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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals announced on Tuesday that Pfizer can be named in some class action lawsuits related to its now-defunct subsidiary, Quigley. The ruling opens the door for Peter Angelos to pursue Pfizer under Pennsylvania law for manufacturer liability. Angelos, a prominent asbestos attorney, argues that Pfizer should be held accountable for Quigley products that contained asbestos because the Pfizer logo appeared on Quigley products, reports Bloomberg....

To the surprise of many, the challenge to the Minnesota law banning political badges, political buttons, or other political insignia at polling places was successful in the U.S. Supreme Court case Minnesota Voter Alliance v. Mansky. The High Court held that the law violates the First Amendment rights of voters because, as the law is written, it’s just too vague. The 7 to 2 majority opinion explains that the wording of law does not provide individuals, nor those tasked with working the polls, clear definitions as what qualifies as “political....

Today was not the day where the Supreme Court stood up and affirmed equality. Nor was it the day that they ended affirmative action or a 1960s Voting Rights Act that continues oversight over southern states’ elections. Nope. Today was the day of jurisdiction over raisons, narrow decisions on arbitration, and ex post facto application to incarceration non-laws. If you were waiting for one of the pending landmark cases, we do have good news: more opinions are scheduled for Thursday....

Will New Haven firefighters have another day in the Supreme Court? This week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals revived New Haven firefighter Michael Briscoe’s claim challenging the same exam that the Supreme Court mulled in Ricci v. DeStefano. A district court had previously ruled that Briscoe’s claim was barred by the Ricci holding. The Nine ruled in 2009 that white New Haven firefighters were unfairly denied promotions because of their race after the city invalidated the results of a promotions exam that none of New Haven’s African-American firefighters passed....

District court’s grant of defendant’s petition for collateral relief is reversed and remanded where, because the record would not support a conclusion that going to trial with only one lawyer had a substantial and injurious effect on the outcome, the state judiciary’s erroneous decision to disqualify defendant’s second lawyer was harmless. Read Rodriguez v. Montgomery, No. 06-3995 Appellate Information Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division...

When I first stumbled upon the case of Mr. Pelullo, the first words that caught my eye were “mafia” and “organized crime.” He had been indicted, along with Nicky Scarfo, Jr. (the son of a convicted crime family boss), in a white-collar mortgage company takeover scheme that had allegedly bilked millions from the public company’s coffers (and by extension, the shareholders). For someone to be held for years without bail, and for someone with an alleged associate that was reportedly high up in the Philadelphia Lucchese branch of La Cosa Nostra, one would expect to find sleeping fishes and horse heads in the indictment....

In a challenge to collection due process determinations issued by the IRS’s Office of Appeals regarding plaintiff’s tax obligations, summary judgment for defendant is affirmed where, because plaintiff failed to articulate any cognizable violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) in connection with the imposition of the failure-to-pay penalties, section 3512(a) of the PRA provided him with no protection from those penalties. Read Springer v. Comm’r. of Int’l. Rev., No. 08-9004...

District court’s denial of defendant’s petition for habeas relief following his conviction for murder and sentence to forty years’ imprisonment is affirmed where: 1) some of defendant’s ineffective assistance claims were procedurally defaulted as it was clear that a state court’s decision to deny defendant’s third post-conviction petition did not fairly appear to either rest on, or to be interwoven with, federal law; 2) defendant has not shown that failure to consider these claims will result in miscarriage of justice; and 3) the appellate court’s rejection of defendant’s preserved ineffective assistance of counsel claim related to his trial counsel’s failure to call a witness as an alibi witness was not contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law....

Net Neutrality. Data Throttling. These are some of the new vocabulary terms that netizens have become fluent in recently. It seems that every few months, a new court drama plays out over the proper nature of Internet traffic and how to handle it. One of the key players, AT&T, has been finding itself in courtrooms a lot lately. How nice of them to set precedent for the rest of us....

In 2000, David Ayers was convicted of the murder of Dorothy Brown, a 76-year-old woman living in Cleveland. There’s just one problem: Ayers didn’t do it. In 2011, he was freed after the Sixth Circuit said that his case was marred by defects of a constitutional character. In 2012, Ayers filed suit against the detectives who investigated his case, as well as the City of Cleveland. In an opinion issued last week, the Sixth Circuit upheld an award of $13 million in damages to Ayers....

