Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 […]

Price Controls on Payment Card Interchange Fees: The U.S. Experience

That's the name of this article by Zywicki, Manne, and Morris. Here is the abstract:  The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation capped debit card interchange fees for banks with assets of $10 billion. Credit card and prepaid card interchange fees were not regulated. The cap, which took effect on October 11, 2011, […]

Supreme Court: Despite FDA regulation of misbranded food, POM Wonderful may sue Coca-Cola under the Lanham Act for allegedly deceptive ads

Read this morning's Supreme Court 8-0 decision here. (Justice Breyer did not participate.) The first three paragraphs of Justice Kennedy's opinion sum things up nicely: POM Wonderful LLC makes and sells pomegranate juice products, including a pomegranate-blueberry juiceblend. App. 23a. One of POM’s competitors is the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid Division makes a juice […]