- Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler awards Three Pinocchios to prominent Senate Democrats for claiming their body is constitutionally obligated to act on a Supreme Court nomination [earlier]
- George Will argues that even though the Constitution does not constrain them to do so, there are strong prudential reasons for Senate Republicans to give nominee Merrick Garland a vote [Washington Post/syndicated] A different view from colleague Ilya Shapiro [Forbes]
- Garland is known in his rulings for deference to the executive branch; maybe this president felt in special need of that? [Shapiro on Obama’s “abysmal record” heretofore at the Court; Tom Goldstein 2010 roundup on Garland’s jurisprudence, and John Heilemann, also 2010, on how nominee’s style of carefully measured liberal reasoning might peel away votes from the conservative side]
- Litigants’ interest in controlling their own rights form intellectual underpinnings of Antonin Scalia’s class action jurisprudence [Mark Moller, first and second posts] “With Scalia gone, defendants lose hope for class action reprieve” [Alison Frankel/Reuters]
- OK for private law firms hired to collect state debt to use attorney generals’ letterhead? Sheriff v. Gillie is FDCPA case on appeal from Sixth Circuit [earlier]
- Murr v. Wisconsin raises question of whether separate incursions on more than one parcel of commonly owned land must be considered together in determining whether there’s been a regulatory taking [Gideon Kanner]
Posts Tagged ‘class actions’
Labor and employment roundup
- Immigration-related rules on the one hand, national-origin discrimination rules on the other: “Employers could get sued for following the law” [Sean Higgins, Washington Examiner]
- Should anyone doubt labor relations as an academic field tilts way left, here are numbers [Mitchell Langbert, Econ Journal Watch]
- Connecticut high court opens door to letting kids of dismissed workers sue employers for lost consortium, on top of suits filed by the parents themselves [Daniel Schwartz]
- Obama scheme to yank millions of workers off salaried status is a real economic menace [Trey Kovacs, CEI, earlier]
- Panel discussion marks 80th anniversary of National Labor Relations Act with lawprofs Richard Epstein and John Raudabaugh, Bill Samuel (AFL-CIO) and Mark Schneider (Machinists), moderated by Hon. Joan Larsen of Michigan Supreme Court [Federalist Society video, National Lawyers Conference]
- “Employment-related class action settlements hit high in 2015” [12th annual Seyfarth Shaw Workplace Class Action Litigation Report via Staffing Industry Analysts] EEOC Employee Charge trends, annual report [Hiscox, and note map on p. 4 of employee lawsuit hotspots including Illinois, California, Nevada, and New Mexico]
Class action roundup
- Justice Scalia’s death will make big difference in class action cases [Samantha Thompson, McGuireWoods via Andrew Trask]
- Manhattan Institute publishes new report in its Trial Lawyers, Inc. series, this one focusing on class actions and mass torts [James Copland and colleagues]
- Prof. Jason Johnston says House-passed class action reform would have modest effect [Chamber-backed Legal NewsLine] More on H.R. 1927, which also includes asbestos-litigation provisions and passed the House 211-188 with no Democratic votes [Mark Hofmann, Business Insurance; Republican Policy Committee]
- “The Supreme Court’s next big class action controversy: ascertainability” [Alison Frankel, Reuters on Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo]
- Texarkana forum-shopping: “Attorney files motion to dismiss class action settlement between USAA and Goodson law firm” [Benjamin Hardy, Arkansas Times, Adams v. USAA h/t Arkansas Business]
- TCPA, law that launched a thousand telemarketing class actions, might stand for “Total Cash for Plaintiffs’ Attorneys” [Adonis Hoffman, The Hill]
Update: “Judge tosses suit from caddies who claimed they were ‘human billboards'”
Following up on a post from a year ago: “Caddies lost their class-action lawsuit against the PGA Tour when a federal judge in California ruled they signed a contract with the tour that requires them to wear bibs as part of their uniform and cannot claim that corporate sponsorship on the bibs makes them human billboards.” [AP/Fox]
You profited when I solved your CAPTCHA and I want money for that
A California court has dismissed an intended class action suit against Google claiming that it reaped undeserved profit when users solved CAPTCHA letter-recognition problems that assisted in solving passages that had gone undeciphered in Google’s own OCR scanning. The ruling “reinforces [the principle] that not every asymmetrical economic benefit exchanged online must be compensated. Parties in a mutual exchange rarely get the exact same amount of value from the exchange, but the fact that one party derives more value from the exchange than the other shouldn’t create a federal case.” [Eric Goldman]
Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez: make mine moot
Can a defendant in a class action moot the whole proceeding by offering the named plaintiff the full value of his claim, thus “picking him off”? No, or at least not in the case at hand in Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday by a 6-3 margin. I discuss the case in a new post at Cato. More, Alison Frankel/Reuters, Howard Wasserman/Prawfs; earlier here and here]
December 30 roundup
- Federal Circuit court of appeals says government can’t deny trademark as “disparaging” just because it frowns on its expressive content, implications are favorable for Washington Redskins in their legal case [Eugene Volokh, Paul Alan Levy, In Re Simon Shiao Tam opinion, case won by past Overlawyered guestblogger Ron Coleman]
- Mentally ill man walks into San Diego county recorder’s office, submits properly filled-out deed transferring major sports stadium to his name, chaos ensues [San Diego Union Tribune]
- Lawsuit against prolific California class action firm includes details on how it allegedly recruits plaintiffs, shapes testimony [Daniel Fisher]
- New Jersey: “Man Sues Because Alimony Checks Were Mean To Him” [Elie Mystal/Above the Law, ABA Journal]
- Blustery Texan Joe Jamail, “greatest lawyer who ever lived” or not, was no stranger to Overlawyered coverage [Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly (“We only overpaid by a factor of five, and that felt like a win”), Daniel Fisher (city should have cut down beloved oak tree in road median because “it isn’t open season on drunks”)] Jamail’s best-known case gave me chance to write what still might be my all-time favorite headline, for a Richard Epstein article in what is now Cato’s (and was then AEI’s) Regulation magazine: “The Pirates of Pennzoil.”