The Seventh Circuit has seen a lot of action dealing with Wisconsin campaign finance in the past few weeks. First, the circuit court swiftly stepped in to stay a district court’s order granting a preliminary injunction. Next, the Seventh Circuit found that much of Wisconsin’s existing campaign finance laws are unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court’s recent political speech jurisprudence. John Doe Stay In Wisconsin, John Doe probes “allow prosecutors to compel people to produce documents and give testimony,” and are overseen by judges, reports the Journal Sentinel....

Qualified immunity cases involving law enforcement are always hip and happening in the circuit. But qualified immunity cases involving a high-speed chase? Now we’re really talking. The Eighth Circuit put its seatbelt on and weathered a bumpy legal ride that explored whether an individual state trooper could claim sovereign immunity for his actions during an arrest following a high-speed chase. Gabriel Coker sued the Arkansas State Police and Trooper Brad Cartwright....

Here’s another interesting death penalty ruling out of the West Coast. The Ninth Circuit just did what a number of other courts have refused to do: forced a state to turn over information on the source of execution drugs and the credentials of the executioners, while granting a stay of execution in the interim. With the circuits now split, state secrecy policies and laws might be the next death penalty issue to reach the Supreme Court....

In a 42 U.S.C. section 1983 action claiming that defendant-officers stopped plaintiff at an illegal roadblock, summary judgment for defendants is affirmed in part where clearly established law did not render the roadblock unconstitutional. However, the ruling is reversed in part where the roadblock functioned not merely as a tribal exercise, but also as an instrument for the enforcement of state law. Read Bressi v. Ford, No. 06-74297 Appellate Information...

In an ERISA action regarding the suspension of plaintiff’s early retirement benefits, judgment for plaintiff is affirmed where defendant trustees conflated “electrical construction work” with “employment as an electrical contractor” under the benefits plan, thus running afoul of the court of appeals’ holding that “each provision in an agreement should be construed consistently with the entire document such that no provision is rendered nugatory.” Read Brown v. S. Cal. IBEW-NECA Trust Funds, No....

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a four-page decision this week that could be worth almost $1 million to Michael Simard. Tuesday, a Ninth Circuit panel found that a district court had employed the wrong standard of proof to determine whether Simard was entitled $999,830 that police seized from his car during a traffic stop. Simard gave Nevada Highway Patrol permission to search his vehicle after he was stopped for speeding on Interstate 15....

Harvey v. Brewer, No. 08-17253, concerned actions challenging Arizona’s felon disenfranchisement scheme. The court of appeals affirmed the dismissal of the action, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment permits states to disenfranchise felons, regardless of whether their offenses were recognized as felonies at common law, and requiring felons to satisfy the terms of their sentences before restoring their voting rights was rationally related to a legitimate state interest, and does not violate any of the various constitutional provisions plaintiffs rely upon....

Want to help your client turn a possible five-year sentence into twenty? You can do it in two easy steps. First, forget about federal sentencing enhancements. Second, let him plead guilty without an agreed-upon sentence. For an excellent demonstration, take a look at this case In January 2012, the federal government charged appellant Leonard J. Allen with transporting child pornography, receiving child pornography, and possessing child pornography. The government also filed a special information based on Allen’s prior state conviction pursuant to 18 U....

A Chinese national was denied asylum despite his claims of persecution in China for his Catholic beliefs. The denial of asylum was affirmed at the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit for inconsistencies he presented first before an Immigration Judge. According to the Immigration Judge, Mr. Dao Kai He failed to “establish his credibility” because he provided multiple answers when asked to reconcile inconsistencies. Catholic Persecution in the PRC Mr....

Women have the right to get an abortion anywhere in America, but they may have a hard time paying for one in Arkansas. The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals said in Does v. Gillespie that Arkansas can kick Planned Parenthood out of its network of Medicaid-approved health providers. Setting up a possible showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Eighth Circuit has changed the abortion litigation landscape. “The plaintiffs are asserting a right – the absolute right to a particular provider of their choosing – that (the law) does not grant them,” Judge Steven Colloton wrote for the Eighth Circuit, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota....