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For the victims of sexual harassment, it is already difficult enough to come forward to speak up, let alone file an official complaint with an employer. And when it comes to sexual harassment lawsuits, the Eighth Circuit doesn’t seem to be very plaintiff-friendly, according to a Citypages writer that surveyed a few curious results from within the circuit. Notably, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has only one single female active justice out of nine....

In an action by the FDIC, acting as receiver of a partnership, seeking disgorgement of embezzled funds from defendants, summary judgment for plaintiff is affirmed where: 1) the district court was not required to draw an inference that a convicted felon had lied in his affidavit; 2) defendants failed to present evidence that the transaction at issue was a loan; and 3) the district court did not err under Ohio law in its calculation of the appropriate amount of damages owed to the FDIC....

In college, a classmate introduced us to the magical world of the Courier New font. Back in the old days – before we grew to loathe serif fonts – Courier New was a welcome alternative to Times New Roman: It was slightly wider, so we could satisfy the written assignment page-length requirements with fewer words. (Surely our professors knew what we were doing, but who would object to reading less undergraduate drivel about Beowulf or European globalization?...

If Governor Brian Kemp and his fellow Georgia Republicans wanted to send a positive message about that state’s new voting law, they could not have been happy with an image that went viral following its passage on March 25. That image, captured by video and photos, was that of a Black female legislator, Park Cannon, being led out of the state Capitol in handcuffs by a group of much larger white male Georgia State Troopers....

In a drug possession prosecution, denial of petitioner’s habeas petition is affirmed where, in view of the relatively low number of peremptory challenges that the prosecutor exercised against African-American jurors, the prosecutor’s ability to justify her other peremptory challenges with specificity and to the state court trial judge’s satisfaction, as well as the fact that two African-American jurors remained on the jury and a third was a prospective juror, the state court of appeal’s denial of petitioner’s Batson claim was not contrary to Supreme Court precedent or an objectively unreasonable application of such precedent....

Justice Anthony Kennedy has long been the Supreme Court’s swing vote, usually swinging a little right of center. Though a Republican and a Reagan appointee, Kennedy has never been as ideologically rigid as some of his more conservative colleagues. He’s joining the conservative majority one day, then penning groundbreaking gay rights opinions on the next. But if Justice Kennedy has been hard to pin down in the past, the Court’s most recent term might have made it a bit easier to box him in....

Alabama v. N. Carolina, No. 132, concerned an action by Florida and Tennessee against North Carolina seeking monetary sanctions under the terms of the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact (Compact), which was entered into by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Supreme Court adopted the Special Master’s recommendations, on the grounds that 1) the terms of the Compact did not authorize the Commission administering the Compact to impose monetary sanctions against North Carolina; 2) North Carolina did not breach its contractual obligation to take “appropriate steps” toward the issuance of a waste disposal license; and 3) under Arizona v....

Full disclosure: Thomson Reuters is FindLaw’s parent, and Above the Law is FindLaw Blogs’ competition (er, sort of). With that said, when the competition gives props to your company’s product, well, it says something. Above the Law says a new report from Thomson Reuters provides “an invaluable source of information and insight for corporate law departments.” It’s like LeBron James saying Steph Curry is the best basketball player in the 2019 NBA playoffs....

Here’s some news from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week: With the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference approaching, some of the awards recipients have been announced. San Jose area Judge Ronald M. Whyte and Phoenix area attorney Paul F. Eckstein will be honored with special awards. The Inns of Court Award is given to a lawyer or a judge who displays “unquestioned integrity” and “sterling character” as well as an “ongoing dedication to the highest standards of the legal profession and the rule of law....

In a class action securities-fraud lawsuit against Diebold, Inc., brought by investors alleging that between 2003 and 2005 Diebold engaged in a series of schemes to prematurely recognize revenue in order to inflate the price of its stock, dismissal of the lawsuit for failure to state a claim is affirmed where: 1) plaintiffs’ request for remand is unnecessary as the record reflects that the district court ultimately applied the correct pleading standard; 2) neither the complaint nor the proposed second amended complaint states with particularity facts giving rise to a strong inference that the defendants acted with the required state of mind; and 3) any inference of scienter is not cogent as required by Tellabs, but speculative and supported only by general and conclusory allegations that fail to connect the defendants to the alleged scheme....

Current and former employees of Lehman Brothers came away disappointed again in their legal battle that first began when the recession started back in 2008. According to the Second Circuit, application of Amgen Inc. v Harris means that the plaintiffs failed to prove that an SEC ban on short selling constituted “special circumstances.” This ruling marks the first time a federal circuit court has applied the 2016 SCOTUS case of Amgen to a pending ERISA case....

It’s going to be a busy week for SCOTUS with decisions expected in several cases, and on this dreary Monday, the Court did not disappoint. The order list was released with one cert grant, and many denials. The Court also issued an opinion in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust, and we remember a landmark case beloved to all Torts 1 (and Con Law) students. Opinion in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust, et al....

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that it’s okay for the City of San Diego to lease land to the Boy Scouts at a cheap rate despite the group’s discriminatory membership policies, Thomson Reuters News & Insight reports. The Boy Scouts prohibit atheists, agnostics and homosexuals from becoming members — a policy the Supreme Court upheld in 2000. The Desert Pacific Council, a nonprofit corporation chartered by the Boy Scouts of America, probably gets the best rental rate in town from the City of San Diego: The Council pays $1 per year to rent Camp Balboa in Balboa Park and no rent for its Youth Aquatic Center property on Fiesta Island in Mission Bay Park....

Astrue v. Ratliff, No. 08-1322, involved an action against the Social Security Administration for Social Security benefits. The Supreme Court reversed the Eighth Circuit’s reversal of the district court’s order that plaintiff’s attorney lacked standing to contest an offset imposed by the U.S. against attorney’s fees received by plaintiff, holding that a 28 U.S.C. section 2412(d)(1)(A) attorney’s fee award was payable to the litigant and was therefore subject to an offset to satisfy the litigant’s preexisting debt to the government....

That light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Star of Bethlehem, it’s the last installment of our 12 Days of SCOTUS. So let’s jump into the final four connections between the most annoying holiday song ever written and the Supreme Court. 4. Colly, Er, Calling Birds What are colly birds? So glad you asked! According to Bird Watchers General Store – which sound like a reliable authority on such matters – a colly bird is a European blackbird....

A recently filed federal lawsuit by the EEOC against the University of Wisconsin has been making headlines due to the seemingly blatant age discrimination that is alleged. The case involves a laid-off marketing and communications specialist, Bambi Butzlaff Voss, who was denied re-employment into other rather similar (and open) positions within the university. The EEOC took up her case, and it was discovered that one of the open positions went to someone thirty-years younger, and (naturally) with much less experience....

In the prosecution of an employee at a day spa where sexual massages were provided to spa customers, imposition of the minimum term of imprisonment called for by the Sentencing Guidelines on defendant convicted of conspiring to use the facilities of interstate commerce to facilitate prostitution is affirmed as the district court properly determined defendant’s offense level and she has not shown which of the Guidelines factors, if any, was sufficiently meritorious to require explicit discussion by the court or to rebut the presumption of reasonableness attached to the within-Guidelines sentence imposed....

If there’s one thing that we learned from Bush v. Gore and the 2000 Florida recount, it’s that recounts lack order. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion this week, finding that federal law does not mandate ballot recount methods in elections for non-federal offices, reports Metropolitan News-Enterprise. What’s interesting about this case is that Congress acted after the 2000 presidential election to head off another recount kerfuffle, passing the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002....

What’s worse, due to the large number of warehouse employees, there are often long lines that can take over 20 minutes to get through. And as you might have already known, a putative class action was filed, and there is multidistrict federal litigation ongoing over this issue. Most recently, the Sixth Circuit opined that workers in Nevada were entitled to compensation for these security checks, while workers in Arizona were not....

US v. Franklin, 08-2195, concerned a challenge to the district court’s sentence, in a prosecution of defendant, a former police officer and armored truck employee, for robbing ATM machines and an armored truck at gunpoint. In affirming the sentence, the court held that defendant’s arguments that the district court had authority to consider his mandatory minimum sentence when determining his sentence for the underlying offenses, and that Kimbrough overruled Franklin II, are without merit....