Blawgletter disdains passive voice. If you don't believe us, look here, where we said:
[P]assive voice in legal writing shows disrespect to the reader. It lengthens, complicates, and obstructs writing; it forces the reader to remember too much, to fill too many gaps, to work too hard. The audience deserves better.
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Plaintiffs who sue under section 1 of the Sherman Act must allege a contract, combination, or conspiracy that restrains competition. Some kinds of conspiracies so patently harm competition that courts presume injury and call them "per se" violations. Agreements between competitors to fix prices, not to compete for specific customers or in particular areas, and to boycott
Blawgletter laments that most cases involving the worst instances of fraud suffer from a sad but inexorable fact: the victims' money has vanished.
Just ask the people who trusted their savings to Bernie Madoff, for instance.
Judges (and, occasionally, juries) struggle with competing urges in such cases. On the one hand, they want to find a way to right the wrong.
The Fifth Circuit kept itself busy last week with Texas fraudulent inducement cases, in which Innocent Person accused Lying Person of fibbing to get IP to sign a contract with LP.
In one appeal (see post), a panel held as a matter of law that a false representation in a contract didn't count as a misrepresentation at
The subprime residential mortgage business got much of its lending money from big banks. Wall Street in turn acquired the cash by pooling thousands of subprime mortgages into securities and selling the paper to investors.
In 2007, Lone Star bought $61 million of such securities from Barclays Bank and Barclays Capital. The deal documents
Texas law gives a price break on title insurance to people who refinance their home equity loans in less than seven years. Many don't know about their right to a discount. Title insurers don't always tell them.
In Sims v. Stewart Title Guaranty Co., No. 09-10127 (5th Cir. Dec. 9, 2009), John and Lucy Mims and Helen
The Arbitration Act of 1925 set up a regime aiming to settle disputes quickly and cheaply. The system depends on courts to make it work. Courts don't do quick and cheap. Sorry.
The Fifth Circuit proved the point this week. The appeal turned on whether a district court erred by ordering a respondent in an arbitration (Old Colony) to pay $29,600 as a deposit to cover American