Does the doctrine of functus officio — "having performed his office" — allow an arbitrator to change his award? Yes, the Second Circuit held today — if the parties agreed in advance to permit amendments. T.Co Metals, LLC v. Dempsey Pipe & Supply, Inc., No. 08-08-3894-cv(L) (2d Cir. Jan. 14, 2010).
The panel also
The Second Circuit did a brave thing today. It tossed dismissal of a price-fixing complaint that centered on "parallel" conduct — the very thing the Supremes disparaged as a basis for stating a section 1 Sherman Act claim in Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007).
The case involved allegations that major
The law gives its strivers an odd sense of reality. That goes double for those who work the courtroom.
You may put blood, sweat, and tears into a case for years, pressing to show and persuade the trier of fact that Thing A happened and that Fact A exists — and contrarily that Thing B didn't occur
The subprime residential mortgage business got much of its lending money from big banks. Wall Street in turn acquired the cash by pooling thousands of subprime mortgages into securities and selling the paper to investors.
In 2007, Lone Star bought $61 million of such securities from Barclays Bank and Barclays Capital. The deal documents
In February of last year, Blawgletter posted this item:
Got Champerty?
Often a yoke companion to maintenance, champerty means . . . what?
Our law school Black's Law Dictionary (5th ed. 1979) defines the crime as:
A bargain by a stranger with a party to a suit, by which such third person undertakes to carry on the litigation
The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 put federal courts in charge of handling all but a small group of class cases with $5 million or more at issue. CAFA did so in part by growing the scope of "diversity of citizenship" jurisdiction — which applies when people on different sides hail from different states
The Robinson-Patman Act came out of the Great Depression. It aimed to stop big department stores from using their buying power to crush mom and pop stores with lower retail prices. But its language applied broadly, barring any substantial discrimination in price.
Courts have tried to manage the reach of RPA by expansively applying statutory defenses, creating
A California court of appeals today held that a city may hire private counsel to collect taxes on a contingent fee basis without violating state law.
The case involved Anaheim's efforts to recoup tax payments from travel services, including Travelocity, Expedia, Priceline, and Orbitz. The city alleged that the travel services short-paid its local transient
The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Tyco Health Care Group on claims that it violated sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act via anticompetitive contracts and other bad acts in the market for pulse oximetry sensors and monitors. Tyco tied discounts to buying items from it and came out with a new product
You've heard about drinking and driving. A ruling today by the Eleventh Circuit involved drinking and diving.
The court held that insurance may cover quadriplegia that resulted from a dive into the Atlantic off a platform in the Bahamas. The diver, James Capone, seems to have trained for the head-first leap by imbibing fluids that induced in him a blood alcohol