Matt Mitten has a new paper on SSRN entitled Baseball: An Illustration of How Professional Sports Are Structured, Internally Governed, and Legally Regulated in the USA. The paper, which is based on a presentation Matt delivered at Dongguk University in Korea, provides an engaging overview of key legal issues in the regulation and administration of Major League Baseball. I, for one, am still astonished whenever I read about that antitrust exemption!
Last January, I published a piece in WI Interest, the journal of the Wisconsin Public Policy Research Institute, arguing that the drafters of Healthy Wisconsin — or any similar program purporting to enact a universal entitlement to health care in a single state — could not constitutionally impose a residency requirement, creating the risk of health care migration and the associated problems of adverse selection. I did not seek to explore whether such migration would occur or who would migrate. I speculated, in fact, that the migrants would not be poor people, but those who are older or high risk.
WPRI has now published a study evaluating the probability of such migration. I have not yet carefully examined it, but I continue to believe that such migration (and the Supreme Court precedent that protects it) is a serious obstacle to state efforts to enact some form of universal health care and, for that matter, a variety of other initiatives that states may undertake in their once honored roles as “laboratories for democracy.”
Cross posted at PrawfsBlawg and Shark and Shepherd.
The Seventh Circuit had four new opinions in criminal cases last week. In United States v. Millbrook (No. 07-2931), the court (per Judge Rovner) affirmed the defendant’s conviction and sentence for drug trafficking and other offenses. The defendant’s appeal raised several issues, the most interesting of which was yet another Rule 404(b) question regarding the use of prior crimes evidence. I have blogged about several of these cases recently, criticizing the Seventh Circuit’s deference to poorly justified decisions by district court judges to admit highly prejudicial prior crimes evidence. In Millbrook, the court once again affirmed, albeit with a caution that the case was “at the outer limits of what is permissible under Rule 404(b).”