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Legal Protection For Unattractive People?

ABA Journal: An economics professor is making the case for legal protections against looks-challenged people.

Writing an op-ed for the New York Times, University of Texas professor Daniel Hamermesh cites findings that good-looking people make more money, find higher-earning spouses, and get better mortgage deals. One study shows American workers assessed as being in the bottom seventh in terms of looks earn about $230,000 less in a lifetime than similar workers in the top third of looks.

Hamermesh offers a solution: Protect ugliness with small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could get help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly,” he suggests.

Debt Deal Eliminates Graduate School Loan Subsidies

USA Today: A federal subsidy that aids graduate students would be eliminated to boost funding for Pell grants that help low-income undergraduates, under the compromise debt-ceiling bill moving through Congress. That trade-off is one of the few program changes specified in the bill.

The maximum Pell grant of $5,550 would be preserved for an estimated 9 million undergraduates, according to the White House.

To pay for that, graduate students who get federally subsidized loans would see the interest on those loans begin to accrue while they’re still in school, beginning July 1 next year. Currently, that interest doesn’t begin accruing until the students graduate. That saves lots of money for doctoral candidates, medical school students, law students and others in long-term graduate programs.

Does the GOP Really Love The 10th Amendment?

Reason.com: The 10th Amendment to the Constitution is like the skinny teenage girl who blossoms over the summer and suddenly finds herself besieged by suitors. Once ignored, it has found a host of champions among Republican presidential candidates who are competing to show their devotion.

The amendment contains just one sentence: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

It is a bulwark of federalism, which allows states the freedom to adopt different policies reflecting their peculiar circumstances. It was meant as a check on those who would demand uniform practices from one end of America to the other.

Congress Wants To Spy On Your Computer

NY Post: If Congress had to name laws honestly, it would be called the “Forcing Your Internet Provider to Spy On You Just In Case You’re a Criminal Act of 2011” — a costly, invasive mandate that even the co-author of the Patriot Act, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), says “runs roughshod over the rights of people who use the Internet.”

But because it’s disguised as the “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act,” the House Judiciary Committee approved it last week by a wide margin — even though it’s got little to do with child porn and won’t do much to protect kids.

The centerpiece of this ill-conceived law is a sweeping requirement that commercial Internet providers retain a one-year log of all the temporary Internet Protocol addresses they assign to their users, along with customer-identification information. The Justice Department says this will help track down child-porn peddlers by linking online activity and real-world identities. But the government would be able to access that sensitive data for all kinds of investigations, most of which would have nothing to do with child porn.

Too Many Federal Criminal Statutes To Count

ABA Journal: Federal criminal statutes have multiplied to such an extent that it has become increasingly difficult to count them.

As a result of the increase, federal prisons now house more than 200,000 inmates, eight times the number 30 years ago, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports. And more people are in criminal jeopardy, often unwittingly, since increasingly the new laws do not have an intent requirement.

A U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman tells the Wall Street Journal that the number of federal criminal laws can’t be quantified. Studies have put the number at more than 3,000 and at 4,500.

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