General Law and Lawsuits

[Ben-Prime]

I'm probably being dense, but I don't get what "see, well," is supposed to mean.

I found a thread discussing it:

but I still don't grok it.

I think she’s being cheeky. She’s acknowledging with the “well” that she’s citing her own work. So it’s not well as in good, but in an exclamatory way as in “well, like I said before…”

Indeed, imagine an 'um', in place of well. It's a conversational noise of not-quite-mock abashedness. "See, um, yeah, .... my other work over here."

[chancery]

A missed opportunity to use the "See, well" signal.

I know Sean personally, since his undergrad days before he was a lawyer. I've dined with him and his now-wife when they visited Florida some time back. I have this mental image of him giggling hard while typing that and it has made my day.

Was he involved in the inception of the "see, well" citation? I'd love to hear about it.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ty-lawsuit

Disney owes female workers more than $150m in wages, pay gap suit alleges
A salary analysis found that when controlled for other factors affecting pay, the disparities arose from gender discrimination

The Walt Disney Company has systematically underpaid women, depriving female employees of more than $150m in wages in California since 2015, according to a new analysis of salary data carried out as part of a class-action lawsuit alleging widespread pay gaps at the company.

Attorneys for a group of women suing Disney alleged in state court in Los Angeles on Friday that the entertainment and media corporation has paid women on average 2% less than men doing equivalent jobs, in violation of California’s Equal Pay Act.

The analysis is based on salaries for non-union employees below the vice-president level and includes workers at Disney Studios, parks and resorts, its music label, Disney+, ABC, Lucasfilm, Searchlight Pictures and other major entities that the lawsuit says are all subject to the same compensation system.

The estimate that women are owed $151.6m was revealed in the attorneys’ motion for class certification for the more than 10,000 women employed by those Disney entities from 2015 to the present. The case excludes Hulu, ESPN, Pixar, 21st Century Fox and several other brands that have distinct pay policies or were recently acquired and cannot be fairly compared to the rest of the corporation, the lawyers say.

The case was first filed in 2019 alleging an “egregious gender pay gap that appears to be engrained in Disney’s culture”. LaRonda Rasmussen, a manager of product development for Disney, and the plaintiff who the case is named after, alleges that six men with the same title were receiving between $16,000 to nearly $40,000 more than her. A senior manager for Disney music publishing said she learned she was earning $25,000 less than some men with equivalent titles. Other women allege that they faced discrimination when they were denied promotions, given smaller raises than men, or were classified in lower-ranking jobs compared with men doing similar work.

[Slim Cognito]

Yeah, not a Disney fan since Hiaasen opened my eyes, but I still hope they kick DuhSantis' ass.

[Frater I*I]

Yeah, not a Disney fan since Hiaasen opened my eyes, but I still hope they kick DuhSantis' ass.

Fun Fact:

I have a t-shirt that has the Hammer, Sickle, and Star on the left side of the chest and the Disney Mouse Ear logo on the right, above them it says:

"Evil Empires...

One Down... One To Go..."

[RTH10260]

US ‘mom influencer’ guilty of falsely accusing Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children
Kathleen Sorensen, of California, sentenced to three months in prison for knowingly making false report of crime

Ramon Antonio Vargas
Sun 2 Jul 2023 07.00 BST

A white California woman who styled herself on social media as a “mom influencer” has been ordered to spend three months in prison for falsely accusing a Latino couple of attempting to kidnap her children.

State jurors in Sonoma county found 30-year-old Kathleen “Katie” Sorensen guilty in April of knowingly making a false report of a crime in a case that involved her publishing a December 2020 social media post that asserted a man and a woman had tried to steal her two children from her in the parking lot of a Michaels craft store about 40 miles outside San Francisco.

Authorities said both the accused couple and store surveillance video “resoundingly contradicted” the account given to them by Sorensen. And on Thursday, Judge Laura Passaglia gave a 90-day prison sentence to Sorensen, two months of which could be served through a work release program, according to a statement from the local district attorney’s office.

Passaglia also told Sorensen to avoid any presence on social media, to agree to have her electronic devices searched and seized without a warrant, to undergo four hours of implicit bias training, and to pay various fines and fees.

The DA, Carla Rodriguez, said the verdict against and prison sentence for Sorensen held her “accountable for her crime”.

“Our hope is that this measure … will help provide some closure to the couple that was falsely accused of having attempted to kidnap two young children,” Rodriguez added.

Sorensen’s defense attorney, Charles Dresrow, could not immediately be reached for comment. He had previously told Good Morning America that his client “misperceived and misunderstood a series of random events, which were occurring around her, and a made an honest report to the police”.

“I don’t think she had any understanding of how this would spread and the impact it would cause,” Dresrow said.

