Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There was a time when this would have been a HUUUGE scandal.  Now it is I gather just the sort of thing that happens.  Still: I will note it here.  There is reason to believe that White House officials have leaked highly material information, to which they had privileged access, to Wall Street firms: that is, that they assisted insider trading. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have long opposed the criminalization of insider trading. I have taken a sympathetic view of defendants on related charges from Michael Milken to Martha Stewart. Still, if we are going to have such laws on the book, there is no good case for giving an immunity to White House officials or the President himself.  Heck, there isn't even the BAD reason that the Supreme Court cooked up recently in another context for giving the President immunity. Their reason may not apply here on its face. But just to avoid a digression, let us focus on the staff involvement that seems to have been inv...

As promised, I'll write today of some of SCOTUS' wrestling this term with issues of statutory construction. In the realm of Labor Law, this was the term of  Encino Motorcars v. Navarro , a case that turns on the meaning of an exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is important, even though the specific category of worker involved may not include very many people, because the New Deal era legislation continues to provide a classification system in a dynamic world of work. The relevant requirement of the FLSA is that which requires overtime pay  for workers who don't fall within exemptions., and that exempts "any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles trucks, or farm implements...." if employed by a dealership primarily engaged in selling said autos or implements. The specific problem is that auto dealers including the petitioner Encino nowadays employ so-called "service advisors."  As the ...