Scene: A gun range. Snappy fires a G31 .357. Bitey watches.
Bitey: Hey Snaps. Did you ever wonder if people who play video games also own guns? I mean more than other people?
Snappy: [Pow, pow, pow.]
Bitey: Good shot! What about mentally ill people? Do lots of them own guns?
Snappy: [Pah-ya.]
Bitey: How about people with
You don't get to meet the Chief Judge of a U.S. Court of Appeals every day. Unless perhaps you work for her or belong to his nuclear family.
Blawgletter had the honor of having a visit with Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, who presides over the Second Circuit, at our firm's open house last week in
The Third Circuit came out last week with a 200-page rumination on the post-Twombly plausibility of conspiracies under section 1 of the Sherman Act (and the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). In re Ins. Brokerage Antitrust Litig., No. 07-4046 (3d Cir. Aug. 16, 2010).
The court upheld dismissal of hub-and-spoke conspiracy claims that
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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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