7/14/2015 A week after reaching a settlement agreement with six Occupy Wall Street Protesters for conduct that occurred in the early days of the 2011 protest; New York City agreed on Monday to give the Estate of Eric Garner $5.9 million. Garner was killed last July in Staten Island after being detained by police after
7/9/2015 On Wednesday, Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia has affirmed the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s 2-1 decision last year that the Washington Redskins’ nickname and logo are offensive to Native Americans. Last year, the board voted that the trademark violated terms of the Lanham Act, which
7/8/2015 Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced in a Tuesday press release that his office will be joining 26 other states who have filed four separate lawsuits since last month over rule changes regarding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement of the Clean Water Act. The legal fight is essentially a territorial battle over which
7/7/2015 The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled against Amazon on Monday by allowing a lawsuit over misleading search results to proceed in Los Angeles federal court. By a split 2-1 decision, the judicial panel ruled that specialty watchmaker Multi Time Machine (MTM) can pursue its trademark infringement suit against the
7/7/2015 New York City has agreed to pay six Occupy Wall Street protestors between $52,500 and $60,000 each, totaling $332,500 in a settlement over being illegally pepper sprayed by police in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The incident happened in the early days of the original September, 2011 anti-inequality protest, when police Deputy Inspector, Anthony Bologna, was
7/3/2015 In a joint press conference, the attorneys general for Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi announced that it has agreed to settle the penalty phase regarding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The spill occurred on April 20th, 2010, when the aforementioned oil rig caught fire, killing 11 people and sent over 3 million barrels of
7/2/2015 In what may be the largest whistleblower lawsuit ever, the Justice Department, along with 11 states, are accusing Swiss pharmaceutical titan, Novartis, of running a massive kickback scheme through the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid programs. Specifically, the U.S. is accusing the drugmaker of referring patients to a handful of specialty pharmacies who sent in
6/30/2015 It seems every few years or so, the specter of tort reform appears in the halls of Congress to test the political winds. Last week, while the winds of freedom emanated from the Supreme Court steps and the air from dozens of collective exhales from the White House over the ACA, the ghost of
6/29/2015 After a historic week in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to legalize gay marriage, as well as delivering a decision that will likely entrench Obamacare as the law of the land, the Court handed President Obama a major defeat to his environmental agenda. On the last day of the Court’s session, it ruled
6/28/2015 On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington D.C. blocked a proposed merger between the U.S.’s two largest food-distribution companies, U.S. Foods and Sysco. Citing antitrust concerns, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with ten state attorney generals’ offices sued the companies in February. The companies announced interest in a merger in December,