Arthur Bryant of Public Justice has this post, entitled Access to Justice At Stake with Federal Rules Changes, about “the critical importance of the Federal Rules process” and the importance of fair rules to ensure access to the civil justice system. [Note, 6/5/14 – The link is not currently working. Seems to be a problem […]

by Brian Wolfman In Eubank v. Pella Corporation, No. 13-2091 (June 2, 2014), Judge Richard Posner makes so many useful points about class-action settlements that it's not sensible to try to summarize them here. Read the opinion for yourself! Just one point for now: As I've mentioned before, class-action settlement proponents often argue that one […]

The federal Food & Drug Administration has launched what it's calling Open FDA. Here's how the agency is describing its new program: OpenFDA is specifically designed to make it easier for web developers, researchers, and the public to access and use the many large, important, health data sets collected by the agency. These publicly available […]

by Paul Alan Levy The DC Court of Appeals has reversed the denial of a special motion to quash a subpoena seeking to identify the anonymous defendant in a defamation action.  The suit, Burke v. Doe, was brought by  lawyer Susan Burke, who complained that her Wikipedia entry had been modified to include false statements relating […]

Read about it here. For more information, click on this link to an ABC news report or on the embedded video below. Under the new FDA regs, tanning beds must have a black-box warning about cancer risks and saying that minors should not use them. (A black-box warning is the most serious FDA warning, usually […]

by Paul Alan Levy In an intriguing ruling last week granting relief by consequence of a default judgment, a federal judge in Nevada engaged in a fair amount of sua sponte analysis in paring down the relief sought against the operator of a web site that hosts reviews of colleges and universities.  The opinion included […]

That's the question asked by law professor Ann Hodges in Trilogy Redux: Using Arbitration to Rebuild the Labor Movement. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court is in the midst of a revolution in arbitration jurisprudence comparable to that reflected in the Steelworkers Trilogy in 1960. While the Trilogy was hailed as a major accomplishment […]

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday issued a report on the “fundamental lack of transparency” in the data broker industry. The FTC’s press release provides a good summary: The report, “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability” is the result of a study of nine data brokers, representing a cross-section of the industry, undertaken by […]

Health insurers that were originally wary of participating in the Affordable Care Act's "exchanges" now are changing their tune, seeing the Act as an opportunity for new business, as explained in this article by Reed Abelson.