It appears confirmation of Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB will be held up because Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) is concerned about Sunstein's embrace of certain animal rights arguments. The Hill reports:
Chambliss worries that Sunstein’s innovative legal views may someday lead to a farmer having to defend himself in court against a lawsuit filed on behalf of his chickens or pigs.
Chambliss told The Hill that he has blocked Sunstein’s nomination because the law professor “has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks.”
Indeed, in his 2004 book, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Sunstein wrote: “I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.”
More specifically, he wrote: “Laws designed to protect animals against cruelty and abuse should be amended or interpreted to give a private cause of action against those who violate them, so as to allow private people to supplement the efforts of public prosecutors.”
Chambliss said he is also concerned about Sunstein’s potential impact on “a number of other issues relative to agriculture.”
The story also suggests that Chambliss could lift the hold once he has had the opportunity to speak with Sunstein directly some time after the July 4 recess. Sunstein's nomination has already cleared committee, and I would be surprised if there were a serious effort to prevent his confirmation.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Sunstein on Hold:
- Cass's Day in the Sun -- or the Heat?
- Desperately Smearing Sunstein:
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I mean, WTF?!
Switzerland Places Ban on the Humiliation of Plants
After all, broccoli's got rights too.
If you deny that being sued is misery and unhappiness, then you don't have much litigation experience.
Thales, politics down here in Georgia are dominated by animal rights questions including animal standing, animal marriage, and animal houses.
Well I suppose there are things that are dumber than believing animals have rights.
***
This is no excuse for the abhorrent treatment of animals. Furthermore, your argument for lifetime employment is incorrect. Lifetime tenure is the reason why our country has utilized lifetime judicial appointments. How have such large-scale pig, cow, and chicken conglomerates even been allowed to open their doors? These companies are even worse for our country than big tobacco, and they have used their slaughterhouse profits to silence lawmakers.
So let's guess how they're making these profits. These large factories now bus in undocumented or poverty-stricken workers to kill hundreds of thousands of animals in extremely dangerous and unsanitary conditions, causing virus outbreaks and widespread water contamination. Even irrigation systems for spinach have been tainted from the uncontrollable animal run-off.
Sunstein is one of those rare people who was in a position to speak out for what is destroying our planet. (Furthermore, how is a cow different than a dog other than recently-embraced societal usage? His argument is not that far-fetched.) The current system is based on cruel and malevolent practices that do nothing but demonstrate the moral depravity of the modern day "farmer."
silence lawmakers? I mean I will be the first to point out the stupidity of our representatives, but even they are not idiotic enough to suggest that animals have any rights (beyond the right to be delicious of course).
Poor Professor Sunstein. IMHO this whole confirmation "controversy" is so facially absurd that it properly falls into the category of attractive nuisances for late-night TV comics who've totally run out of good monologue material. And frustrated judicial punsters and poets, of course.
Presented without comment.
Bravo, bravo! It's been years since I've laughed so hard at such brilliant satire!
If an animal rights group gets a statute baning cruelty to animals passed in the legislature (that includes clear language that individuals should have cause of action to enforce it), then they should be able to sue to enforce the law. I don't see why that's a radical idea.
If Chambliss doesn't like animal cruelty laws, he should work to have them appealed, not oppose reasonable legal procedures to enforce those laws.
Which I still occasionally have nightmares about my 1L contracts professor reading out loud in class... the whole thing... all five stanzas... after first ceremonially locking the classroom door so nobody could escape... Ah me!--Ah moo!
as a matter of policy should i be able to sue you for running a red light i see you do so?
But, let's make sure that before they eat it, they store it inhumanely, without room to move (so it's so weak it can't stand on its legs for more than one step) or sunlight (who knows why) and that they pump it full of hormones to produce lots of milk first (if it's female) or lock it in a veal shed so it gets no exercise (if it's male), and, finally, that it is then slaughtered without any anesthetic and as cheaply as possible--which probably means that it will bleed to death slowly. Oh, and, let's feed it the remains of other animals--that would save some money.
I don't think tastiness should be an argument for animal or worker abuse, disease proliferation, air/water pollution, or the deaths that result from all of these factors (which are not minimal), but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
If legislation is passed that explicitly states that you should have a cause of action to do so (uprooting the common law baseline that you do not), then yes (I believe this was the case in Lujan, although it been years since I read it).
No. Lujan was about Constitutional standing, not statutory.
Sounds good. And it opens up a whole new field of shyster, and I didn't think that was possible. "I'm an expert in zoological representation. You'll find no better office for a cat to pad in and find justice."
If it was "about" statutory standing it would have been a no-brainer, as the statute explicitly created standing.
Well we don't have to jump at every moronic idea that comes along. This is why it is important to ridicule arguments like this before someone organizes a Czar position in the government to promote them.
JK,
How does this work? does every person have a right to sue you if you do something illegal? the first one that saw you? or the first one to file the lawsuit?
GLUC,
No excercise is the whole point, the meat becomes more tender that way.
