Nathan Koppel at the WSJ reports that a federal grand jury indicted Melvyn Weiss yesterday on charges relating to paying securities purchasers to serve as class representatives.

The indictment comes after former partners at Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach agreed to plead guilty to making "secret payments" to people who succeeded in representing classes…

Blawgletter saw a recent headline about American companies’ welcoming of federal regulation.  We got the gist that the businesses now prefer the feds to pass nation-wide rules because the U.S. agencies demand less of them than many states do.  And federal preemption doctrine protects them from liability for transgressing state mandates.

The tragic killing this…

Ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather sued CBS and others for messing with him.  See the complaint (thanks to Scribd.com).

He wants $20 million in actuals plus $50 million in punies.

As far as Blawgletter can tell, Mr. Rather fusses that CBS got him to report a shaky story and made him a scapegoat after it shook…

The Ninth Circuit today determined that the "Filed Rate Doctrine" and federal pre-emption do not preclude all of a vintner’s antitrust claims alleging manipulation of the market for natural gas.  The court affirmed denial of summary judgment, holding that the federal regulation of natural gas prices didn’t extend to all prices and that therefore the…

Today the Eighth Circuit revived a jury’s award of actual and punitive damages against Orkin Extermination for fraudulently representing the effectiveness of a termite treatment in the home of a Hawkeye State couple.  The district court tossed the award because, it concluded, evidence of Orkin’s net worth improperly affected the compensatory award of $138,000 and…

Do you know pig Latin? 

O-Day ou-yay ow-knay ig-pay atin-Lay?

Blawgletter doesn’t either.  But some federal judges appear to ow-knay ow-hay o-tay iss-may e-thay oint-pay. 

So it happened oday-tay when a court of appeals affirmed dismissal of a complaint because, it concluded, a state court had dismissed the same claims before the plaintiffs non-suited their…

As Blawgletter noted earlier today, the Second Circuit held that the New York Stock Exchange lacks "absolute immunity" as a quasi-governmental regulator if it makes false representations about securities trading.  The en banc Eleventh Circuit reached the same conclusion, 12-1, with respect to another securities exchange, the NASDAQ.  The complaint alleged that NASDAQ deviated…

On the day after reports of William Lerach’s impending guilty plea, he prevailed for his clients in an appeal from an order dismissing a securities fraud complaint.  The Second Circuit today upheld the district court’s conclusion that the New York Stock Exchange enjoyed absolute immunity for missteps as a quasi-governmental regulator of securities traders.  But…