Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Never Trusted Those Voting Machines Anyway

Posted on July 19, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Peter Shane has a cautionary article in today's Washington Post. In Usurping the Voters, Prof. Shane conjures up a scary hypo based on a close reading of Bush v. Gore,

Under that decision, there is no guarantee that the electors who are decisive in choosing the next president of the United States will themselves be selected by the people of the United States. That's because the justices ruled in that case that state legislatures have unlimited authority to determine whether citizens in their respective states shall be allowed to vote for president at all.

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States,” the court said, “unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College.”

Imagine, now, a state in which the same party controls both houses of the legislature and the governor's office. There would presumably be no partisan impediment to the state legislature, with the governor's approval, deciding that the majority party in state government shall control the state's electoral vote, regardless of any popular vote in the state. If the Supreme Court's declaration is an accurate statement of the law, there would not be any legal impediment either.

The impedement of course is, as he notes, “outrage” but look how far that's gotten us in the last four years…

Posted in Law: Constitutional Law | 9 Comments

Meet Guest Blogger George Mundstock

Posted on July 19, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I'm going to be away for most of the period between July 26 and August 6. For the first few days I will be at the Internet Meltdown event, and might blog a little from there if the wifi is working. But after that blogging could be very sparse: I'll be back in Miami but not in my house since the construction will have temporarily taken over. Then I'll be at a Berkman Center conference.

George Mundstock in a rare formal momentMy colleague George Mundstock has heroically volunteered to step into the breach as a guest blogger (starting this week), which should be fun. George is a guy who knows numbers. He's a tax lawyer, and an expert on accounting, but if you met him it would undoubtedly destroy any stereotypes you had of what tax lawyers are like. George is the antithesis of stuffy. He's wickedly funny. He has wildly iconoclastic taste in music. He learned to program on an IBM 1130 and runs Linux (SuSE) at home. And he cares about tax policy. So I've created a new category Law:Tax just for him.

George joined the UM faculty long before I did, and a few years ago his achievements were recognized with the offer of a prestigious chair at the University of Minnesota. Since that's reputed to be a good school, and since his family was from around there, George moved, leaving a very George-sized hole in our faculty. Last year, to our delight, he decided that he wanted to come back—the perfect answer to the vast George-sized hole we had yet to fill. As I was chair of the Promotion and Tenure committee last year, my share of the bureaucracy necessary to rehire him involved me assembling his weighty publications and reading through years of his teaching evaluations. The teaching evaluations were humbling: students love him and apparently love his quirky humor too.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that George's politics are somewhere to the right of mine, but I'm not really sure. I have no idea what party if any he belongs to. He's interesting. He's going to have fun doing this, and I think people who read this blog will find what he has to say as stimulating as we at UM do.

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Posted in Discourse.net | 5 Comments

Cuban-Born Miami Bishop Warns that Bush Request for Church Membership Resembles Castro’s

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Here is something I certainly never expected to see. A Miami Bishop, born in Cuba, has said President Bush reminds him of Castro. OK, he's an Episcopalian Bishop, not a Catholic, but still…

Here's what the Miami Herald reported (reg. req.),

As the Bush-Cheney campaign mounts an offensive to solidify a religious base for the November election, the Episcopal bishop of Southeast Florida has joined a chorus of religious leaders denouncing the campaign's plan to obtain church directories for electioneering purposes.

To Bishop Leo Frade, the Bush-Cheney strategy violates the separation of church and state.

“Handing over names for partisan politics to any party would be an infraction of our tax-exempt status as a religious institution,'' said Frade, who heads 82 Episcopal churches in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Monroe and Martin counties.

Frade, who was born in Cuba and came to the United States in 1960 as a college student, went further in a July 2 diocesan letter.

“I'm alarmed by any suggestion of providing the names of church members to any particular political group,'' he wrote. “I saw this request made by Fidel Castro at the beginning of his regime, and his persecution of churches that refused.''

The Herald reprints the GOP instructions to churches, or church members, here. (It also reports the interesting GOP claim that what the GOP is doing to evangelical churches is just like what Democrats have done for years in black churches. Is that true? Have Democrats ever been that organized?)

Incidentally in other Florida-Cuban news, it turns out that Bush's allegations about Cuba being a sex-tourism haven may be several years out of date (at least, that's what the Cubans claim, and there's some evidence to support it) and that Bush's picked GOP Senate candidate, Mel Martinez, is getting some south Florida flack for suggesting that some Cuban refugees are economic refugees, not entitled to political asylum.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 5 Comments

Movies You Will Not See on TV for a LONG Time

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Today's NYT “Week in Review” section has a small but remarkably clueless item by Sharon Waxman on the profusion of liberal movie/DVD documentaries being released this year. Lights, Camera, Liberal begins like this:

If talk radio is dominated by conservatives, documentaries must be the preferred medium of liberals. It’s not only “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s box-office hit about the Iraq war. A number of films — all left of center — are set to be launched in the coming weeks, as the electoral season gets underway in earnest.

Why so many documentaries, and why now?

The article not only fails to explain “why now” but it fails to connect its lede with the fact it explains: the main reason why anti-Bush documentaries are going to film or DVD is that the broadcast media, largely owned and run by right-wing Republicans, won't make them and won't play them. If even a mildly hagiographic TV mini-series like the Reagan biography gets mau-maued by the right wing, who in the broadcast world is going to dare to speak truth (or anything unwelcome) to power? No one. And most of the cable news networks are overtly or covertly Republican. So that relegates centrist and especially liberal documentaries to independents working through distinctly second-best alternate distribution channels. And even that can be hard, witness the various obstacles film chains have put in the way of 9/11, a money-making film.

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Movies You Will Not See on TV for a LONG Time

Who Gets Custody of the Alligator?

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Further to the law and animals theme, today's Herald has an interesting feature on what happens to pets in divorce: Divorcing couples fight like beasts over pets.

Given the number of childless people I know who call their pet “baby” or refer to their spouse as the pet's “mummy” or “daddy”—something I as a parent always find a bit startling—I bet this happens a lot.

It seems that, in Florida at least, pets are chattel property under law, so you cannot have court-ordered visitation: “Our courts are overwhelmed with the supervision of custody, visitation and support matters related to the protection of our children,'' a Florida appellate court ruled. “We cannot undertake the same responsibility as to animals.''

Update: The leading Florida case is Bennett v. Bennett, 655 So. 2d 109 (Fla. 1st DCA 1995), and as it's short and not on findlaw, I've put the text in the extended.

For commentary, see Who Gets Fluffy? Division of Pets in Divorce Cases (“a family pet is an item of personal property, and principles concerning the classification of this property apply. Once it is determined, however, that the family pet is marital property or that the court has the authority to award the family pet to one party or the other, then the court may consider who would better care for the pet and who has the greater attachment to the pet. This is really no different from the many cases that award a particular piece of property to the party who asserts a greater sentimental value to an item of property”).

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Posted in Law: Everything Else | 1 Comment

Exam Question: Is an Alligator a Deadly Weapon?

Posted on July 17, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

AP reports that a Port Orange Florida Man accused of hitting woman with gator:

A man hit his girlfriend [Nancy Monico, 39] with a 3-foot alligator and threw beer bottles at her during an argument in the couple's mobile home, authorities said.

David Havenner, 41, was scheduled for a bond hearing Saturday on misdemeanor charges of battery and possession of an alligator.

Note that Mr. Havenner is not charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and Ms. Monico only says the gator “hit” her not “bit” her. No, the biting comes later in the story:

Havenner's version of the story differed. He told investigators that Monico bit his hand because she was upset that they had run out of alcohol.

Posted in Florida | 3 Comments