprecedented, wholly novel and frankly absurd. A prisoner or a prisoner’s lawyer simply cannot obtain these drugs legally, or legally transfer them to the department of corrections, so it’s hard to fathom what the Arizona department was thinking in including this nonsensical provision as part of its execution protocol.”

Encouraging companies to go public won’t be easy

Robert Bartlett and Steven Davidoff Solomon cited by Bloomberg BNA, Feb. 15, 2017

What can the SEC do on its own without congressional action? That is an “enormously complicated question,” said Robert Bartlett. … At a minimum, the SEC should “consider the effects on small business capital formation when it encourages funds to be more systematic in their liquidity risk management.”

Bartlett … and University of California, Berkeley, law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon co-authored a September 2016 paper that found that since 1998—when the Asian financial crisis and other events spurred a flight to liquidity—the largest mutual funds have invested in fewer smaller IPOs.

‘We had to sue’: the five lawyers taking on China’s authorities over smog

Rachel Stern quoted by The Guardian, Feb. 13, 2017

“This lawsuit on this topic at this moment in history is going to be an uphill battle,” says Rachel Stern, author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence. “I would be surprised if this lawsuit is successful, and if I were betting, I don’t even think it will get accepted by the court.”

MDL v. Trump

Andrew Bradt co-writes for Dorf on Law, Feb. 13, 2017

Although MDLs are commonly thought of as tools to resolve mass torts, there seems to be nothing in the statute that would prevent its use in public-law cases like the one involving Trump’s executive order. And one might imagine reasons why the parties on both sides of the “v” and the involved judges might want to try it.

A new generation of human rights investigators turns to high-tech methods

Alexa Koenig interviewed by PBS Newshour, Feb. 13, 2017

One of the biggest hurdles about using these new methods is that they are so new. … One of the things we’re hoping to do for kind of investing in the long-term use of these methods is just begin to build an international standard for how to evaluate what constitutes an effective and a good investigation.