Your daily ration of civil justice rationing
The world’s largest chemical maker and a prominent law firm have lost another court appeal in a class action lawsuit accusing them of concealing and destroying evidence in a batch of asbestos litigation. The federal Third Circuit has declined to “rehear” a September decision that, in effect, re-opened the case. Businessweek reports that the company was “… ordered to face claims it fraudulently hid evidence that its talc products contained asbestos as it sought to scuttle thousands of personal-injury lawsuits.” The company in question was actually acquired by BASF and that business unit mined talc that was used in everything from wallboard to children’s balloons.
Image as reported in the 9/4/14 Wall Street Journal article “Appeals Court Breathes New Life Into Fraud Case Involving BASF, Cahill Gordon”
Writing in The American Lawyer (a subscription site) Susan Beck reports that “… BASF, its asbestos litigation has morphed from being a negligible nuisance into an expensive, embarrassing problem. The company stresses that it inherited this situation from Engelhard, and has gone to great efforts to find out what happened. For Cahill, the litigation is also remarkable. Legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers of New York University School of Law says it’s not unheard-of for a law firm to be sued for fraud, noting that several were sued in the wake of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. ‘What is rare,’ he says, ‘is for a case like this to target such a prominent law firm.’”
As reported in SCPR, “A judge hears the cases of immigrant teens in Los Angeles.”
The KPCC reports says that a typical judge in Los Angeles has about 2,500 cases on their docket, which means an average case takes more than two years to reach a decision, but that could change with Obama’s action. Einhorn, said it will take time to see the effects on the ground. One group that will likely not find relief are the thousands of child migrant cases that are working their way through the courts. As Take Two has been covering on the program, more than 7,000 children are being heard in Los Angeles alone. Since they arrived in the country within the past five years, they probably will not qualify under the new rules from Obama.
Read and listen to the report here: Obama’s actions could affect thousands at LA’s immigration courts.
The LA Times is reporting that “a group of administrators from nearly 80 law schools, including University of LaVerne College of Law Dean Gilbert Holmes, has asked the National Conference of Bar Examiners to review how the bar exam is scored after a big drop in passage rates this year.”
Just when we need more lawyers for things like immigration cases, it turns out that fewer people are passing the bar exams. The Los Angeles Times reports that “… for the first time in nearly a decade, most law school graduates who took the summer California bar exam failed, adding to the pressure on law schools already dealing with plummeting enrollments, complaints about student debt and declining job prospects.”
