Regulation

In a recent decision, the NY Court of Appeals handed down a decision with a new interpretation of the law of liquidated damages with regard to surrender agreements. Trustees of Columbia v. D'Agostino rewrites the rules of when a tenant simply gives up on the space.

The back-and-forth is certainly confusing, but what is clear is that it can be unclear exactly where the line between real property and personal property should be drawn.

Wall Street has greeted Gary Gensler's nomination as Chair of the SEC with some trepidation, perhaps with good reason. Congress, by contrast, may have presented him with a powerful signing bonus.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive budget proposal includes plans for a comprehensive data privacy law that rather than bring more clarity to an increasingly fragmented U.S. privacy landscape, could place even more strain on corporate legal departments attempting to get a handle on compliance.

The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.

By further expanding access to a streamlined Chapter 11 process, the SBRA will ensure that a wider array of debtors have the ability of reorganizing themselves, when Chapter 11 was previously too cost-prohibitive for such debtors.

The holding in Blaszczak significantly widens the scope of criminal insider trading. It also creates the anomaly of extending the criminal law beyond the SEC's civil enforcement authority.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is the sort of broadly worded criminal statute which gives white-collar prosecutors considerable power — and makes defense counsel and judges uneasy. The meaning of "or exceed[ing] authorized access" is not so clear.