Illegal Aliens as Mormon Missionaries

The Salt Lake Tribune recently wrote an article highlighting the problem the LDS Church is facing with it's missionaries who are illegally living in the United States, yet serving full-time missions. According to the Tribune, would-be missionaries who are "undocumented" are now being assigned only to "state side" missions where they will have a decreased chance of having problems with immigration issues.

We have also discussed this issue in the past, after Jose Calzadillas was detained by Customs and Border patrol agents in the Cincinnati International Airport for not having proper identification after attempting to fly home after successfully completing his mission in Ohio.

We have also discussed a separate yet similar topic of LDS missionaries knowingly baptizing illegal aliens into the Church and the moral issues that raises.

I feel that if the Church continues to knowingly baptize illegal aliens and allows them to serve full-time missions it will put them in the ackward position of having to publicly defend their support of people who are not obeying the law.

New JRCLS website

If you are a member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society or ever use their online resources, you may be interested to learn that the JRCLS website was redesigned this week. While it still isn't anything cutting-edge, I think the new site is much more usable than the old one. The new site makes better use of multimedia materials and has a well-designed bar across the top with drop-down menus for various pages and materials.

Old Site

New Site

Hopefully this new attention to the website will be accompanied by more resources and more frequent updates. The old site often went weeks or months without updates.

Ryan Marshall a "Super Star" Lawyer

SALT LAKE CITY, July 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione, one of the largest intellectual property law firms in the United States, is pleased to announce that Ryan L. Marshall, an intellectual property attorney based in the Salt Lake City, Utah office of the firm, has been named a Super Lawyers "Mountain States Rising Star" in intellectual property law for 2009 in a survey conducted by Law & Politics magazine. The Mountain States region consists ofIdaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

Mr. Marshall prosecutes patent applications in the chemical, pharmaceutical and biochemical arts in the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Marshall also litigates intellectual property and unfair competition claims. He received his J.D. from the J. Reuben Clark Law School, an M.S. in organic chemistry and a B.S. in chemistry, all from Brigham Young University.

Law and Politics surveyed lawyers in the "Mountain States" region, representing 70 practice areas, and asked them to identify the best lawyers they had personally worked with or had observed in action. Attorneys from firms of all sizes were considered as well as those in private practice, prosecutors, in-house counsel and public service lawyers.

The "Rising Stars" category recognizes lawyers that are under the age of 40 or have been in practice for 10 years or less. While up to 5 percent of lawyers in the state are named as Super Lawyers, no more than 2.5 percent are named to the Rising Stars list.

The complete list appears in the 2009 Mountain States Super Lawyersmagazine and in select consumer magazines.

New alcohol laws take effect in Utah

We would be remiss if we didn't mention the new Utah state alcohol laws that took effect last week. While none of the blog's current contributors live in Utah, it's impossible to ignore the role that the Mormon Church has played in alcohol control policy in the state where a majority of the residents are at least nominally adherents to the faith. The new Utah laws abandon the 40-year-old requirement that bar patrons fill out an application, pay a fee and become a member of a private club. The private club rules were a quintessentially Utah oddity for many years, but they were most noticed during the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics.

I've never quite understood the rationale of the private club rule. By most accounts, the rule was not much of a barrier to drinking, and in some parts of the state (such as Park City) it wasn't even enforced. So the private club rule doesn't appear to have restricted alcohol consumption. It seems to have had more of a social stigma function, requiring drinkers to be "on a list." In that respect, the updated law hasn't changed much. The Associated Press reports:

The [Mormon] Church has always helped shape alcohol policy here, and the change to the law this year was no different. Only after consultation with church leaders and an agreement that DUI penalties would be stiffened, did lawmakers make progress on the changes.

As part of the agreement, Utah also became the only state in the country to require bars to scan the ID of anyone who appears to be 35 or younger to ensure their ID is valid. Bars store the information for a week so law enforcement can inspect it.

Anyone who has an ID that doesn't properly scan is required to fill out a form logging their presence at the bar.

Utah alcohol laws still have quite a few quirks. That same AP article notes that flavored malt beverages may not be sold at grocery or convenience stores, the percentage of alcohol in beer is capped at 3.2%, happy hours are illegal, and cocktails must be mixed out of the sight of customers.

As a policy matter, I think the new law is at least a step in the right direction, particularly the harsher DUI penalties. I would rather see some more creative solutions, such as those that I discussed earlier this year involving alcohol tax equal to the average marginal social cost of each drink.

Study dispels myth of high Utah bankruptcy rate

I've heard several people cite the statistic that Utah has one of the highest bankruptcy law in the nation as evidence that members of the Mormon Church are falling into the consumerist trap and "living outside their means." I've always thought that was a strange assertion; I don't live in Utah, but I've traveled there on occasion and I never saw anything that indicated that Utah residents spent more or less of their incomes than residents of other states. Apparently I wasn't the only one suspicious of this oft-quoted statistic -- two Brigham Young University professors of economics have an article in The Journal of Law & Economics that at least in part dispels that myth.

In their article entitled "Explaining the Puzzle of Cross‐State Differences in Bankruptcy Rates," Lars Lefgren and Frank McIntyre make the argument that the variation in bankruptcy rates is due primarily to differences in state laws. Specifically, they found that laws governing the garnishment of wages significantly impacted bankruptcy rates. This actually makes a lot of sense -- if your state's laws prevent your creditors from garnishing your wages, you are less likely to need the the protections afforded by filing bankruptcy. On the other hand, if your creditors can get at your paycheck, you have a strong incentive to file for bankruptcy as soon as possible. Lefgren and McIntyre also found, somewhat unsurprisingly, that rates of bankruptcy were highest in areas where the median household income was between $30,000 and $60,000.

