by Paul Alan Levy The major ruling of the day: Circuit Judge Denny Chin, sitting as a trial judge because he retained the case after being promoted to the Second Circuit, has granted summary judgment rejecting the Authors Guild’s copyright claims against Google’s program of scanning books into digital form and both offering the digital […]
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Jeff posted earlier about settlement of the Mt. Holly case shortly before argument in the Supreme Court. The case presented the question whether disparate impact claims may be brought under the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits housing discrimination (or, on the other hand, whether plaintiffs must show intentional discrimination to prevail under the Act). There […]
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Mississippi ex rel. Hood v. AU Optronics Corp., which presents the question whether a state’s parens patriae suit may be removed as a “mass action” under the Class Action Fairness Act when the state is the sole plaintiff, the claims arise under state law, and the state […]
Lawyers for consumers and other plaintiffs have long complained that the Supreme Court's cases making summary judgment and dismissal easier to obtain have had adverse effects on their clients. That's not surprising. (For instance, it is the plaintiff who will be on the losing end of a successful motion to dismiss.) Now, law professors Kevin […]
An NPR economic reporter sent an online request for a $500 payday loan to see what happened. So what happened? A barrage of contacts, by phone and email, seeking to lend her all kinds of amounts, as high as ten times the amount she asked for, and at interest rates as high as 1300%. But […]
That is the name of this article by law professor Mark Moller. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court’s 2011 decision, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, drew heavily on the work of the late Professor Richard Nagareda. In a series of seminal articles, Professor Nagareda urged courts to treat class action procedure as a handmaiden […]
As this article from late last week explains, a new study of the effects of the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act finds that the Act is saving consumers more than $20 billion dollars a year by placing limits on certain credit card company practices that could lead to surprise fees for […]
According to this article by Jenna Greene, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been targetting lawyers in its enforcement suits. Here's an excerpt: The agency has filed more lawsuits against lawyers than almost any other group, according to an analysis by The National Law Journal, bringing six suits against legal services providers. Only the banking […]
We have blogged about the "company Doe" suit a couple times, including here. That's the case in which a company sued to block the inclusion of a product report in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's publicly available, web-accessible database about potentially dangerous products. The district court permitted the company to litigate in secret and under […]
On Friday, we told you about FDA's proposal to authorize generic drug manufacturers to update labels to provide new warnings, just like brand-name manufacturers have been authorized to do since 1982. Janet Woodcock, the head of FDA's drug research and evaluation division, has written an essay in FDA Voice explaining why the agency wants the […]