Before landing in a case that illustrated the kind of unfounded criminal suspicions that racial minorities in the US can draw, Sorensen posted tips on social media about beauty and being a mother.

That existence changed when she went shopping at a Michaels store on 7 December 2020 and – after leaving – reported to police that a couple had tried to kidnap her children, who had accompanied her.

Several days later, Sorensen published a video on social media which gave a more detailed version of purported events at the store than the one she gave to investigators. The video showed Sorensen describing how the couple had trailed her into the store, commented on her children’s appearances and gave her the “heebie-jeebies” because they were not “clean-cut individuals”, as NBCNews.com reported.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ple-kidnap

[RTH10260]

Federal Judge Limits Biden Officials’ Contacts With Social Media Sites
The order came in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who claim the administration is trying to silence its critics.

By Steven Lee Myers and David McCabe
July 4, 2023

A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online.

It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government. Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.

In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”




https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/busi ... media.html
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/busi ... =url-share

[Dave from down under]

madness

[raison de arizona]

Can a thumbs-up emoji seal a contract? A Canadian judge rules

Sending a thumbs-up emoji may now be considered the agreement of a legally binding contract, a Canadian judge has ruled.

The thumbs-up emoji proved pivotal in a case involving farmer Chris Achter of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and a 2021 deal to sell 87 metric tons of flax to grain buyer Kent Mickleborough. Mickleborough signed the contract for the deal and texted a picture of it to Achter and wrote "Please confirm flax contract," according to court documents. Achter responded to with a thumbs-up emoji.

When Achter did not send the flax to Mickleborough, the grain buyer filed a lawsuit stating he thought Achter's thumbs-up emoji was an agreement to the contract.

Judge T.J. Keene of the Court of King's Bench in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, agreed and ruled on June 8 the thumbs-up emoji Achter sent served as an agreement to the contract. Keene ordered Achter to pay Mickleborough $82,200 in Canadian dollars, or $61,000 in U.S. currency.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 394268007/

[RTH10260]

Four Pages Found in a Couch Are Ruled Aretha Franklin’s True Will
In deciding a family dispute over her estate, a jury in Michigan ruled that a handwritten document found in a couch at Franklin’s home after her death represented her last wishes.

By Ben Sisario and Ryan Patrick Hooper
July 11, 2023

More than four years of family conflict over the estate of Aretha Franklin ended Tuesday when a Michigan jury decided what her family could not — which of two hand-scrawled wills represented the famed singer’s true wishes for how to divide her estate.

After a two-day trial in a probate court in Pontiac, Mich., a six-person jury decided after less than an hour of deliberation that a four-page document written by Franklin in 2014 — and discovered under a couch cushion at her home, months after Franklin’s 2018 death — should serve as her will.

The verdict resolved the biggest problem that had been hanging over Franklin’s estate, and sets in motion a plan for how income and assets from her estate should be divided.

“We just want to exhale right now,” Kecalf Franklin, one of the singer’s four sons, said outside the courtroom. “It’s been a long five years for my family and my children.”




https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/arts ... couch.html

[RTH10260]

Johnson & Johnson must pay $18.8 million to California cancer patient in baby powder suit

Reuters
Wed, July 19, 2023 at 2:30 AM GMT+2·

Johnson & Johnson must pay $18.8 million to a California man who said he developed cancer from exposure to its baby powder, a jury decided on Tuesday, a setback for the company as it seeks to settle thousands of similar cases over its talc-based products in US bankruptcy court.

The jury ruled in favor of Emory Hernandez Valadez, who filed suit last year in California state court in Oakland against J&J, seeking monetary damages. Hernandez, 24, has said he developed mesothelioma, a deadly cancer, in the tissue around his heart as a result of heavy exposure to the company’s talc since childhood. The six-week trial was the first over talc that New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J has faced in almost two years.

The jury found that Hernandez was entitled to damages to compensate him for his medical bills and pain and suffering, but declined to award punitive damages against the company. Hernandez will not be able to collect the judgment in the foreseeable future, thanks to a bankruptcy court order freezing most litigation over J&J’s talc.

J&J vice president of litigation Erik Haas said in a statement that the company would appeal the verdict, calling it “irreconcilable with the decades of independent scientific evaluations confirming Johnson’s Baby Powder is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer.”




https://finance.yahoo.com/news/johnson- ... 50855.html

[RTH10260]

Taco John's has given up its 'Taco Tuesday' trademark after a battle with Taco Bell

July 19, 20235:09 PM ET
By b Ayana Archie

The phrase "Taco Tuesday" is now free to use after a taco chain restaurant relinquished its trademark on the popular phrase.

Taco John's has held the trademark since 1989, in all U.S. states except New Jersey. Taco Bell filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to have it reversed, arguing that no one should have the rights to a common phrase.

