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There are bad weeks, and then there are lose-your-job-and-file-for-bankruptcy bad weeks. Karen Auday had the unfortunate distinction of enduring the latter. To make matters worse, Auday alleges that she was a victim of age discrimination. While that may be true, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Auday can’t sue her former employer because the claim now belongs to her bankruptcy estate. Seriously, this woman can’t catch a break....

Travis Folkerts is a mentally impaired man with an IQ of 50. In 2008, he was living on his own, with supervision during most waking hours. In May of that year, a neighbor reported that Travis had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with her underage son. Schneider again read Travis his rights and more fully explained them. Though he was aware of Travis’ impairment, he was not aware of its full extent and believed that Travis understood him....

In a petition for review of the BIA’s denial of petitioner’s motion to reconsider its rejection of petitioner’s appeal as being untimely filed, the petition is denied where 8 C.F.R. section 1003.38(b) is ambiguous regarding the BIA’s jurisdiction to consider late filings, and the BIA’s interpretation barring petitioner’s filing was not plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the language of the regulation. Read Irigoyen-Briones v. Holder, No. 07-71806 Appellate Information Argued and Submitted March 10, 2009...

After Chief Justice Roberts decided recently to not send a man who could no longer remember his crime to the execution chamber in Alabama, court pundits took it as a sign that the Chief Justice could be switching teams. The other conservative justices would’ve let the old-timer die. Although, most liberal pundits have been cautious about putting too much stock in the Justice Roberts statistics showing the Justice may have spontaneously grown a liberal conscious....

Samuel Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber,” has parlayed a campaign stop criticism of then-Senator Barack Obama’s tax plan into Internet notoriety, cable commenter gigs, and a congressional bid. He could teach a master class in how to capitalize on 15 minutes of fame. But he can’t bring a First Amendment retaliation lawsuit in federal court. Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Joe the Plumber did not satisfy the circuit’s three-prong criteria for a retaliation lawsuit....

A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from taking away the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, saying they would suffer “irreparable harm” if sent back to their home countries. The administration terminated the protected status of about 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Sudan in November 2017. The immigrants left their countries because of life-threatening conditions, such as civil war. Representatives sued and asked for an injunction to stop the government action....

There’s a new addition to the Notorious RBG canon coming out soon(ish). Justice Ginsburg is penning a new book, My Own Words, to be released January, 2017. The book, a collection of her writings and speeches on feminism, Judaism, the law, and the Court, will be her first published book since she was appointed as a justice in 1993. For Ginsburg fans, My Own Words promises to be a great read....

For most lawyers, the workload can get to be overwhelming. It’s not unusual to fall behind from time to time and lose some (or a lot of) sleep. However, when you do fall behind, lying to clients, billing them for work you never did, then blaming an undiagnosed and questionably related medical condition probably isn’t the best way to get yourself out of trouble, especially if you’ve already blown a deadline....

Petition for review of a decision of the NLRB is denied where the Board properly ruled that plaintiff’s effort to enforce the work preservation clause of the collective bargaining agreement amounted to a boycott in violation of the National Labor Relations Act sec. 8(e). The Board’s award of attorneys fees to the employer is reversed where the employer withheld a document from the union in defiance of a discovery order and thus prolonged the proceedings....

An armed robber who was discovered and prosecuted years after the crime has failed in his challenge to his conviction. Pascal Sylla, convicted in 2013 of committing a 2003 robbery in Anderson, Indiana, challenged a federal law which extended statutes of limitations when new DNA evidence links an individual to the felony. That law, which essentially resets the statutory clock when a DNA connection is discovered, is not unconstitutional, the Fourth Circuit ruled on Thursday....

Have you ever dreamed of eating like a Supreme Court justice? Well, now’s your chance! A newly released SCOTUS cookbook has found its way into the United States Supreme Court Historical Society’s gift shop. Table for 9 includes over 40 recipes and plenty of curious information about the justices of the High Court throughout history, including the most recent justice, Neil Gorsuch’s recipe for English Marmalade. The book also releases some never-before seen photographs including one of the justices preparing to eat a 28 pound salmon that Justice Breyer caught and served to his fellow justices....

