Stock painting of flying spaghetti monster. Photo of
arbitragation monster currently unavailable.
Texas Lawyer comes out next Monday with an article on the 11-5 en banc decision in Positive Software Systems, Inc. v. New Century Mortgage Co., No. 04-11432 (5th Cir. Jan. 18, 2007). (See previous post with link to opinions here.) Too
The Roberts Court takes a break.
For those of you who’ve started missing a near-daily dose of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, take heart. According to its handy-dandy online calendar, the Court went on hiatus after a "non-argument session" on January 22, 2007. Their Honors will return on February 16 for a "conference day".
Labor union keeps arbitration
award despite arbitrator’s
"serious error".
So long as an arbitrator "plainly was ‘arguably construing’ the contract", the full Sixth Circuit held today, courts must uphold his award even if he "just as plainly made a ‘serious error’ in construing the contract". Michigan Family Resources, Inc. v. Service Employees Int’l Union Local
"The Death of Socrates" by Jacques-Louis
David (1787).
The mind-bending experience of learning to think like a lawyer results, in law school, largely from having to answer professors’ tricky questions — a method we call Socratic after the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (circa 470-399 B.C.). Like the Athenian jurors who sentenced him to death for
NERA Economic Consulting’s annual study, Recent Trends in Shareholder Class Action Litigation: Filings Plummet, Settlements Soar (Jan. 2007) (available here), includes a chart showing the rates of dismissal for securities class actions in the 11 U.S. circuit courts of appeals during 2006. To Blawgletter’s surprise, the Tenth Circuit (covering Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma
Two federal appellate decisions came out today on antitrust issues, both in the realm of monopolization law:
In Hydril Co. LP v. Grant Pride LP, No. 2006-1188 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 25, 2007) (opinion here), a 2-1 panel reinstated Hydril’s claim that Grant Pride monopolized the markets for drill pipe and drill pipe connections
Parsley as garnish in the non-legal sense.
A decision today out of the Ninth Circuit — on garnishment of a foreign sovereign’s U.S. assets — reminded Blawgletter of a comment from law school days, On Third World Debt, 25 Harv. Int’l L.J. 83 (1984). The piece discusses the ballooning of third world countries’ borrowings
Syringe may infringe.
The Federal Circuit today rejected a district court’s construction of several terms in a patent relating to hypodermic safety syringes and thus reversed a summary judgment of noninfringement. MBO Laboratories, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson & Co., No. 2006-1062 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 24, 2007) (opinion here).
BBar
Did Karl Rove set up Scooter
Libby? Does it matter?
Yesterday, Blawgletter marveled at Scooter Libby’s apparent combination of an "I forgot" defense to a perjury charge with a "Karl Rove framed me" defense. See here. The two seemed, um, inconsistent if not at war.
This morning we read in a NYT article that
And backdating options?
Insiders at chip-maker Broadcom cost the company $2.24 billion more than it previously disclosed as a result of backdating stock options, according to this WSJ story. Yesterday, Broadcom restated earnings from 1998 through the first quarter of 2006 to reflect charges for the options.
The revelation strikes Blawgletter as a big
