The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation has issued 24 25 Transfer Orders from its two-day session last month in Louisville, Kentucky.
District courts with "Southern" in their names triumphed, getting 10 of the 24 25 MDL matters.
By transferee district, here you go:
Northern District of California
MDL No. 2040, In re ConocoPhillips Co. Service
A different kind of aggregate.
At its annual meeting in May, the American Law Institute approved the final draft of Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation. The biggest fight concerned a tweak to the "aggregate-settlement" rule, which now applies in some form across the United States and the District of Columbia.
The current rule provides
Did Flowserve, um, inflate its financials?
To be successful, a securities class-action plaintiff must thread the eye of a needle made smaller and smaller over the years by judicial decree and congressional action. Those ever higher hurdles are not, however, intended to prevent viable securities actions from being brought.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued three big decisions today:
In Forest
As we know from "Annals of Trademark Law: It's a Bird! It's a Boat! It's a Super Duck!", the protectability of a trademark varies with its strength. Generic marks get no protection, and others receive varying degrees — from "descriptive" to "suggestive" to "arbitrary" to "fanciful".
In 2000, a jury in Little Rock federal court pondered
Remember the 19th-century Frenchie guy who wrote the long book about how much he loved America and Americans? Tocqueville? That one.
He said lots of surprising things. He wrote, for instance, that he saw trial by jury in America as more of a "political" institution than a "judicial" one. Huh?
Tocqueville explains:
I am so entirely convinced that
From the May issue of Barnett's Notes on Commercial Litigation:
Teddy Roosevelt's Department of Justice sued to bust up Standard Oil .
The signs of a tougher approach to bigness and badness have grown like . . . Google.
On May 18, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said:
I will assure that we will
The U.S. Supreme Court today ambled toward the summer hiatus, trotting out four decisions. Two involved civil claims against businesses.
In Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., No. 08-441 (U.S. June 18, 2009), the Court held that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 requires proof that age but-for caused a demotion. Showing
Richard Marin Scrushy, before the fall.
In March 2003, HealthSouth Corporation admitted that it overstated its assets and inflated its profits. Securities fraud cases ensued. In 2006, HealthSouth and its insurers settled for $445 million. The district court okayed the deal, which not only released the settling defendants but also barred ex-CEO Richard Scrushy
The Washington Post today posted a "near-final" draft of a white paper on how to "build a new foundation for financial regulation and supervision". The 85-page summary suggests:
New powers for the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange