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After a brief delay, Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times is set to go to trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Feb. 3. It’s rare for a libel case against a news organization to go to trial. Most cases are dismissed long beforehand because the standard of proof for public figures is so hard to meet. The allegations are pretty straightforward. In 2017, The New York Times published an editorial about the U....

In a private cause of action brought under the Medicare Secondary Payer statute, district court judgment dismissing plaintiff’s claim is affirmed where: 1) the court properly held that plaintiff lacks standing to bring the action as he alleged no direct injury to himself and any injury he suffered as a federal taxpayer was too generalized and attenuated to constitute an actual injury to himself; and 2) the Medicare Secondary Payer statute does not create a qui tam action, but rather merely enables a private party to bring an action to recover from a private insurer only where that private party has itself suffered an injury because a primary plan has failed to make a required payment to or on behalf of it....

A recent Ninth Circuit appeal explains that just because an Arizona bank robber placed a knife on the counter during a bank robbery, that doesn’t necessarily automatically make the robbery an armed robbery. As the Ninth Circuit explained in USA v. Bain, there is a critical difference between simply having a weapon and using that weapon to commit a crime. In the case in question, the bank robber merely pulled out his folded pocket knife and placed it on the bank’s counter because a plastic bag was in the same pocket and he needed to take out the knife in order to get out his plastic bag....

As abortion bans take hold in many states, questions arise about the legality of abortion pills. “Medication abortions” became legal in the U.S. in 2000, when the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone for early non-surgical abortions up to the 10th week of pregnancies. The percentage of abortions by pills has risen steadily since then and now accounts for more than half of the total. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v....

William Bruce Jenner is a mere memory. Caitlyn Marie’s time has officially come. A Los Angeles judge today approved the name and gender change for the former track star, now best known for her gender transformation and association with the Kardashian clan. Jenner reportedly did not appear at the brief hearing, and there were no objections to the change. As of today, Caitlyn Marie Jenner can obtain a license, passport, and all official documents to reflect her new identity....

The Tenth Circuit decided matters concerning civil procedure, environmental law, and criminal procedure. Morris v. US Nuclear Reg. Comm’n., No. 07-9505, involved a petition for review of a license granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to conduct in situ leach mining for uranium on four sites in northwest New Mexico. The court of appeals denied the petition, on the grounds that 1) the clear language of 10 C.F.R. section 20....

If you live in an area of the United States where winter brings heaping mounds of snow, you know that it is essential to clear the white stuff from your roof before spring rains arrive. Clogged gutters, or even water backing up into your house, are not fun to deal with. But for many people, climbing onto the roof to shovel snow and break up ice dams or buying a roof rake to remove the snow from the ground are not an option....

Utah politics have always been a little different. From its theocratic beginnings, Utah has long been a bastion of conservatives. If you are a Democrat in Utah, you may have a hard time winning an election. So it is not too surprising that Utah’s most recent political battle is between Republicans and Republicans. In Utah Republican Party v. Cox, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals may have put an end to it – for now....

In an antitrust action alleging monopoly leveraging in an HIV drug market, the denial of summary judgment to Defendants is reversed, where allegations of monopoly leveraging through pricing conduct in two markets does not state a claim under Section 2 of the Sherman Act absent an antitrust refusal to deal in the monopoly market or below-cost pricing in the second market. Read Doe v. Abbott Labs., No. 08-17699 Appellate Information...

Great legal words come in all shapes and sizes. Take for instance the word gerrymander. You might not believe it, but the word’s origins are about as simple as they sound. It’s a portmanteau of sorts of the name Gerry and salamander. But the history of how the term came to be doesn’t trace back to Latin, Greek, or even French. The origin of the word actually doesn’t go back that far, and stems from right here in the U....

