Have you ever heard of the McCarran-Ferguson Act? Not long ago, half a century after its passage, the statute became a low-key but key part of the healthcare reform debate.
The WWII-vintage statute, you see, generally exempts insurers from federal antitrust law. That means health (and other) insurers can collude to fix premiums, rig bids, allocate
Flyswatter by Rube Goldberg.
You've heard about the genius whose incandescent idea for a new contraption wakes him in the hours before sunup. You'll also recall Edison's cutesy statement that "[g]enius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
Both the burning thought that disturbs the inventor's slumber and the drudgery that produces the pre-dawn
The case involved NVIDIA stock, which didn't do too well.
The Ninth Circuit chided a district court today for usurping a right that the panel held belongs to the "lead plaintiff" in cases under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 — the right to choose counsel for the putative class.
The PSLRA
A man and his lawyer stand outside a building that looks like a courthouse:
Client: What's wrong? Why aren't we in court anymore?
Lawyer: I just got Twombleyed in the Iqbals.
David E. Mills, Courtoons, Oct. 23, 2009.
A panel of the Tenth Circuit today affirmed an order that denied a motion to vacate an arbitrator's award in favor of Qwest, the telephone company.
The movant, DMA International, accused the neutral of misdeeds but mainly called him dumb for reading an unclear contract such that he ruled that DMA couldn't get $3.7 million more than the $1.7
Richard Burton, as Hamlet, fussed about "the law's delay".
The Ninth Circuit spans a vastness on our spinning globe — from Window Rock, AZ, to Merizo, GM; from Border Field State Park, CA, to Barrow, AK; plus a lot in between.
The biggest U.S. court of appeals also claims, oh, nearly 30 circuit judges.
Let's not advert to the
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered today that its seven members will gather for the next argument session on November 19 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their Honors will hear from lawyers in, by Blawgletter's count, 16 potential MDL matters.
By the way, we confess to error in guessing the Panel would head south for this gathering.
A lump of bituminous coal.
Thomas Hobbes wrote awhile back that, in the state of nature, "the life of man" tends toward the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Kentuckian Merle Travis translated the Hobbesian view into the brief candle of a bituminous miner. Travis sang:
You load sixteen tons [of hard coal], what do you get? Another
Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi on August 29, 2005.
On September 23, Blawgletter reported that the Second Circuit revived a complaint that tied CO2 emissions to global warming under a public nuisance claim.
Last Friday, the Fifth Circuit reached the same result in a case arising from Hurricane Katrina. A class of Mississippi
Attorney Lionel Hutz graduated from Princeton School of Law. He seldom won and cobbled shoes to pay the bills.
The Third Circuit today affirmed orders that awarded about $567 million in "common fund" fees. The money goes to law firms that helped win $6.44 billion in settlement funds. The claims asserted that Wyeth's weight loss drugs, fen-phen (fenfluramine
