Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
Say your firm does an awesome job in a bankruptcy case. It helps the debtor come up with a plan to pay its debts, put its balance sheet in order, and emerge from Chapter 11 in near-record time.
Your firm's lodestar — hours times hourly rate — comes to $5.98 million. You ask for a $1 bonus. Only the…
Is the liberal love affair with Anthony Kennedy — which should have ended five years ago with his preposterously patronizing opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and suggesting that women are incapable of acting in their own best interests — finally over?
Linda Greenhouse, "The Mystery of John Roberts…
Does the taxing power of Congress extend federal authority beyond the reach of the commerce clause — does it let Congress do more than it could under its power to regulate commerce? Or does it just provide a way to enforce proper exercises of the commerce power (or some other source of federal power)?
A…
On this Fourth of July, let us think of our patriot farmers. Also our domestic glass-blowers, soap-makers, even people who produce feed for our critters. For all use potash — "mineral and chemical salts that are rich in potassium". And all of them fell victim to a 600 percent price increase that resulted from a…
It's an argument that's so beloved by professors, but there was not a single justice who was even interested in the tax-power argument in six hours of oral presentation. If any justice liked the tax-power theory, you would have expected to hear from her or him during the discussion of the Anti-Injunction Act.
The justices were
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By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the penalty in the Affordable Care Act for not buying health insurance as within Congress's constitutional power to tax. Nat'l Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, No. 11-393 (U.S. June 28, 2012).
The majority consisted of Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the main opinion, and…
Blawgletter has now — just now – posted 2012 times. Which means that the number of posts matches the count of years since B.C. switched to A.D. Woo-hoo!
The milestone makes us a bit giddy. We feel so giddy in fact that the latest ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court inspired us to re-think the outcome…
Blawgletter thinks we can all agree that the U.S. Supreme Court has done few favors in the last decade or two for what the folks at the American Law Institute call "aggregate litigation" — mainly class actions. What with Dukes (no class for women who work at Wal-Mart) and Concepcion (no class for AT&T wireless…
You didn't ask what Blawgletter thinks about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as its fate dangles in the well of the U.S. Supreme Court courtroom. We'll tell you just the same.
The "individual mandate" part of it (and perhaps the requirement that insurers cover all comers) will vanish in a puff of…
All nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to wipe out patents that told doctors how to tell how much of a drug to give a patient. The patents' sin? They did little more than describe a "law of nature".
Prometheus Labs held sole rights to a couple of patents. The patents dealt…