Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
Blawgletter's favorite source of business news — The Wall Street Journal – today presents a longish item on antitrust enforcement — "U.S. Trustbusters Try to Reclaim Decades of Lost Ground".
The piece notes three recent cases in which the Supreme Court has lately rejected antitrust claims (Trinko, Twombly, and Leegin).…
Backdating an employee''s option to buy stock at a certain price tends to guarantee that the optionee will make money. It also defeats the usual purpose of granting the option — to give the worker an extra incentive to help the company do better financially.
Apple backdated 6,500 options over a five year period (1997-2002). It later decided to reclassify…
The head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, Christine Varney, has done a lot to change the Division's orientation on enforcement of Sherman Act section 2, which makes monopolization and attempts to monopolize unlawful. A big step involved withdrawing the section 2 "report" that the AD issued under Ms. Varney's predecessor. She has also joined with…
The Second Circuit today upheld dismissal of securities law complaints against Morgan Stanley for misleading disclosures about a couple of mutual funds. In the course of saying why, the court noted:
Although plaintiffs use the term "Chinese Wall," we use the term "Information Barrier" and intend it to have the same meaning.
The Seventh Circuit today resolved an issue that only one sister court — the Eleventh Circuit — had decided. Both agreed that the Class Action Fairness Act doesn't kill federal court jurisdiction over a putative class action once the "putative" label vanishes due to an anti-class action ruling under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules…
The Federal Communications Commission has for many years given Comcast and other gigantic cable operators a pass on their duty to license their programming to competing multiple video programming distributors, specifically digital broadcast satellite outfits such as DirecTV and DISH.
But the FCC has also fussed that Comcast, et al., may have done bad by withholding…
Please, please, please! Can't Blawgletter just give you a summary of the business law cases the federal courts of appeals decided today? If not, read no further. If so . . . well, you know what to do.
…
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 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…