After a week of intense speculation, embattled Auburn quarterback Cam Newton took the field and played Saturday. The Heisman Trophy front-runner dominated, rushing for 148 yards, throwing for 151 and accounting for four touchdowns in the Tigers’ 49-31 victory. No. 2 Auburn (11-0) moved one step closer to a possible BCS National Championship Game appearance. But the Cam Newton news, as we all know, was not all on the field....
Volkswagen has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and settle the federal investigation into its “clean diesel” emissions fraud – for $4.3 billion in civil and criminal penalties. That comes on top of the nearly $15 billion the company has agreed to pay to consumers, making VW’s emissions scandal perhaps the most costly corporate scandal ever. But that’s hardly the end of things for VW. Last week, six executives were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, and violations of the Clean Air Act – and more prosecutions could be coming, implicating even the company’s in-house attorneys....
A California appeals court has refused to enjoin Prop 14, the open primary law that California voters approved in June 2010. Prop 14 critics claim that the court’s decision signals the end of independent-candidate viability in California elections by demonstrating a preference for qualified party candidates. Last year, California voters tossed traditional party primaries in favor of one open primary for a number of state and federal elected positions, referred to in the measure and legislation as “voter-nominated” offices....
Two Pop Warner coaches are accused of offering bounties to their 10- and 11-year-old players to make big hits and knock out opponents during games. Coach Darren Crawford and assistant coach Richard Bowman of the Red Cobras football team in Tustin, Calif., allegedly offered cash for hits during the team’s undefeated 2011 season, reports The Orange County Register. This “scandal” allegedly occurred four months before we heard about the New Orleans Saints’ bounty scandal that rocked the NFL....
Traveling on an airplane requires passengers to obey various rules and instructions. So, when a flight attendant instructs you to do something, or cease doing something, you obey. After all, disobeying a flight attendant can result in anything from being kicked off a flight to fines from the Federal Aviation Administration to jail time, depending on the circumstances. How Did This Happen? It’s unclear why the flight attendant required the family to put their dog in the overhead bin....
Egypt, always the newsmaker, has made headlines for providing their Olympic athletes with fake Nike knockoffs as official training gear. Synchronized swimmer Yomna Khallaf tweeted that the training gear provided by the Egyptian Olympic Committee wasn’t actually Nike. The bags had the Nike logo but they also had Adidas-labeled zippers, according to her tweet. Somehow it seems unlikely that the supplier intended to provide two brands rolled into one. The Egyptian government has now admitted that the gear provided was counterfeit and Khallaf reports that athletes will be getting real Nike gear for the Olympic Games....
In plaintiffs’ products liability suit against defendant for manufacturing shower pans that allegedly resulted in water damage, trial court’s order denying class certification is affirmed as the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it found class certification inappropriate as there was substantial evidence from which the court could have concluded that the sole common issue did not predominate over individualized questions of damages, and there is substantial evidence from which the court could have concluded that the proposed plaintiffs did not adequately represent the interests of the class....
Charlotte School of Law’s food drive brings new meaning to the phrase, “starving students.” The embattled law school is in fact holding a food drive for its own students. Since the Department of Education cut off student funds to the school last month, some students literally cannot afford to buy food. “How can we be prepared for class when we can’t feed ourselves?” said third-year student Margaret Kocaj. “How can we study when we have headaches because we can’t afford to eat?...
D.C. is a scrappy jurisdiction, which isn’t surprising considering that it houses thousands of politicos, but has no voice in Congress. D.C. overcompensates. For years, the District famously banned handguns. The Supreme Court overturned that ban in the 2008 case, D.C. v. Heller, finding that the Second Amendment does not permit “absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.” The District responded to Heller by implementing new laws requiring handgun registration and background checks, and banning semiautomatic rifles and magazines with more than 10 rounds....
The ‘casting couch’ was just part of the furniture in Hollywood long before Harvey Weinstein soiled the industry. Weinstein’s behaviour has been an open secret so long they joked about it at the Oscars years ago: “Congraulations to you five ladies who no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein,” Seth MacFarlane said, and everybody laughed. Of course, it’s not funny anymore. Sexual harassment is not funny, and neither is keeping secrets about it....
