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 […]
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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."
by Deepak Gupta Despite an unusually full-throated public-relations campaign and amicus effort by the tort-reform lobby, the Supreme Court this morning turned aside three petitions for certiorari from the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits concerning the propriety of class certification in cases alleging that moldy washing machines sold to consumers were defective. Today's denial is […]
We have covered extensively (for instance, here, here, and here) the ban on the sale of large, sugary drinks by New York City's health department. A state-law-based challenge to the ban by merchants and others succeeded in a New York trial court and an intermediate court of appeals. But last October New York's highest court […]
by Brian Wolfman The popular "cloud" storage service Dropbox has added a forced, pre-dispute arbitration clause to its standard consumer contract. As explained by Adam Levitin over at Credit Slips, Dropbox's clause also bans class actions, both in court and in arbitration. What I like about Levitin's post is that it stresses that the problem with […]
The Federal Reserve just issued its most recent quarterly report on household debt and credit. Though it reviews household debt and credit of all sorts, I was interested in what it had to say about student-loan debt: • Outstanding student loan balances reported on credit reports increased to $1.08 trillion (+$53 billion) as of December […]
by Paul Alan Levy Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a moot court at Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute for the upcoming Supreme Court argument in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness, in which the Court will have the opportunity to nix the very restrictive standard applied by the Federal Circuit […]
The Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has issued orders to stop the sale and distribution of four tobacco products currently on the market. The orders are the first time that the FDA has used its authority under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to order a manufacturer to stop selling […]
Check out this thought-provoking piece of reporting from NPR about where an undergraduate student's tuition dollars go and the debate over what should be included in calculating the cost of a student's education. Depending on who's answering that question, one can view tuition as terribly inflated or — if you count financial aid subsidies and […]
by Paul Alan Levy This week Public Citizen became involved in a case pending in a trial court in Alabama, in which a lawyer is handling both a mass action and a class action against an exterminating company named A-1 Exterminating and its affiliates. Plaintiffs allege that A-1 both provides bad services and fraudulently advertising […]