Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
The wages of sin is death. What wages do you get from a Ponzi scheme?
The kind you can't access any more.
People who worked at Stanford Group Company found that out the hard way. Their employer, we now learn, paid them with proceeds of a Ponzi scheme. The Fifth Circuit held that funds they…
A federal judge asked Blawgletter a few years ago what we thought about "cy pres" (sounds like "sigh pray") payments in class actions. The judge had in mind a method of dealing with money that a class settlement or judgment produces but that for one reason or another doesn't find its way into…
The U.S. Supreme Court today reversed a Fifth Circuit decision that required plaintiffs in federal securities cases to prove "loss causation" at the class certification stage. Erica P. John Fund v. Halliburton, Inc., No. 09-1403 (U.S. June 6, 2011).
As Blawgletter noted a couple months ago, the Fifth and Seventh Circuit had…
Doesn't the whole world know that, if you publish info you regard as a trade secret, you lose any right to complain about others' use of the info?
The man who came up with a way to pack meat with zero oxygen in the package seems not to have gotten the memo. He — Dr. Gustav…
If you've tired of hearing campaign promises about tax cuts, repeal of tax cuts, extension of tax cuts, tax cuts for the middle class, tax cuts for income over $250,000 a year, and the like — relax. Let Blawgletter tell you about an entirely other subject: tax avoidance.
And not just any kind of tax…
The Seventh Circuit struck a blow last month for certifying securities fraud cases as class actions — and against the Fifth Circuit's attempt, the panel believed, "to 'tighten the requirements' for class certification" in such cases.
The court held the district court did right by rejecting the defendants' "arguments that if accepted would end the use…
May the operator of oil and gas leases drill and complete a well before it gives notice to other working interest owners of their right to participate in it?
The Fifth Circuit held last week in Bonn Operating Co. v. Devon Energy Production Co., L.P., No. 09-11040 (5th Cir. July 30, 2010) that, under…
One of Blawgletter's favorites, Infamy or Praise, goes into Some Detail about recent hits the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has taken at the hands of the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Copyright Office. Round Tuit riffs on lots of other cool stuff, too — liberal bias in our law schools, nuttiness over mentoring, and the art…
[See bottom of post for update on the Fifth Circuit's new opinion in the case.]
The software you use at work came from God knows where. Perhaps the Internet. But your copy features something the author didn't intend. Unlike the version the author sells, this one has somehow disabled the security doodad that controls access to…
Two makers of spray-tanning machines, Mist-On and Laughlin Products, sued a customer, Nouveau Body & Tan, for saying ugly things about their devices.
Bad move.
Nouveau struck back by charging Mist-On with selling it bad spray-tanners. Nouveau won a judgment against Mist-On and its president, Thomas J. Laughlin, for more than $1 million. They couldn't pay, and Mr. Laughlin…