Abortion rights supporters have challenged two new Oklahoma laws that would give the state some of the strictest abortion laws in the country by forcing women to answer questions about race and their relationships, and to listen to a doctor talk them through an ultrasound.

Opponents of the laws say they were drafted to make a woman's already difficult decision to have an abortion even more difficult. But supporters say the surveys will prove valuable to understanding why women seek abortions, and that women need to be provided with as much knowledge as possible before making an irrevocable decision.

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The Associated Press: Strict Oklahoma abortion laws spark court battles



In this Feb. 4, 2004 file photo, Garlin Newton carries a cross in front of the Oklahoma Capitol in Oklahoma City, in observance of Rose Day, an anti-abortion event. Two new laws being challenged in the Oklahoma courts would give the state some of the strictest abortion laws in the country by forcing women to answer questions about race and their relationships, and to listen to a doctor talk them through an ultrasound. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Haderthauer, File)

There is far more hate than there are crimes. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is a necessary step in better protecting a group of Americans that is all too often targeted for attack simply because of who they are. That we find ourselves on the cusp of seeing this historic legislation signed into law is a testament to the fact that the American people recognize the hatred in our midst and want to challenge it where it happens.

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washingtonpost.com

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

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Twitter anarchist raided under 'riot' laws - CNN.com



Elliott Madison's home allegedly was raided for evidence that he may have started a riot on Twitter.

It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/wo...llance.html?hp



Jenny Paton with her daughters Thea, left, and Esme last month at their home in Poole. A school application by a third and youngest daughter set off a local council's surveillance of the family.

If things had gone according to plan, Lindsay Murphy would be a big-city tax lawyer by now. Instead, the recent law school graduate found herself doing legal aid, listening to complaints about raw sewage bubbling up into the bathtubs of a Mississippi Delta housing project.

Murphy is among hundreds of newly minted lawyers who've been forced by the recession to take a detour on their way to the nation's top firms, spending up to a year helping out nonprofits for as little as a third of the salary they'd expected.

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The Associated Press: Law firms pay new hires to work for public good



Lindsay Murphy, an attorney working with the University of Mississippi's Civil Legal Clinic in Oxford, Miss., is photographed Oct. 16, 2009. Murphy helps poor clients with housing and tax problems as part of a deferred hiring plan established with a Dallas, Tex., law firm. She hopes to join the firm next summer. In early October she traveled to another part of the state to learn about a housing complex's sewer and water problems to help determine whether the clinic can help its residents. (AP Photo/Ryan Moore)

Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces that a securities class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of all persons or entities who purchased American Depositary Shares of The9, Ltd. ("The9" or the "Company")(Nasdaq:NCTY) between November 15, 2006 and July 15, 2009, inclusive (the "Class Period"). The class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern
District of New York.

The Complaint alleges that the defendants violated federal securities laws by issuing material misrepresentations to the market concerning The9's business, prospects and financial condition, thereby artificially inflating the price of the Company`s securities.

Law Offices of Howard G. Smith
Howard G. Smith, Esquire
215-638-4847
888-638-4847
howardsmith@howardsmithlaw.com
Law Offices of Howard G. Smith

At around 12:30 EDT this morning, a huge explosion rocked a fuel-storage facility outside San Juan, Puerto Rico. As of this afternoon, according to the linked AP story, the cause of the explosion at the Caribbean Petroleum Corp. in the suburb of Bayamon was still unknown.

This afternoon, the first lawsuit was filed, a putative class action filed in federal district court in San Juan. Click here for a copy of the complaint, filed by a San Juan lawyer, John Navares, Camilo Salas, a lawyer in New Orleans, and well-known plaintiffs’ lawyer Daniel Becnel, based in Reserve, La. The suit names as defendants Caribbean Petroleum and the Mapfre Insurance Company. [We were unable to reach Caribbean Petroleum Friday afternoon; a call to Gulf Oil, the parent company of Caribbean Petroleum was not immediately returned. An email sent to Mapfre was not immediately returned.]

We have no idea if, at this point, the suit is going to pan out. But we have no choice, it seems, but to be fairly impressed by the speed at which these lawyers got their filing through the courthouse doors — and, incidentally, up on PACER.

We called up Becnel to find out how this happens. What steps does a plaintiffs’ lawyer take in the hours (minutes?) after a calamity like this to make sure the, uh, wheels of justice get churning as soon as possible.

Hi Dan, thanks for chatting. Sounds like you’ve been busy today.

I’m busy every day. This week alone I’ve been in five cities. I was in Bangor, Maine to work on light cigarettes, then down in Miami to work on denture cream. I’ve worked on Chinese drywall too. There’s a lot going on.

Okay. So how does a lawyer in Louisiana manage to file a lawsuit in San Juan a few hours after something like this explosion happens?

