Seems like Harvard faker Adam Wheeler hasn’t learned his lesson. The 25-year-old was convicted of fraud last year for lying his way into the Ivy League. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail and 10 years of probation, but only served 1 month in jail. Now it looks like he’ll be serving a few more. Wheeler was arrested last week and has admitted to portraying himself as a Harvard student....
An Ohio man has been wearing an “idiot” sign in public this week, pursuant to a judge’s order. It seems “public shaming” is now a sign of the times. Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Pinkey Carr ordered Richard Dameron, 58, to stand outside a local police station with a sign bearing an apology to “all police officers for being an idiot.” The sign also says, “I’m sorry and it will never happen again....
Mark Gamar died when police nudged his car into a street pole during a high-speed chase. He was the passenger. His mother sued the City of Gardena for negligence and wrongful death, but the city won based on a state law that says police are immune if they receive annual training on police pursuits. In Ramirez v. City of Gardena, the California Supreme Court affirmed. It came down to the difference between police actually being trained and just saying they are....
If you get cases from the National Attorney Referral Service, you may want to start turning them down. According to reports, the referral service has been paying police for accident reports to get a jump on personal injury cases. Richard Burton, owner of the company, has been charged with conspiracy and bribery in Chicago. Two officers, who allegedly accepted $13,350 for the crash reports, have also been indicted. That’s right gentlemen, step away from the car....
Conviction of defendant for making criminal threats is affirmed as the trial court was acting within its discretion in denying defendant’s Pitchess motion to the extent that it made a common sense determination that defendant’s version of events was not plausible based on a reasonable and realistic assessment of the facts and allegations. Read People v. Sanderson, No. E047284 [HTML] Read People v. Sanderson, No. E047284 [PDF] Appellate Information Filed February 9, 2010...
When it comes to labor regulations, farm workers are in a class by themselves – a class that largely exempts them from normal minimum wage, child labor, and overtime laws. But even that class has subclasses, which privilege certain types of agricultural work over others. If you’re a prune dryer in California, for example, state regulations entitle you to more overtime than if you’re simply a prune picker. And those regulations have a bit of a bite, as two farmers learned on Tuesday in California’s Third Appellate District court....
The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed a $300 million attorney fee award to two firms involved in a corporate takeover deal. This award is one of the largest awards of attorney fees ever and came to represent a billing rate of roughly $35,000 per hour worked or 66 times the value of plaintiffs’ lawyers time and expenses, reports The Wall Street Journal. While these rates may seem outrageous, a Delaware judge got behind the backs of the much maligned attorneys – and their attorney fees – and basically said haters should stop hating....
Saying your class-action is largely settled is like saying you’re a little pregnant. But that’s the status in the proposed settlement of a high-profile invasion of privacy case. Twitter, Yelp, Instagram and others have agreed to pay $5.3 million to people who used their apps only to discover that their contacts had been uploaded through “Find Friends” and similar features. Only problem is, “Find Friends” is a feature on iPhones as well, and Apple is not settling....
In what is certainly not a puzzling display in some hokey ‘believe it or not’ museum, West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry has just been charged with 22 criminal charges, including one count for taking a historic desk home with him from work. Other charges include several varieties of fraud and false statements, as well as witness tampering. It is alleged that he misused “Supreme Court vehicles” and used his government credit card to fill up that car....
A Florida man known for donning a “naked woman” apron has been barred from his city’s farmer’s market for wearing the suggestive covering. The city of Lake Mary, Florida, told part-time book vendor Tom Levine to lose his apron, which is painted to resemble a naked woman with bare breasts and a flower obscuring her nethers. But days later, he was told he could no longer attend the city’s weekly farmers market....
The California State Legislature passed, and Governor Brown signed, more than 800 new laws in 2015, covering everything from physician-assisted suicide, to minimum wage, to beer-tastings at farmers’ markets. As is often the case, most of those new laws went into effect at the stroke of midnight, January 1st, 2016. Here’s a quick overview of some of the most significant new laws and how they might affect your life and your legal practice....
