Ethics

Congratulations to Sandefur

By Ed Brayton

I want to congratulate Tim Sandefur on a big victory against government rent-seeking laws. I've mentioned before a case he's been working on for quite a long time involving a man who owns a company that does non-chemical pest control being required to spend a great deal of money and time to take courses and get licensed in pesticide use in order to continue doing business. A federal district court granted summary judgment and upheld the law, but last week the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law. The case is Merrifield v Lockyer.

The ruling is really rather fascinating because it shows the restrictions within which Sandefur had to argue because of a long litany of bad precedents and legal theories. For instance, the court could not rule in favor of the plaintiff based on the privileges and immunities clause because the court almost immediately gutted that clause of all meaning in the Slaughterhouse cases.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).