One of the great features of Facebook, for advertisers, is the ability to target people based on their location and interests. Where Facebook gets into trouble, however, is when it lets certain advertisers restrict access to ads based on gender or race. The social network has already been sued for allowing employers to exclude women and non-binary users from receiving certain job postings and accused of allowing advertisers to exclude specific groups from seeing advertisements based on “Ethnic Affinities....

In Berry v. Peterman, No. 09-3557, the Seventh Circuit faced a challenge to the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants in an inmate’s 42 U.S.C. section 1983 suit against a nurse, a doctor and jail administrator, claiming violation of his Eighth Amendment right for refusing to refer him to a dentist for a serious toothache. The court affirmed the district court’s conclusion that plaintiff has raised a genuine issue of material fact as to whether he exhausted his administrative remedies, and also the conclusion that plaintiff suffered a serious medical condition and that the jail administrator is entitled to summary judgment because he was not deliberately indifferent to plaintiff’s situation....

Judge Michael Kwan cracked a joke about President Trump, and now he is paying for it. Kwan, a longtime Utah judge, has been suspended without pay for six months because he criticized the president in court and online. It is a rare, if not unprecedented, sanction. It’s ironic, too, because the president has liberally attacked the judiciary in the past and never had to pay for it. But irony in this case came with a price tag....

To every lawyer who has been busted by a judge for missing court, this one’s for you. Brent English literally got busted when he didn’t show up for an order to show cause. He was already in trouble because he had missed the last hearing. In Clapper v. Clark Development. Judge John Adams ordered marshals to arrest the lawyer and bring him to court. In the end, however, it didn’t work out so well for the judge....

November is just beginning, but the Supreme Court’s oral argument sitting for the month is already complete. Next week, we could have the Supreme Court’s cert decision in the individual mandate challenges that were up for consideration in this week’s orders. Once that cat’s out of the bag, no one will be able to think or speak of anything else. So while we still have your attention on other matters, let’s look at the cases that Court will consider during its December sitting....

Montana today became the 34th state to permit same-sex marriage after a federal district judge found the state’s prohibition on gay marriage unconstitutional. For those keeping score at home, it’s now one federal circuit and two district courts in favor of same sex marriage bans, as opposed to four circuits and over 30 district courts against. As you might expect, the outcome at the district court level is wholly derivative of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Latta v....

Conversion therapy proponents say that it’s a matter best left to mental health professionals and patients. Opponents call it “quackery.” Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to put a ban against the practice on hold. So what’s all the fuss about? Last week, plaintiffs opposing SB 1172 asked the Ninth Circuit to enjoin enforcement of the bill. Attorneys for two religiously-oriented therapists and a therapy student – who claims to have successfully completed reparative therapy – filed a lawsuit in October, claiming that SB 1172 would intrude on free speech, privacy and freedom of religion, reports the San Francisco Chronicle....

Is a good deed any less good if it was done with less-than-noble intentions? Maybe so. But the Ponzi scheme guidelines don’t care about motive – they care about money. And Jason Snelling, in the end, only stole $5.3 million, returning the other $3.6 million to his investors in order to lure them into “investing” more money into his Ponzi scheme. The district court declined to credit Snelling for the returned funds, but the Sixth Circuit reversed the sentence as procedurally unreasonable....

Some ex-workers may wish they could start over, but the False Claims Act doesn’t work that way. In Potts v. Center for Excellence in Higher Education, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals said the Act doesn’t protect employees from discriminatory retaliation after their jobs end. The unanimous panel said the law “unambiguously” does not protect workers post-employment. In other words, an employer can’t really retaliate against employees at the job if they aren’t there....

Raise your hand if you saw this coming. Not only was this a Ninth Circuit opinion (REVERSE) and contrary to the other circuits’ holdings (REVERSE), but the issue is clearly controlled by the Portal-to-Portal Act, which was passed in response to a 1944 Supreme Court holding that was about as broad as the Ninth Circuit’s and nearly bankrupted a number of American industries. 1947 Is Calling When Congress passed the FLSA, they did what they often do – they left things undefined....