Another gem from the Nashville Codes (6.72.400)
No taxicab driver shall solicit patronage in a loud or annoying tone of voice or in any manner annoy any person.
There’s a hard criterion to meet.
In deciding what are reasonable methods for businesses to solicit customers, Nashville makes exception for solicitations with a charitable purpose. How do we differentiate between these noble goals and the subaltern drive for the mighty dollar? Nashville codes (6.64.070) to the rescue:
‘Charitable purpose’ means any purpose which is benevolent, …, philanthropic, …, eleemosynary, either actual or purported.
Apparently, Council members are provided a thesaurus and are not afraid to use it. A dictionary, unfortunately, does not seem standard issue:
purport: To have or present the often false appearance of being or intending
We don’t ask you to be charitable, but merely to feign concern.
UPDATE: I have been made aware that (i) many towns have this precise definition of charitable purpose (google search) and (ii) at least one member of Council has no idea what “eleemosynary” means.
I decided to combine two activities that frequently occupy my day: study of auctions for my research, and perusal of the Nashville Codes for entertainment. The section of Nashville law on auctions and auctioneers (Chapter 6.84) defines an auction as:
The offering for sale or selling of such property by the method known as “down hill selling” by which is meant first offering any article at a higher price and then offering the same at successive lower prices until a bidder is secured.
So, the elegant Dutch Auction is legally permitted. I wonder who determined that this method is “known as down hill selling.” The Dutch have yet to discover a single elevation change in Holland that can in any way be construed a “hill.”
The definition continues:
“Selling at auction” also means the offering for sale or selling of such property to the highest bidder.
And there you have the exhaustive list of market mechanisms that the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County considers an auction.
Preferential auctions, where I might care about who wins? Procurement auctions, where the lowest bidder should be selected? Take that crazy stuff out of state!
The press has been quite jubilant about yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on direct shipment of wine (“Let those wine sales flow” claims USA Today) but we shouldn’t pop the cork on that last bottle of bubbly since it may not get easier to acquire more.
All that the Court requires in its decision is that states adopt comparable winery-to-consumer shipping laws for out-of-state wineries as they do for in-state wineries. I applaud the decision on legal grounds, asserting that fair interstate commerce applies to alcohol sales, but expect it will make wine even harder to acquire.
Continue reading »Economic theorists are often criticized for making assumptions that conflict with what practitioners haughtily term the “real world.” Since these practitioners seem unmoved by simple, elegant models, I offer instead that the law is on our side.
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