A recent decision out of California’s First Appellate District could open the door for benefit reductions for public sector pensions, Bloomberg reports. In that case, the court upheld a 2013 law changing pension benefits calculated in an effort to prevent “pension spiking,” or gaming the system in order to retire with an inflated pension. But, Bloomberg’s Romy Varghese notes, the court’s decision could open the door for other rollbacks, so long as the pension remains “reasonable” for workers....
After only three days of jury deliberations, the “epic” battle between Apple and Samsung over phone and tablet designs is decided. Apple is the big winner. For the last few weeks, however, the Apple and Samsung have made themselves at home in the federal courthouse in San Jose, arguing about whether Samsung copied Apple’s iPhone and iPad designs for its Galaxy phones and tablet. To recap, for anyone who has actually been living under a rock (and had no Internet connection) while these two companies litigated around the world: Apple sued Samsung for $2....
President Trump declared a national emergency to fund his border wall, but he’s facing another wall in California. In a speech at the White House, President Trump called illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border “an invasion of our country.” Soon after, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue to stop the president. Trump made up the “national emergency” to seize power and to subvert the Constitution, the governor said....
In a labor dispute between firefighter’s union and the city, trial court’s ruling allowing the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to intervene and granting its motion to dismiss the action based on the agency’s exclusive initial jurisdiction over the underlying labor dispute is reversed as, under the amended Myers-Milias-Brown Act section 3509(a), the court now has exclusive jurisdiction to determine the disputed issues in the case. Read City of San Jose v....
People can get pretty picky about their food, or rather, crabby. A couple in Connecticut was arrested this weekend after a dispute over crab legs at a buffet turned into a battle between patrons involving assault, disorderly conduct, threats, and pepper spray. The couple is out on a bail bond now and will be back in court in mid-April, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, a young man who is unrelated to them had a split lip and lost a tooth when he was hit in the face during the dispute....
The California Court of Appeal for the First District decided a case involving an attorney’s anti-SLAPP motion, validity of an arbitration award in an employment dispute, and the constitutionality and the scope of probation conditions placed upon a juvenile criminal defendant. In San Francisco Hous. Auth. v. SEIU Local 790, No. A123636, the court dealt with an order by the Superior court vacating an arbitration award in its entirety on the ground that the award is contrary to the layoff provisions in the parties’ memorandum of understanding (MOU)....
When you have to chose between sleep and work, work wins. That leaves many lawyers with huge sleep deficits. After a deadline crunch leaves you working ten hours a day or more, six days a week, many esquires try to catch up by sleeping in all weekend long. But sleeping in on days-off, it turns out, could be hazardous to your health. Keeping a Consistent Internal Clock For many associates, all nighters followed by sleep binges are the norm....
Chest-deep in problems, Florida Coastal School of Law is trying to dig out by going non-profit. As a for-profit entity, Florida Coastal had had all kinds of issues. Among them, the American Bar Association said the law school had substandard admission practices and low bar pass numbers. Changing tax status won’t solve those problems. But going non-profit is better than going broke. Non-Profit Law School Florida Coastal is one of three for-profit law schools owned by InfiLaw....
In an action against Merck, the manufacturer and marketer of Vioxx, seeking recovery for the difference in price between what the plaintiffs paid and what they would have paid for a safer, equally effective, pain reliever, trial court’s denial of plaintiffs’ motion for certification of a class action is affirmed as the decision is consistent with Tobacco II and is supported by substantial evidence where: 1) trial court did not err in concluding the individual plaintiffs’ claims were not typical of the claims of the TPPs; 2) the trial court did not err in concluding that a generic version of the drug was not a valid comparator on a class-wide basis; and 3) because the trial court concluded, on the evidence, that the issue of a proper comparator was a patient-specific issue, incorporating the patient’s medical history, treatment needs, and drug interactions, it properly concluded that restitution could not be calculated on a class-wide basis....