So it appears that Utah's relatively high rate of bankruptcy (7.05 per thousand households) has more to do with its laws allowing creditors to garnish the wages of debtors than it does a particular trend among Utah residents or a Mormon subset of that population. Utah allows up to the federal limit of 25% of wages to be garnished, although it does impose a 6-month limit. In the Southeastern United States where I live, many states use the federal garnishment limit and have similarly high bankruptcy rates. Tennessee leads the pack with 8.12 bankruptcies per thousand households, with Alabama (7.42) and Georgia (7.38) not far behind.

The article is a bit dense, but it does a good job at dispelling some of the myth that Utah residents are spending like there's no tomorrow. The bankruptcy data doesn't support that assertion, and in fact, it turns out that the state-by-state data isn't very useful to map trends, due to the differences in state laws.

Lefgren and McIntyre's article is currently available for free on the J.L. & Econ website in both HTML and PDF.


Photo credit: debaird™.

Secular laws vs. God's laws

I was on the road last weekend and attended church at a Mormon ward in another city. Their Sunday School schedule was a week behind my home ward, so I got to hear the Word of Wisdom lesson twice. After hearing members of the class quibble over what constitutes "hot drinks" and the purpose behind the various prohibitions and admonitions, I started thinking about how the Word of Wisdom compares to secular laws.

I've often said before that the Word of Wisdom would be a lot clearer if it came with a definition section, but that approach probably wouldn't work well for a religious law. A Word of Wisdom written like modern statutes would probably be less ambiguous, but it would also be limited by the text of the document. For example, illegal drugs are commonly included in the prohibitions of the Word of Wisdom, but there isn't any particular text in Doctrine & Covenants 89 that supports this interpretation. Instead, that prohibition is based on the spirit of the law and (more importantly) revelation and clarification by modern prophets having the authority of God.

We have secular laws for many of the same reasons that we have laws from God. Those laws are intended at least in part to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others, so as to create a better-functioning society. Secular laws tend to be lengthy and difficult to understand, with rigid structures and terms of art that make them inaccessible to the layman. Secular laws, even constitutions, can usually be updated or amended by their enacting bodies to deal with changed circumstances. Sometimes secular laws can be interpreted by judicial bodies to clarify or extend the application thereof.

God's laws tend to be relatively simple, even if they aren't exhaustively thorough. They are designed so that even a child can understand the basic principles. They aren't always crystal clear in structure or purpose, but like secular laws, religious laws can be clarified and expanded -- not by legislatures or judges, but by God's servants and messengers. And unlike secular laws, God's laws always have an element of subjective application. Thus, there is considerable variation within the Mormon Church with respect to certain practices, such as paying tithing on gross or net income, drinking or avoiding Coke, etc.

Even though a Word of Wisdom with a definition section would be easier to follow, it doesn't seem like a good idea. God's laws weren't meant to be subjected to textual analysis, but rather, inspired guidance and illustration by His servants. Attempting to quantify and dictate every aspect of worship was precisely what the Pharisees of Jesus' time were trying to do, and that didn't work out too well for them. Worship was never intended to require legal counsel -- it is a personal relationship with Deity. So now when the members of my Sunday School class question how much meat consumption qualifies as "sparingly," I sit back and smile. If that's what it takes in order to keep the Gospel of Jesus Christ from devolving into arcane legal discussions, then it's a small price to pay.

Best (or Worst) Law Suits Ever Filed

The Top Ten most ridiculous law suits ever filed was compiled by The Independent (UK).

1. The man who sued Budweiser after drinking the beer which brought him no hot women.
2. The prisoner who sued himself for violating his own civil liberties.
3. The Judge, Roy Peterson, who sued the dry cleaners for $65M after they lost his pants.
4. The Turkish city of Batman who sued "Batman" the movie.
5. The 77 year old man who sued the 19 year old girl who said 'no' to his sexual advances.
6. A driver who sued the family of the cyclist he killed for damages to his car.
7. The Michael Jordan look-a-like who sued Nike for making Jordan too recognizable.
8. The parents who sued Oliver Stone after their kids saw his movie and went on a crime spree.
9. The man who demanded his cheating wife return the kidney he donated to her.
10. The copyright battle over two separate recordings of silence.

Number ten on the list is pretty good but I don't think any of them can beat Mr. Jack Ass's law suit against Viacomm. In 1997, a Montana man legally changed his name to Jack Ass. A few years later, MTV began airing "jackass" the TV show. Mr. Ass claimed that MTV had plagiarized and defamed his name. Ass's lawsuit states that Viacomm is "liable for injury to my reputation that I have built and defamation of my character which I have worked hard to create."

Apparently, he had a hard time finding the "right" attorney for the case. "I couldn't find an attorney. Listen, lawyers are not just going to pipe up--they're not going to say they don't have courage. They give me lame excuses. One is too busy. They won't do it on contingency (what why not?). Some say I may have a case and they want to look deeper. Then they don't call back."

So what do you do when you've got a great case and you can't find an attorney to help you out? Well, you represent yourself. Ass filed the suit on his own and said "Anyone can do it. You do some research. And there's some rules you have to learn." Apparently

I wonder if in all his research he learned what a 12(b)6 motion is?