Five members of the U.S. Supreme Court must think that class actions do nothing but bad.
They must believe that Rule 23, which allows class actions, rots the moral fiber of our citizens.
That it stands as an insult to our noble but fragile job-creators, who respond by withholding their business genius and in their
Justice Elena Kagan capped her 9-0 outing in Bowman v. Monsanto Co., No. 11-796 (U.S. May 12, 2013) (post here), with another unanimous ruling in Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter, No. 12-135 (U.S. June 10, 2013). She sure can write.
The Court held that the federal Arbitration Act required it to
The Sixth Circuit split with the Second and Ninth Circuits today on what a plaintiff must plead under section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 in cases that involve opinions, views, and other "soft" info.
The panel looked at a claim that Omnicare violated Section 11 by publicly stating its judgment that its drug-care
The wise thing for me to say . . . is that I don't have evidence to contradict it.
David Ingram, "Q&A: Plaintiffs' Lawyer Barry Barnett on the Comcast class action", Thomson Reuters News & Insight, May 13, 2013 (referring to "the academic study spotlighted in The New York Times that found
At the end of the one of the Best Movies Ever, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) drives with her young daughter towards safety down a Los Angeles street. Will they escape? Yes, we think they just might!
A Los Angeles police lieutenant (Perry Lopez) steps onto the pavement. He aims his pistol and fires. Mulwray's car
NYU Law School Professor Richard A. Epstein — "an advocate of minimal legal regulation" and "one of the most influential legal thinkers of modern times" — thinks the U.S. Supreme Court got its ruling wrong in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, No. 11-864 (U.S. Mar. 27, 2013) (post here).
Leaving to one side the
Today the Supreme Court, by 5-4, reversed a ruling that upheld certification of an antitrust case against Comcast as a class action. The majority disagreed with the district court and court of appeals on whether the plaintiffs' damages model showed class-wide losses from Comcast's efforts to thwart "overbuilder" competition in the Philadelphia area.
Justice Scalia wrote the
Standing nearby when what our banker friends call a liquidity event takes place can result in an influx of wealth. Who doesn't want that.
The opposite feeling takes hold for what we'll refer to as liability events. These usually involve the disappearance of money that belongs to Other People. Bankers like to distance themselves in those instances.
Sometimes
We've known at least since Bell Atl. Co. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), that competitors can engage in parallel conduct — charging the same price, offering the same product features, setting identical contract terms — without running afoul of the Sherman Act. A plaintiff claiming a violation of section 1, which bars conspiracies
The legal landscape for class actions has gotten harder for plaintiffs to cross in the last decade or so. Today it got no worse. And plaintiffs and their counsel rejoice at that.
In Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, No. 11-1085 (U.S. Feb. 27, 2013), the Court ruled 6-3 that a