It’s safe to say that the tide of public perception of sports gambling has turned in the last ten or twenty years. With the rise of fantasy sports and March Madness, the image of placing bets on sporting events has changed from seedy mob-affiliated bookies to Karen from accounting throwing a few bucks into an office pool. And states, perhaps eyeing the money to be made from legalized sports betting, have begun pushing back on the federal restrictions on gambling....
Miss San Antonio Dominique Ramirez, 17, was stripped of her crown after she was allegedly told that she needed to “lay off the tacos” during a bikini photo shoot. Sad, as nobody likes jabs to be made about their weight - especially during something as skin-baring and revealing as a bikini shoot. Officially, pageant authorities claimed that Ramirez lost her crown because she was insubordinate, reports USA Today. After all, pageant queens are supposed to be all smiles and niceness (and sugar and spice), with a truly strong wish to end hunger and create world peace....
There’s been a lot of criticism of courtroom fashion in recent years, but little has been said about lawyer fashion outside of work. A recently aired episode of TLC’s guilty pleasure What Not to Wear demonstrates just this point. Hosts Stacy and Clinton ambushed Sarah, a then-2L from Nashville School of Law. What she wore at the courthouse wasn’t necessarily inappropriate for a cash-strapped law student. But what she wore on a day-to-day (and nightly) basis?...
By now, we all know that you shouldn’t just out-and-out lie on your resume. You shouldn’t make up a university or a job experience; employers can easily find out about those. But what about taking a little bit of poetic license with your job descriptions? Like inflating the importance of a job you had? Your goal as a resume embellisher is to make the interviewer think that you did something much more important than you did, without ever saying specifically what you did....
Navigating normal litigation when insurance adjusters are involved can be complicated, but most attorneys don’t struggle too much with making adjusters fall in line … or suffer. But when it comes to bad faith insurance litigation, that’s a whole different matter, and a whole different area of law, for that matter. Not only are the claims complex, but issues surrounding assignments of rights, or even coverages, can quickly expose those litigators who have no business pressing forward with a bad faith insurance case....
Icons from Steve Jobs to Mike Ditka have done it; perhaps Johnny Cash did it best. There is something primeval about flipping the bird, like it was the first, finest, and most simple and complete insult we ever learned and we have yet to find one better. The middle finger’s wordless punch transcends linguistic barriers and leaves no doubt as to its intent. It is speech, perfected. Does that make it perfectly legal?...
17-Year-Old Junior Puts the ‘High’ into High School Assembly Stoners often use the word “epic” to describe a noteworthy event. And “chutzpah” is derived from a Hebrew word for audacity. If you could combine the two (and you can’t, trust us) you would get the only word that could accurately describe the actions of a student at a high school near Tacoma, Washington this week. At a Peninsula High School assembly, while his peers were likely sending no-look text messages to each other in the bleachers and dreaming up their next clever Facebook status update, a junior giving a speech on the legalization of marijuana drove his point home by lighting up a joint....
Look, we’re not saying the New York Jets are a good football team or even an above-average one. The team hasn’t made the playoffs since 2010, and has been the butt of jokes for years. In fact, you probably shouldn’t ever watch the Jets – not if they show up on ESPN highlowlights; not if they’re playing against your favorite team; not even if you’ve been a lifelong fan. What we are saying is that, from a strictly legal standpoint, “I drank too much because the Jets suck!...
In plaintiff’s case against the defendant for misappropriation of its trade secrets of an anti-viral protein based therapeutic used as a daily nasal spray for the prevention and treatment of the common cold, plaintiff’s petition for a writ of mandate to compel the trial court to accept plaintiff’s trade secret identification statement as sufficient and to allow it to commence discovery is denied where: 1) the trial court applied the correct legal standard to plaintiff’s trade secret identification statement; and 2) there was a basis in the record to support the court’s conclusion that the statement was not reasonably particular under the circumstances presented....
Trial court order denying petition to compel arbitration of the wrongful death action brought by adult children heirs of the deceased is affirmed where: 1) the court correctly concluded the adult children cannot be compelled to arbitrate their wrongful death claims as California’s wrongful death statute does not create a derivative action and thus the deceased lacked authority to bind the wife or adult children to the physician-patient arbitration agreement he signed; and 2) the issue of whether the deceased’s wife was bound to the arbitration agreement cannot be revisited as she failed to appeal from the court’s order compelling arbitration of her claim....
