As the national sports spotlight turns to college basketball, with its buzzer-beaters, office pools, and cinderella stories, Warren Buffett offers a fairy tale of his own: $1 billion for a perfect bracket. That's a perfect bracket — not just the best in the contest — so you have to pick more than five dozen games […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
The New York Times explains: As part of the $25 billion national mortgage servicing settlement two years ago, California and other states won a portion for home loan counseling and other educational services to help troubled homeowners avoid foreclosure. Kamala Harris, the state’s attorney general, secured the funds after long and tense negotiations with the […]
It may sound like something from House of Cards, but it appears (or it has been alleged, at the very least) that the CIA is now hacking the U.S. Senate. Here's the Post's lede describing the speech on the Senate floor today by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California: The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee […]
At SXSW, by video conference. You can watch the conversation here. The technology is a little glitchy but one can hardly blame him — he's appearing through "seven proxies," notes the ACLU's Ben Wizner, who moderated the discussion — and the content makes up for the image quality.
For reasons we've discussed many times before, class actions are important and powerful tools for holding bad actors accountable. But sometimes the settlements they produce aren't as beneficial to class members as one would hope. For an useful and accessible discussion of the types of problems that can arise in some class action settlements, check […]
As reported by the Guardian and other news outlets, Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation is going to great lengths to keep Pennsylvania environmental activist Vera Scroggins out of sight and out of earshot. So much so that the company obtained an injunction barring Scroggins not only from Cabot-owned properties but also all properties in the […]
The question before the Court in Lawson v. FMR LLC was whether the whistleblower protection of Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 applies only to employees of public corporations or also to the employees of contractors with those corporations. Contractors' employees are included, ruled the Supreme Court today, in a 6-3 decision that did not split along […]
Despite her history of backing measures on the leading edge of the conservative agenda (such as the controversial immigration law S.B. 1070, later invalidated in part by the Supreme Court), Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer yesterday vetoed a bill that would have permitted discrimination against LGBT customers by business owners who cited religious reasons for […]
Today the Supreme Court refused the City of Burbank's request to rehear Dahlia v. Rodriguez, in which the en banc Ninth Circuit reinstated the claim of a Burbank police officer who was suspended for reporting that his fellow officers were beating suspects — a victory for the First Amendment and for public oversight of law […]
Following up on our recent coverage of the FCC's efforts to promote net neutrality (see here and here), it's worth noting this Washington Post analysis of a recent deal between Comcast and Neflix. The headline is a good summary: "Comcast’s deal with Netflix makes network neutrality obsolete."