The U.S. Supreme Court held yesterday that the National Football League may not escape antitrust scrutiny by claiming it functions as a "single entity". Am. Needle Inc. v. Nat'l Football League No. 08-861 (U.S. May 24, 2010).
The NFL theorized that the ban under section 1 of the Sherman Act on contracts, combinations, and
Today the Seventh Circuit rapped the idea that consumer fraud cases never qualify for class treatment.
The panel affirmed certification of two classes of people who bought defective windows, which let water seep in and somehow promoted wood rot. That decision of the class issues won't resolve all issues didn't bar certification, the court held.
Blawgletter starts a jury trial on Monday, May 17.
Expect spotty posting for awhile.
The Third Circuit held today, 6-4, that courts must decide whether to enforce a class ban in arbitration clauses. Courts may not defer the question to arbitrators because, the majority ruled, the unconscionability or not of a contractual bar to class treatment raises an issue of "arbitrability", which the federal Arbitration Act leaves to judges.
Does a contingent fee give lawyers too much control over public nuisance cases?
Or can public entities control the lawyers enough to prevent abuse of the governmental power they wield?
The Supreme Court of California heard argument on those questions this week (finally). Kimberley Kralowec at The UCL Practitioner gives us a blow-by-blow.
The Rhode
Tech firms like Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM urge us to compute in the cloud.
What cloud, you say? The Internet, Blawgletter replies.
You can store vast amounts of information in the Internet cloud — millions of pages of your clients' documents, for instance. The info resides, electronically, on a physical server somewhere. You
The New York Times published a fascinating article yesterday about fees in mega-bankruptcies — your Lehman Bros., your Washington Mutuals, and your General Motors, to name a few.
Compare Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, "Who Knew Bankruptcy Paid So Well?" with "How Susman Godfrey Handles Cases".
Holden Caulfield misheard a word in the song "Comin Through the Rye" — "catch" a body instead of "meet" a body — and so wanted to stand between a cliff and children heading towards it, unawares, through a field of rye and catch them before they could tumble off and down. See Catcher in
Today the U.S. Supreme Court broke 5-3 in favor of a rule against class arbitration.
The majority held that an arbitration panel exceeds its authority under the federal Arbitration Act when it construes an agreement to arbitrate as allowing class treatment of a dispute unless the agreement shows the parties intended to permit such a
An 11-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit today upheld certification of a sex discrimination case against Walmart. Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., No. 04-16688 (9th Cir. Apr. 26, 2010).
Chief Judge Kozinski and Circuit Judge Ikuta filed dissents.