Obviously a system of private "prosecution" would be nuts in the realm of traffic laws, but that doesn't mean it's a generally illegitimate way to enforce any statute.
You'd think in principle conservatives wouldn't have a problem with putting the cost of enforcing a statute on the parties that lobbied for it rather than the taxpayer, but I guess that's subservient to the idea that one ought to be able to torture his or her own animals regardless of whether that behavior has been deemed illegal.
[Blue eats a piece of nice, crispy bacon]
BLUE: Ummm, good! If that's wrong I don't ever want to be right!
Anyway, hopefully if Cass Sunstein is confirmed he won't have as much time to flood the world with terrible law review articles about how technocrats and economists and "incentives" etc. are really really awesome.
Also, Saxby Chambliss is a buffoon.
I think if someone says something that's bats**t insane, that's relevant to being confirmed for a position, even if it's not something people in that position would have control over.
[as for the nom de blog above - seriously, somebody please explain what, if anything, would have been accomplished by giving Vick's dogs standing to sue him? Methinks the Commonwealth of Virginia did just fine by the dogs under existing animal cruelty law without the pit bulls being named plaintiffs in some bizarre contingency fee action]
That gets into some pretty tricky waters. For example, is believing that Joseph Smith walked on water in a lake in the United States in the mid 19th century "batsh**t insane"? Should we be digging into all sorts of philosophical and religious views people might hold that are unrelated to their job, to find ones that seem crazy and outside the mainstream?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mcbain-mendoza.JPG
This is an old picture, I have lost some weight when I switched to the atkins diet.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743
Such a thing already exist, complete with SCOTUS imprematur. It's called a qui tam action. Of course, under that statute standing is not a problem because the plaintiff gets to keep some of the damages obtained, but still, it's a case of privatising enforcement.
In antitrust, of course, there is also a lot of private litigation, at least in the US. Unfortunately, research shows that private Clayton Act cases predominantly follow a successful DoJ action, when the plaintiff can benefit from the presumption of 15 USC 16. (I have no cite at hand at the moment, but an actual academic paper to this effect does exist.)
The Atkins diet has clogged your arteries for good. Hope you enjoy the irreparable damage to your circulation system and impending heart attack or stroke, not to mention your likely kidney disease or gout. Peace out.
We? Who is "we?" Lawyers?
These clients have cheap maintenance. They are non-verbal and cannot object to the consumption of most of any settlement by legal fees. Perfect clients.
I wouldn't count it, because "illogical" isn't the same as "insane". Someone who believes that Joseph Smith performed miracles likely believes it because of all sorts of reasons related to social pressures. That has no bearing on whether that belief is true, but it has a lot of bearing on what the belief says about his general state of mind.
If there was no such thing as Mormons, and he decided to join a 200 person cult who believes that their founder walks on water, that would be different. It's the same belief, but it was probably arrived at in a different manner.
That being said, I do think that believing one Mormon doctrine might imply belief in another that's more relevant. For instance, if he believes Joseph Smith walked on water he might also believe a bunch of bad archeology, which should disqualify him from any science-related position the same way that being a creationist would.
Theoretically, it would elevate animal welfare law above the level of dead letter.
well that convinced me, I am switching to fried kelp.
But seriously this nastiness stems from the fact that people who advocate the comical point of view of the animal rights activists lie to themselves daily that if the public knew how meat is made, it would turn vegetarian. This is why it makes them incensed when they see someone who knows exactly how meat is made, and is comfortable with it.
"Sunstein represents the cutting edge in ultimate lawyer rent seeking. There will be an infinite amount of animals and plants with standing. If cute mammals get standing, it is phyllist to deny standing to bacteria. You will need a fair hearing and a court order to wipe your kitchen counter with ammonia, eradicating billions of bacteria without due process.
These clients have cheap maintenance. They are non-verbal and cannot object to the consumption of most of any settlement by legal fees. Perfect clients."
Ok, I nominate this post for the Innertube Hall of Fame.
It's miserable, but I don't blame the lawyer for suing, I blame the legislature that passed the law. If the law says you cannot put lipstick on a pig, why would you blame the lawyer and not the law?
On the other hand, the way livestock are kept and slaughtered for meat can be pretty horrifying in some cases. It's not clear Michael Vick's dogs suffered more than pigs do on some farms. Yet one gets criminally prosecuted while the other doesn't. Americans may continue to live with this very selective view of animals rights but I suspect the trend is going to more recognition of animals rights rather than less.
I can't speak to the legal or constitutional issues, but allowing a private cause of action for violations of an animal rights statute doesn't seem that outrageous to me, provided the one who brings the suit pays the others' legal fees if the case fails.
We don't? How on earth did we get prohibition, sodomy laws, abstinence-only public sex education and gun control, then?
Correct but I’m pretty sure that the owner would be able to sue for the theft and/or destruction of their pet and possibly file criminal charges as they could anytime property is stolen and/or harmed. In other words the owner (human) has rights but the pet does not*. Nor should they.
* Anyone who tries to take this statement hoping to make some facile comparison to slavery is an idiot.
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