5/26/2015 Perhaps no industry besides investment banks has been hit as hard by the federal court system than tobacco over the past several years. A pair of recent appeals rulings, however, indicates a substantial turn in the industry’s decades-long financial flogging. On Friday, the D.C. Court of Appeals delivered a mixed-ruling, in which some
5/25/2015 A lawsuit will continue in U.S. District Court in Minnesota regarding Target’s widespread 2013 pre-holiday data breach as banks rejected a $19 million settlement proposed last month. Over 40 million debit and credit cards were compromised during the breach, putting millions of cardholders’ information at risk. The settlement set aside by Target would have
5/20/2015 Baseball is a game of eternal youth, and nothing may be more evident of that than listening to 95 year-old retired Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens talk passionately about the future course of the sport. In a May 15th speech in front of the Sports Lawyers Association in Baltimore, Justice Stevens recalled his
5/19/2015 Many people were caught off-guard in 2010 by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. FEC ruling that in many ways equated the amount of political speech one was able to express by the amount of money the speaker was able to spend. The New York Times, however, notes that the Court made a similar
5/18/15 If there were any doubts about whether or not many banks broke the law while selling bad mortgages to investors or if their clients were merely victims of bad timing, Manhattan Federal Court Judge, Denise L. Cote, would like to eliminate them. Finding Japanese bank, Nomura Holdings and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)
5/15/2015 Now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has apparently survived a near coup d’etat led by Democratic Senators Harry Reid and Elizabeth Warren, pending a successful re-vote, the battle over the large-scale trade deal will soon be heading to the House of Representatives. The vote in the House may be even more troublesome for the
5/12/2015 A former sales executive for the money transfer service, Intermex, filed a lawsuit last week in Kern County Superior Court in central California, alleging that she was fired for disabling a company-required app on her phone that constantly tracked her motions. Myrna Arias, who worked at the Bakersfield-area company, claims she was fired after
5/12/2015 U.S. Justice Department lawyers presented a motion to dismiss MetLife’s suit against the government on Friday, May 8th in U.S. District Court in Washington DC. MetLife filed the suit in January, after being named by the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) as a company that is a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI), known
5/11/2015 In a decision that turns a bad situation even worse for the state of Illinois, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously declared a law to reduce the amount of pension benefits for state workers to be unconstitutional. The controversial law titled SB 1, signed in December, 2013 by then-Governor; Pat Quinn, reduced compounded cost-of-living increases
5/8/2015 Contrary to yesterday’s post regarding the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that warrantless access to phone records is not an invasion of privacy; a 3-judge panel from the 2nd Circuit ruled unanimously on Thursday, May 07th that the National Security Agency (NSA) spying program is illegal. Although both programs base their justification on