In a statement released Tuesday, Taco John's conceded and said they are "lovers, not fighters."

"We've always prided ourselves on being the home of Taco Tuesday, but paying millions of dollars to lawyers to defend our mark just doesn't feel like the right thing to do," Taco John's CEO Jim Creel said.

"Best taco tuesday ever... for now," Taco Bell tweeted.




https://www.npr.org/taco-tuesday-tradem ... -taco-bell

[AndyinPA]

Not a lawsuit because the business couldn't afford to fight it, but a local restaurant, small chain, is going out of business because they were threatened with a lawsuit because of the name, Back to the Foodture.

[RTH10260]

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... trial-deny

A US prosecutor has asked a court to close down a third motion by former Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere for a new trial, arguing that Raniere’s claims that the government manipulated evidence against him were “untimely and meritless”.

Raniere, 62, was sentenced to 120 years in prison following his 2019 conviction on charges of federal sex trafficking, racketeering and possession of child sexual abuse images. He has claimed that he is entitled to a new trial because “the government manufactured child pornography and planted it on a computer hard drive to tie it to him”.

It is Raniere’s third attempt to obtain a new trial based on alleged witness or government malfeasance, including purported “newly discovered evidence of government intimidation of potential defense witnesses”.

The earlier motions were denied in July and October of 2020.

[RTH10260]

Emminent domain, or: Municipalities and School Boards behaving badly

[raison de arizona]

These lawsuits cannot result in damages, but they can result in attorney fees. And of course forced compliance with the ADA for a business.

Disability “Testers” Keep Businesses Accessible. Will SCOTUS Ban Them?
Disabled people have to sue to enforce accessibility laws. That could soon get much harder.

In October, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a core recourse for protecting disabled people’s civil rights: The ability to sue private businesses for inaccessibility under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Inaccessibility isn’t just discriminatory—it can also impact disabled people’s quality of life. If an online portal for a private hospital doesn’t work with screen readers, Blind people and others with low vision may face barriers to booking appointments. If a grocery store has steep stairs, some people can’t get in—and those with a cane, for instance, could risk falling.

The case, Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer, came to be after Deborah Laufer, who is disabled, filed around 600 ADA complaints against individual hotels and chains across the United States, in some cases for not having accommodation information available on their websites or not having a feature to book an accessible room. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in March, after the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Laufer’s favor. While the ADA was signed into law with bipartisan support in 1990, the civil rights of people with disabilities are now in the hands of SCOTUS’ majority-conservative justices.

[RTH10260]

Immortal cells: Henrietta Lacks’ family settle lawsuit over HeLa tissue harvested in 1950s
Cells taken without consent from cancer victim can reproduce indefinitely and were sold for unjust profit by Thermo Fisher Scientific, relatives argued

Staff and agencies
Wed 2 Aug 2023 01.03 BST

Laboratory equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific has settled a lawsuit brought by the estate of Henrietta Lacks, a long-deceased cancer victim whose “immortal” cells have lived on to fuel biomedical research for decades, lawyers for the estate have said.

The story of Lacks, a young African American woman who died in Baltimore in 1951, was made famous in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which became a movie in 2017 featuring Oprah Winfrey.

The HeLa cell line, the first to survive and reproduce indefinitely in lab conditions, has been cultivated in vast quantities and used in a range of medical research worldwide, including to test the polio vaccine, research the effects of radiation on human cells, and develop a treatment for sickle-cell anaemia.

The tissue sample that became the HeLa cell line was cut from Lacks’ cervix at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore without her knowledge during surgery to treat her cervical cancer. Lacks died of the disease at age 31. Since then, it is estimated, 50m tonnes of her cells have been produced.

Lacks’ estate sued Thermo Fisher in Baltimore federal court in 2021, asserting her family had “not seen a dime” of money that Thermo Fisher made from cultivating the HeLa line of cells that originated from tissue taken without Lacks’ consent during a medical procedure in 1951.

The terms of the agreement were confidential. Thermo Fisher and the estate’s attorneys, Ben Crump and Chris Seeger, said in a statement that they were pleased with the settlement.

The lawsuit accused Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher of unjust enrichment, arguing it illegally commercialised Lacks’ genetic material.

“Black suffering has fuelled innumerable medical progress and profit, without just compensation or recognition,” the lawsuit said.

The estate had asked the court to disgorge Thermo Fisher’s profit from commercialising HeLa cells and to block the company from using them without its permission. Thermo Fisher argued in court that the lawsuit was brought too late and that the estate failed to outline a valid unjust enrichment claim.




https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -harvested

[Kriselda Gray]

I'm glad to hear that they got something they're happy with. I read the book years ago and was just stunned by the whole situation. Good for them!

