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In an action claiming that defendant-insurer used inflated lapse rates to purposefully underprice its LTC insurance products and gain market share, summary judgment for defendant is affirmed where: 1) plaintiffs failed to show that their LTC insurance policies contained a fraudulent representation; 2) plaintiffs’ claim for bad faith denial of benefits failed because plaintiffs were not alleging a denial of benefits; and 3) the additional discovery sought by plaintiffs was not relevant to the district court’s decision....

After the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, questions have again been raised about the role of qualified immunity in protecting law enforcement officers from civil liability, particularly when those claims involve white officers and minorities. Floyd’s family has yet to file a civil lawsuit against the Minneapolis Police Department or the officers involved, although the State of Minnesota has filed a civil rights charge....

In June, a Texas taco shop announced an unusual trade for anyone who’s been arrested: Bring in your booking photo and you can get a free order of tacos — but only if you’re smiling in the mugshot. The shop’s owners say they are not encouraging crime, but offering a message of peace and love because “everyone deserves a second chance in life.” Hmm. Second chances are indeed good things. But a smiling mugshot is almost certainly a terrible way to provide it....

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits workplace discrimination based on sex. Over the past decade, the question for employers and the courts has been whether those protections apply to gay, bisexual, or transgender employees. Different courts have come to different conclusions on the matter, and even the Equal Employment Opportunity (which was created by Title VII) has swapped sides, going from an emphatic “yes” under the Obama administration to an equally forceful “no” under President Donald Trump....

Tesla’s autopilot feature may be the stuff of science-fiction fantasy, but it’s turning out to look more like one of those dystopian stories where the robots rise up and take control. After all, there have been more than a few autopilot-related fatalities since the feature was released. It was recently discovered that in the fatal Tesla accident in Florida this past March, that not only was the driver speeding, the autopilot feature was engaged when the vehicle crashed into a semi-truck trailer, ripping the roof right off the car and killing the driver....

In the most anticipated case of the 2021-22 term, and one of the most impactful in decades, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. This decision explicitly overturns Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood and hands the issue to states to regulate. While 68% of Americans believe that abortion should remain legal nationwide, at least 26 states are likely to implement total or near-total bans on abortion in the wake of the decision....

Judge Dennis Bailey snapped at the defendant’s lawyers during a criminal trial. As every trial lawyer knows, it happens. But this judge was about to snap for real. “One lawyer at a time,” he warned them. “Only one lawyer argues.” Faster than a speaking objection, the judge ordered the bailiff to remove one of the defense attorneys. They won the trial, but the judge was not so lucky. ‘Patient, Dignified, and Courteous’ After disciplinary proceedings, the Florida Supreme Court issued a public reprimand against Bailey because that’s not how the court works....

In an appeal from the district court’s order striking claimant’s claim to his assets in a civil forfeiture proceeding, the order is affirmed where: 1) 18 U.S.C. section 1956 authorized federal jurisdiction over forfeiture actions for proceeds of a violation of 18 U.S.C. section 1324, if that violation was for financial gain; and 2) 28 U.S.C. section 2466(a), the fugitive disentitlement statute, applied to claimants who were fugitives from state criminal proceedings....

Sentence for participating in a continuing financial crimes enterprise and conspiracy to commit bank and mortgage fraud is affirmed where the 2001 amendment to the gross receipts provision of the United States Sentencing Guidelines is a substantive change to an unambiguous provision and therefore does not apply retroactively. Read US v. Amico, No. 08-1338 Appellate InformationAppeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of New York. Argued July 7, 2009Decided July 21, 2009...

As a small business owner, you probably want to take great care of your employees. After all, happy workplaces create happy products and therefore happy clients and customers. On the other hand, budgets can be tight and small business owners need to be especially conscious of their expenses. So which employee benefits are required by law for small businesses, and which are up to the business owner? And how big of a business do you have to be before the latter becomes the former?...

Perhaps in an effort to prove that Florida Man doesn’t have a monopoly on crazy, a Wisconsin man decided to head on down to the local police department to retrieve a nunchuck- and methamphetamine-filled backpack he left behind at a library. In the least surprising statement you’ll hear today, that Wisconsin man was arrested and charged with possession of methamphetamine. A Rogue Officer If we take Joel Mullin-Romo at his word, an unhappy ex-girlfriend “hacked his accounts, did a bunch of identity theft against him, is a drug dealer and a prostitute and tried to have him killed....

As part of our ongoing year-in-review series across all of FindLaw’s Legal Professional blogs, we decided to take a look back at the 10 most popular posts of the past year in the Seventh Circuit. What posts were a hit with you, our dear readers? Posner. Posner benchslappings. And sanctions slapped down on unsuspecting parties. 10. 5 Tips: How to Avoid Getting Benchslapped in the 7th Cir. The Seventh Circuit isn’t shy about benchslapping....

It can happen to the best of us. Nine-year-olds; German shepherds; even Mr. T. And most of us will do our best to avoid them, civic duty and civil penalties be damned. There’s the run-of-the-mill jury duty excuses, like sickness or upcoming vacation. And then there’s the stranger ones: I get claustrophobic; I don’t work well with others; or I hate cops. And then there are these – easily the weirdest things people have said or done to get out of jury duty....

In 2009, Tynisa Williams was arrested, strip-searched, and deloused (allegedly in front of two other inmates) before being put into jail in Cleveland and released later that day. Her crime? Driving with a suspended license. There was no individualized suspicion that she was carrying anything dangerous, nor that she had lice. “Doesn’t this all sound familiar?” you’re saying, scratching your chin. Yes, in fact: The Supreme Court dealt with a similar situation in Florence v....

It’s no secret that the Sixth Circuit is having some trouble with crack sentencing. But it’s not just Fair Sentencing Act changes, or retroactivity, or their own muddled precedent that they keep botching. They’re also having issues with differentiating a felony from a misdemeanor for purposes of priors and with statutes of limitations. To be fair, this is all North Carolina’s fault. Their determinative sentencing scheme, which takes into account past crimes, the nature of the present crime, and other individualized factors to determine an appropriate sentence is far more complicated than “give ’em a few decades....

We’ve all heard of kids getting grounded for bad grades, but sending them to jail sounds ridiculous. In a federal lawsuit, however, the American Civil Liberities Union says Riverside County is criminalizing bad grades. According to reports, the local school districts are “funneling students into the criminal justice system.” The ACLU wants to dismantle the Youth Accountability Team, which is run by the county probation department. It puts “at risk” youth on six-month’s informal probation to divert them from criminal activity....

True story: In college, one of our friends received a Dear John letter from his live-in girlfriend, explaining that she had married another man a year earlier to help him get his Green Card and had subsequently fallen in love with her husband. Our friend, unwittingly, was the mister-ess in a sham marriage. Lest you think Green Card marriages are the stuff of fiction, they are very real. But that doesn’t mean they work in circumventing immigration laws....

It looks like Ninth Circuit Judge Kozinski was particularly prescient in his prediction. SCOTUS has handed down a reversal to the federal appeals court, thus starting another round of litigation of securities allegations against the pharma maker, Amgen. Amgen has been through the Ninth Circuit for two rounds already on grounds that the company knew long ago that the company’s stock was overvalued and yet continued to allegedly violate ERISA. An excellently written summary of Amgen’s court troubles was summarized by FindLaw’s Casey Sullivan....

Even among people who think our jails are overcrowded and that many people guilty of drug crimes and low-level misdemeanors should not be imprisoned, there’s still the sense that violent criminals need to be taken off the streets. Even if incarceration is not a general deterrent, at least it will be a specific deterrent to those individuals, preventing them from committing future violent offenses. But new studies are showing that, even in some of the nation’s most notoriously violent cities, reducing the number of people sentenced to jail or prison actually corresponds to a drop in violent crime....

Appellate court’s opinion affirming the district court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s 42 U.S.C. sections 1983, 2000bb, and 2000cc-1 complaint on the ground that plaintiff failed to allege exhaustion of his available administrative remedies prior to filing his complaint is reversed in light of the United States Supreme Court holding in Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199, 127 S. Ct. 910 (2007), that under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a prisoner is not required to specifically plead or demonstrate exhaustion in his complaint and that exhaustion is not per se inadequate simply because an individual later sued was not named in the grievance....