Residents of the New York City borough of the Bronx who have been arrested for a misdemeanor charge are waiting months or even years for their cases to be resolved. Attorneys in the Bronx say that the amount of time their clients have to wait between a misdemeanor arrest and a hearing can be so long that it violates their constitutional right to a speedy trial. On Tuesday, several of these …
The Westchester County Department of Health has asked to be dropped from a lawsuit brought by a property owner who accuses it and several other defendants of botching contamination cleanup decades ago …
On Friday, movie studios, the rating board, and prominent theater owners asked a federal judge in California to dismiss a class-action lawsuit that’d make all films with smoking R rated unless tobacco is shown as dangerous. That complaint, filed in February, sought an injunction, claiming children are more likely to smoke after watching any offending films. Defendants are the Motional Picture …
When it comes to the business model of turning piracy into profit, the name Voltage Pictures is never far from the action. The Los Angeles-based movie outfit has tested the legal waters in several jurisdictions in an effort to extract cash settlements from alleged pirates, most recently in Australia with its movie Dallas Buyers Club. In 2012, Voltage targeted Canadian ISP Teksavvy in a long …
The major film studios, their trade association and theater owners don’t want to be held hostage to any misguided morality play — not one that seeks to force them not to have any movies with tobacco imagery rated G, PG or PG-13. On Friday, they filed court papers asking a judge to reject a putative class action that blames them for children becoming addicted to nicotine. The lawsuit was filed …
On March 29, 2016 the United States District Court for the Central District of California granted preliminary approval to the proposed class action settlement and authorized the sending of the Notice of Settlement to the members of the Settlement Class by mail and publication. Fairness Hearing Scheduled: The Court has scheduled a fairness hearing to occur on September 16, 2016 at 2:30 pm at the …
Madison County Circuit Judge Dennis Ruth denied an Illinois resident’s motion to compel the state’s treasurer and Firearms Services Bureau chief to provide their litigation plans and personal information on all Illinoisans who were charged $1 more than state statute allows when they applied for a firearm owner idenficiation card (FOID). Wood River attorney Thomas Maag filed the class action on …
The defendants in a class action lawsuit, brought by a Florida chiropractor against a group of insurers for allegedly breaching a patient’s insurance agreement, recently decided to withdraw their request to separate discovery into two phases. On April 1, Garrison Property & Casualty Insurance Company, USAA Casualty Insurance Company, USAA General Indemnity Company and…
A Vancouver Island-based lawsuit against the cold remedy Cold-Fx is a lawyer-manufactured action in search of a victim and not worthy of class-action certification. Or at least that was the argument advanced by lawyers for the drug giant Valeant Pharmaceuticals earlier this month in a New Westminster courtroom. To be certified, an applicant must show the existence of a…
Fresh from a $14 million victory that had Warner/Chappell backing off from ownership claims over “Happy Birthday to You,” the attorneys at Wolf Haldenstein now have chosen their encore with a new lawsuit that seeks to establish that the worldwide famous protest song, “We Shall Overcome,” is conclusively in the public domain. The putative class action, filed Tuesday in New York federal court …