- Hotel security camera footage may help decide whether Eloise tainted-sandwich tale will end up shelved as fiction [New York Post]
- Your War on Drugs: shopping at garden store, throwing loose tea in trash after brewing combine with police goofs to generate probable cause for SWAT raid on Kansas family’s home [Radley Balko] More: Orin Kerr.
Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup
- Supreme Court agrees to review CRST Vans Expedited v. EEOC (Eighth Circuit) on standard for prevailing-party fee awards in EEOC cases, could mean help for defendants against overzealous government lawyering (and thanks for quote) [Sean Higgins, Washington Examiner, earlier here and here]
- 6-3 win for arbitration and freedom of contract in DirecTV case [Deborah LaFetra/PLF, Daniel Fisher, ABA Journal] WSJ editorial: Bravo to Justice Breyer for upholding as precedent what he’d earlier dissented from on substance [Texans for Lawsuit Reform reprint]
- OK to choke off legal defense by freezing all assets before trial, even if not criminally obtained? [Radley Balko]
- South Carolina $124 million penalty against Risperdal maker should be recognized as violating Excessive Fines clause [Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer, Cato]
- “Supreme Court will review state laws making it a crime to refuse blood-alcohol tests” [ABA Journal, Reason]
- Helpless against the administrative state: revisiting SCOTUS’s awful 1944 Yakus case [James Conde and Michael Greve, SSRN via Michael Greve, Law and Liberty]
- New Akron Law Review symposium on class action jurisprudence of Roberts Court [Paul Karlsgodt]
December 16 roundup
- Judge Jed Rakoff reviews new book by Columbia lawprof John Coffee on future of class actions [New York Review of Books]
- About that “vaping could cause popcorn lung” scare: “All conventional [cigarette smoke] contains… levels of diacetyl… a lot higher than those produced by e-cigarettes.” [Michael Siegel]
- A peek inside Kinder Surprise eggs, global candy favorite that cannot lawfully be brought into the U.S. [Business Insider, earlier]
- Man’s suit against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as “too white” raises eyebrows [New York Post, ArtNet]
- Courageous: in Saudi Arabia, lawyer Waleed Abulkhair, who has represented blogger Raif Badawi, imprisoned for doing his job [Scott Greenfield]
- Lawyer’s advice: bosses face legal risk if they let their employees join in #ElderlyChristmasSongs Twitter levity [Jon Hyman]
- Current food labeling standards “provide a big nudge for people to eat less saturated fats and more carbohydrates,” contrary to what many doctors now advise [Ike Brannon, Cato]
Liability roundup
- “Definition of Insanity – Expecting Certification of a Personal Injury Class Action” [James Beck on oral contraceptive defective packaging litigation]
- “Noticed something strange. In jury selection, attorneys for two other defendants conferred with attorneys for the plaintiff.” [Madison County Record, more]
- Changes in federal discovery rules effective December 1 [Mathea Bulander and Jason Moore (Redgrave LLP), Washington Legal Foundation] More: Jeff Bennion, Above the Law.
- Eric Turkewitz takes issue with my reference to New York’s Scaffold Law in writing on Sheldon Silver’s downfall [New York Personal Injury Attorney Blog]
- Changes ahead for Rule 23, which governs class actions? [Andrew Trask]
- Behind the attacks on arbitration: plaintiff’s bar, key political player, is “fighting back hard” against threat to its interests [Daniel Fisher, earlier here, here, etc.]
- Not every hot-coffee-spill case is like Liebeck v. McDonald’s. Sometimes defendants actually are negligent [Nick Farr/Abnormal Use, earlier here and many others]