Delivering a blow to bloggers' rights, a federal appeals court has ruled that a Washington state teacher's blog attacking co-workers, the union and the school district was not protected speech, and therefore she was not unlawfully demoted over it.
Are labels on commercial products, which can be seen worldwide, synonymous to the pages of print publications, which can linger in public sight for days or years?
The Court of Appeals of Ohio, Eighth District, affirmed an order to compel the production of documents from trademark lawyers for John Malm, former manager of musician Trent Reznor, for use in litigation between Malm and his counsel from an earlier suit that Reznor had filed against Malm.
When the cash-strapped recording industry announced at the end of 2008 that it would largely drop its aggressive litigation campaign against unauthorized file sharers, some observers saw this as a defeat for record labels. But numerous court rulings have been issued over the past few years that debate and/or establish legal guidelines that will be referenced in file-sharer cases that are either still in the pipeline or may later crop up. This article examines some of the most recent of these cases and decisions.
Recently, two federal courts rejected certification in three putative "medical monitoring" class actions that were brought against E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company in West Virginia and New Jersey. These are significant rulings in the still developing field of "medical monitoring," and indicate the limits of class certification based on medical monitoring theories of recovery
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
