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Yes, Justice O’Connor is still hearing cases–this time considering whether New York’s denial of a handgun license (in the home, not carry) to a person who only lives in New York part-time is constitutional. Before confronting the Second Amendment issue, O’Connor found that it was unclear as a matter of New York law how this statute was understood.

Rather than resolving the issue, she certified this question to the New York Court of Appeals (the court of last resort in the Empire State):

Is an applicant who owns a part-time residence in New York but makes his permanent domicile elsewhere eligible for a New York handgun license in the city or county where his part-time residence is located?

Of course, Justice O’Connor was not on the Court for Heller. Justice Alito replaced her. So it is an interesting counterfactual how SDO wrote about the right to keep and bear arms.

To begin, we agree with both parties that there is a serious constitutional question in this case. This Court has recently held that “Second Amendment guarantees are at their zenith within the home,” Kachalsky v. County of Westchester, 701 F.3d 81, 89 (2d Cir. 2012), and a domicile requirement will operate much like the bans struck down in Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020 (2010), for part-time New York residents whose permanent homes are elsewhere. At the same time, this Court has acknowledged that the ground opened by Heller and McDonald is a “vast ‘terra incognita’” that “has troubled courts since Heller was decided.” Kachalsky, 701 F.3d at 89 (quoting United States v. Masciandaro, 638 F.3d 458, 475 (4th Cir. 2011) (Wilkinson, J.)). It is open to Osterweil to make his domicile in New York, so even a domicile requirement may not be the kind of absolute ban that the U.S. Supreme Court has already addressed, and some regulation of itinerant handguns is clearly valid. See Kachalsky, 701 F.3d at 100 (“[E]xtensive state regulation of handguns has never been considered incompatible with the Second Amendment or, for that matter, the common-law right to self-defense.”). Thus, we would confront a serious and very difficult question of federal constitutional law if required to evaluate a domicile requirement.

Oh yeah, and Paul Clement, who argued Heller and McDonald, argued this case.

H/T How Appealing

She raps about Chevron v. NRDC.

 Rock it, don’t stop it,
Everybody get on the floor,
Wake the party up,
We about to get it on,
(Let me see ya’ll)
1,2 step,
(I love it when ya’ll)
1,2 step
(Everybody)
1,2 step,
We about to get it on

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBHNgV6_znU]

The New York Times reports that New York CIty is removing signs that warn people not to honk their horns. Why? They are ignored.

Now, it appears, the city has effectively thrown up its hands — or, more accurately, taken down its signs.

In a move condemned by critics as a tacit surrender to a ubiquitous noise, the Transportation Department is removing all “Don’t Honk” signs from the streets, and predicts there will be none left by the end of the year.

City officials said the move was part of an effort to declutter the streets of often ignored signs.’

But why would New York eliminate signs? What is the cost of leaving them up? They can’t hurt anyone, right?

 Nonetheless, the decision has ignited a voluble opposition among noise-conscious New Yorkers, particularly in high-traffic residential areas like the Upper East and Upper West Sides.

“I can’t tell you how many requests I get for ‘no honking’ signs,” said Gale A. Brewer, a councilwoman in Manhattan who wrote a letter to the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, arguing against the change. “The notion of taking down information when information is so hard to get in New York City is pretty bad.”

Brewer could not be more wrong. It is possible to have too much information–and with too much information, signs are often ignored.

Nate Silver writes about over-signage in his cool new book, The Signal and the Noise. In short, where there are too many signs (call it the noise), it is harder to find the important signs (call it the signal). If everyone is simply ignoring the no-honking signs, they get into the behavior of ignoring all of the signs, including the important ones. Also, people become overly reliant on the signs, and stop relying on their own judgment (a problem that many underestimate with the move towards disclosing EVERYTHING).

Many cities in Europe have begun to eliminate signs, to great success (see here, here, and here). From the UK Guardian:

Far from generating anarchy, road rage and a trail of death and destruction, taking away traffic controls prevents drivers ‘bunching’ into gridlock and speeding because it forces them to slow down and take more care.

Experiments in towns in the northern Friesland region found that busy junctions where two or three people had been knocked down and killed every year dropped to a zero death rate when they took the traffic lights away and put a tree in the middle of the street instead. UK experts now believe the same methods could work in Britain.

The unusual traffic arrangements are based on forcing motorists to rely heavily on eye contact with each other, pedestrians, cyclists and bus drivers instead of falling back on road signs and red lights to dictate their driving. When drivers have to keep an eye out for potential obstacles and casualties because there are no lines, traffic lights or lane markings they automatically slow down to below 20mph – a speed where a child who is knocked down is five times more likely to live as one who is hit at more than 30mph.

By eliminating the ignored signs, they make the important signs more observable.  The City’s comments implicitly acknowledge this:

Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the department, said that while the reason for the drop was unclear, “we’re not aware of any evidence that the signs have had any impact at locations where they’ve been installed.”

He said the signs could even be misleading, if a driver believed that unnecessary honking was prohibited only at locations that had them, and said the city had improved signal timing to better avoid gridlock and the honking it so often yields.

I doubt Mayor Bloomberg’s Politburo is aware of this science–it aims to over-regulate everything else. But for once, I am glad that NYC walked into an effective act of informational asymmetries.

Check out information on the symposium and my panel here:

10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Panel 2: Big Data Applications in Scholarship and Policy I

• Josh Blackman, Assistant Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law
• Carole Roan Gresenz, Professor, Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies
• Bill LeFurgy, Digital Initiatives Manager, National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program, Library of Congress
• Kathy Zeiler, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
• Moderator: Kumar Percy Jayasuriya, Associate Law Librarian for Patron Services, Georgetown University Law Center

I will be talking about Assisted Decision Making and FantasySCOTUS. Hope to see you there!

Today we will talk about implied warranties of quality, and introduce the concept of the deeds.

The lecture notes are available here. The livechat is available here.

This story about whether a seller has a duty to disclose that a previous owner of a home died from a drug overdose ties into our lecture from last class. Also this story, explores whether a buyer in New York City can recover a $5 million downpayment for a luxury home. This article talks about a Pennsylvania case where a buyer seeks to rescind a contract to purchase a house because the seller failed to disclose there was a murder-suicide in the home. Finally, we will reference this Texas General Warranty Deed in class.