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... defamation

Leah Remini has filed an expansive lawsuit against the Church of Scientology and its leader, David Miscavige, for harassment, defamation, surveillance and other unlawful behavior resulting in “psychological torture”.

The 53-year-old actor, who joined Scientology as a child in 1979 and left in 2013, claims the organization’s “mob-style operations and attacks” have “significantly” affected her life and career.

“For 17 years, Scientology and David Miscavige have subjected me to what I believe to be psychological torture, defamation, surveillance, harassment and intimidation, significantly impacting my life and career. I believe I am not the first person targeted by Scientology and its operations, but I intend to be the last,” Remini said in a press release issued on Wednesday.

Remini filed the bombshell 60-page lawsuit in the California superior court on Wednesday in an attempt to “require Scientology, and any entity it controls and funds, to cease and desist its alleged practice of harassment, defamation and other unlawful conduct against anyone who Scientology has labeled as an ‘enemy’”, she stated.

[keith]

Emminent domain, or: Municipalities and School Boards behaving badly

https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=diVywSPc8k4

The Australian move 'The Castle' addressed this very issue. It produced many lines that have entered into the Australian vernacular like "Tell 'em he's dreamin'" and "It's not a house, it's a home" and "That's going straight into the pool room".

And this from a court room scene (you really have to see the whole movie to see how this came out):

[RTH10260]

"Horrendous": Black Men Tortured By White Mississippi Police “Goon Squad” React to Guilty Pleas

Democracy Now!
9 Aug 2023

Six white former police officers in Mississippi who called themselves the "Goon Squad" have pleaded guilty to raiding a home on false drug charges and torturing two Black men while yelling racist slurs at them, and then trying to cover it up. We speak with Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker about how, on January 24, six deputies in Braxton, Mississippi, raided the home they were staying in and attacked them, and how they are speaking out to demand justice. Meanwhile, the deputies have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019, in which two of the men died. We also speak with civil rights attorney Malik Shabazz, who is representing Jenkins and Parker in a federal lawsuit against the Rankin County Sheriff's Department. Shabazz asserts that the majority-white Rankin County, which is 20 miles away from majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi, is "infested with white supremacists" who "have decided 'Rankin County is for whites'" and seek to enforce it through state-sanctioned violence and torture, overseen and covered up by Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. "We demand that Bryan Bailey step down," says Shabazz. Parker adds, "We want justice for everyone that has gone through this with Rankin County."

article at

[RTH10260]

comments on Brett Favre litigation in Mississippi

[RTH10260]

Oregon

Federal judge to order release from jail for anyone denied an attorney in Washington County

By Conrad Wilson (OPB)
Aug. 16, 2023 2:25 a.m.

Anyone held in the Washington County jail without a court-appointed lawyer will be released 10 days after their initial court appearance, under an order announced Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane.

In a preliminary order read from the bench Tuesday following a two-hour hearing in Eugene, McShane said the ruling applies to the 36 people currently in the county’s jail without counsel and “any future defendants who are similarly situated.”

While the ruling will be directed at Washington County, the public defense crisis is statewide. As of Tuesday, more than 160 people facing charges in 17 of Oregon’s counties were in custody and did not have a court appointed defense attorney.

“It’s a systematic statewide problem,” McShane said Tuesday. “It needs to be addressed quickly, because we can’t simply hold people in custody without representation for indefinite periods of time.”

The Sixth Amendment guarantees a right to an attorney. The courts have interpreted that right to mean people charged with a crime must be provided with an attorney that’s paid for by the state if defendants cannot afford one. For nearly two years, Oregon has failed to provide lawyers for everyone charged with a crime.




https://www.opb.org/article/2023/08/15/ ... ty-oregon/

[RTH10260]

Music labels sue Internet Archive over digitized record collection

By Blake Brittain
August 12, 20232:56 AM GMT+2Updated 19 days ago

Universal Music Group NV

Aug 11 (Reuters) - Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), Sony Music Entertainment (6758.T) and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records.

The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.

They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.

Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive digitally archives websites, books, audio recordings and other materials. It compares itself to a library and says its mission is to "provide universal access to all knowledge."

The Internet Archive is already facing another federal lawsuit in Manhattan from leading book publishers who said its digital-book lending program launched in the pandemic violates their copyrights. A judge ruled for the publishers in March, in a decision that the Archive plans to appeal.

The Great 78 Project encourages donations of 78-rpm records -- the dominant record format from the early 1900s until the 1950s -- for the group to digitize to "ensure the survival of these cultural materials for future generations to study and enjoy." Its website says the collection includes more than 400,000 recordings.

The labels' lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings, including Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)".

The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and "face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed."

Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington Editing by David Bario and Diane Craft




https://www.reuters.com/legal/music-lab ... 023-08-12/