Category Archives: Uncategorized

New York’s highest court throws out New York City’s ban on the sale of large sugary drinks

The New York Court of Appeals — New York's highest court — today threw out the New York City Board of Health's ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. The ban was a significant component of former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's fight against obesity. Read the court's 4-2 decision and Michael Grynbaum's article about […]

Auto safety and other consumer groups petition the FTC to take action against CarMax for claiming its used cars are safe, but failing to fix safety recalls before marketing them

Eleven auto safety and other consumer groups have petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking the agency to take enforcement action against the major national used-car seller CarMax. The groups say that CarMax claims its cars go through a rigorous safety inspection but that, in fact, CarMax does not fix defects that are the subject […]

Arbitration in the Supreme Court and error correction

Law professor Christopher Drahozal has written Error Correction and the Supreme Court's Arbitration Docket. Here is the abstract: Supreme Court Justices from William Taft to Stephen Breyer have repeated the maxim that the “Supreme Court is not a court of error correction.” When it comes to arbitration law, however, a number of the Court’s cases […]

Supreme Court rules in key securities case

The Supreme Court held this morning in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, No. 13-317 (June 23, 2014), that the presumption of shareholder reliance in private securities-fraud class actions established by the Court in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1985), should not be overruled. It agreed, however, with the defendant Haliburton that […]

Supreme Court reinstates First Amendment claim of public employee fired for court testimony

In a unanimous opinion today in Lane v. Franks, the Court held that an employee who was fired by a public employer for giving subpoenaed judicial testimony about his state-funded program could maintain a claim for First Amendment retaliation. The key issue in the case was whether testifying was part of the employee's job responsibilities […]

When tribes team up with payday lenders, who profits?

…is the subtitle of this Al Jazeera America piece on the use of tribal sovereign immunity to shield payday lenders from the reach of consumer protection laws (while, incidentally, providing little benefit to the tribes themselves). As the article explains: Tribal sovereignty allows the rancherias’ businesses to claim immunity from state usury laws, making them […]