Illinois of course prohibits people under 21 from drinking alcohol. Except that it’s permitted “in the performance of a religious ceremony or service.” Students attending ostensibly religious functions (a.k.a. “parties”) at the Tannenbaum Chabad house at Northwestern University did indeed consume alcohol there – so much, in fact, that one student had to be hospitalized for excessive consumption. A discrimination suit against the university arose after Chabad’s advisor, Rabbi Klein, failed to make any changes to the house, resulting in the university “disaffiliating” itself from Chabad and barring Klein from contracting with a food company called Sodexo to provide rabbinic supervision over its kosher food....

A case that’s been up and down the Second Circuit several times since 1994 is once again in the spotlight. And, the latest in the recent slew of art-related cases in the Second Circuit involves the sale of forgeries for millions. Details below on the latest on Second Circuit legal news. Rothko Forgeries New York art gallery Knoedler & Company, several of its employees, and an art historian are being sued by Frank J....

For-tuna favors the bold, but customers don’t favor food chains that aren’t serving up what they claim to be. Subway is the latest restaurant chain to find this out the hard way, as a class-action lawsuit alleges that the sandwich chain’s “tuna” wasn’t what it promised to be. On the Hook Plaintiffs Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed the class-action lawsuit in California in early 2021, claiming that Subway’s tuna was purposely mislabeled as being “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna” when it actually was “completely bereft of tuna....

In a First Amendment action seeking to require pharmacies to deliver lawfully prescribed FDA-approved medications and prohibit discrimination against patients, a preliminary injunction in favor of plaintiffs is reversed where the district court incorrectly applied a heightened level of scrutiny to a neutral law of general applicability, and the injunction was overbroad. (Superseding opinion) Read Stormans, Inc. v. Selecky, No. 07-36039 Appellate Information Argued and Submitted July 8, 2008 Filed October 28, 2009...

In a criminal case pitting two New York City firemen against each other, the Second Circuit found that the defendant was denied a “fair opportunity to present a defense and a fair trial,” when the district court denied him the chance to present surrebuttal evidence. Patrick Murray was tried and convicted of four counts related to the growing of marijuana plants: conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana, manufacturing at least 100 marijuana plants, manufacturing at least 100 marijuana plants near a school, and endangering a person while manufacturing marijuana....

When Jeffrey Heffernan, a police officer in Paterson, New Jersey, was spotted with a campaign sign for his mayor’s political challenger, he was quickly demoted, as punishment for his “overt involvement” in the opponent’s campaign. Heffernan sued, arguing that the demotion violated his First Amendment rights. And he would have had a fairly straight-forward case, except for one complication. Heffernan hadn’t been involved in the opponent’s campaign. Not at all. He’d just been picking up a sign for his bedridden mother....

Therrien v. Target Corp., No. 09-5047, involved an action claiming that plaintiff was stabbed when he tried to help apprehend a shoplifter at a Target store. The court affirmed judgment for plaintiff on the grounds that 1) the jury could rationally find that a customer’s decision to enter the fray was not an intervening cause because it was “reasonably foreseeable”; 2) the district court properly refused to instruct the jury that defendant had no duty to warn or protect plaintiff from apparent dangers and that it is not liable if there was no time to warn or protect him; and 3) the district court properly excluded evidence of plaintiff’s psychological history and prior bad acts....

If you’ve been charged with a crime, your main priority is to get those charges dismissed or win your criminal case at trial. And the best way to do those things is to have a good criminal defense attorney on your side. But whether you win or lose your case won’t entirely be on your lawyer’s account. There are ways to can help – and hurt – your case, beginning from your first contact with police and ending with a jury verdict....

Things that we learned from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals this week: You can get a degree in funeral science. Your Facebook status could be cause for termination from a funeral science teaching gig. The school that fires you for your Facebook status might be entitled to qualified immunity. Toby Sutton sued two Arkansas State University: Mountain Home administrators after he was terminated as the school’s Funeral Science Director. He claimed the administrators violated his right to procedural due process by failing to provide an adequate pre-termination hearing....