I’m lead counsel in the Puerto Rican cabotage case. That’s an antitrust case involving shippers. That case brought me to Puerto Rico quite a bit — I’ve got other cases there too — so I know a lot of lawyers down there and they call me when things arise.

In any event, I got a call this morning from John Nevares, who said he knew I’d handled these kinds of cases and that he had clients. What I immediately did was started to put together the complaint. I hired a mechanical engineer, a metallurgist, a psychiatrist, and an expert in air modeling. We also got up a Web site, so cases have been coming in on the Internet.

How did these clients know to call Nevares?

Well, look, you’re in Puerto Rico and a plant blows up overhead and you can’t breathe or use your home . . . people know that something’s gone very wrong, that they should call a lawyer. John got a few calls.

How important is it to be the first in the door on a case like this?

It’s not necessarily important to be the first, but it’s important to get in the door quickly. One of the main reasons is to get a preservation order in place to make sure that nobody destroys physical evidence. You need to get in there fast to find out what really happened.

When something like this happens — and I’ve worked on a handful of them — the first thing a company does is call its insurance claims agent. They’re on the scene within an hour. They’ll try to show that nobody’s hurt and that the damage is minimal. They’ll put out a press release. You’ve got to get in there so you can start working the other side as soon as possible.

How do you have any idea whether there are real damages at this point?

Well, we don’t know the exact amount. You’re not allowed to put forward exact amounts in federal complaints. We simply say that our clients were damaged at amounts to be determined at trial.

But there are damages. And the damage is continuing. Every time the wind changes, the plume of toxins shifts and, well, what goes up has to come down. That’s why I hire an air modeler. He can help me figure out just how widespread the coverage area of the plume is.

And how can you sue the insurance company? Isn’t it the case that insurance companies are typically sued down the line?

That’s right. Typically, that’s the case. Typically you’re not allowed to sue the insurance companies right away. but Puerto Rico is a jurisdiction that has a “direct action statute,” which allows me to make the insurance company a defendant right off the bat.

Well, fair enough. Thanks for taking the time, and best of luck.

Thank you.

Have a great weekend, LBers. And don’t forget to root hard for the Angels tomorrow night!

As we’ve written before, only two Wall Street executives have been charged with securities fraud stemming from the credit crisis. The two, former Bear Stearns execs, Ralph Cioffi (pictured, left) and Matthew Tannin (pictured, right), are currently on trial now, in Manhattan federal court. Click here for recent LB coverage of the case.

But the prosecutions may not wind up providing prosecutors much of a road map for subsequent trials. That’s because things don’t seem to be going that well for the government lawyers, writes our old colleague Dan Slater, who recently wrote another dispatch for the NYT’s Dealbook on the case.

So what’s happened? According to Slater, government witnesses keep coming unleashed, providing testimony that seems if not exculpatory, at least helpful to the defense. As Slater puts it: “a case built on provocative e-mail excerpts, bereft of context, can teeter when witnesses appear in court to provide a backdrop, for example, or the surrounding context of a seemingly damning e-mail message excerpt is read before a jury.”

On Monday, Slater wrote about an example of this concerning testimony from a credit analyst which seemed to help the defendants. The latest example concerns a so-called “toast” email written by Tannin to the Gmail account of Cioffi’s wife, in which he claimed the whole sub-prime market was “toast.”

But, writes Slater, “in that same e-mail, the entirety of which was read into the trial record this week, a more sympathetic personality emerged.” Tannin also wrote:

Every so often I worry a bit that because you have been so spectacularly successful so far in almost every way, you might be taking this opportunity to second guess yourself. Well, just in case you are, don’t. At the end of the day, I think we will both be able to look at all that happened and all that we have done and learn from what has gone well as well as from what hasn’t … What a shame it would be for us to not take all we have learned and apply it going forward.

According to Slater, it seems the judge in the case, Frederick Block, is growing a bit weary with the government’s rather choppy presentation. Regarding an “ever-growing mountain of evidence,” he commented: “We have a lot of papers here … I doubt jurors are going to read all 530 of those documents. But this is how the government chooses to present its case. Continue.”

We’ve been writing about law in one form or another for a while now, and yet we’ve never had the opportunity to write about Richard Ramirez, a.k.a, the Night Stalker. But now we do, which for some reason seems to satisfy an itch we’d been wanting to scratch.

Who’s Richard Ramirez, you ask? Anyone — and we do mean anyone — who was sentient and living in California in the summer of 1985 remembers him. He was the serial killer who terrorized Golden State residents for several tense weeks back in the spring and summer of 1985. Ramirez was ultimately convicted in 1989 on 13 murder counts and and 30 other felonies and sentenced to death — though he has yet to be executed.*

The news, which not surprisingly is all over the California papers today: DNA evidence has tied Ramirez to yet another murder: this one of a 9-year-old girl in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco in 1984. Click here for the SF Chron story; here for the LA Times story.

According to the LAT, cold-case detectives in San Francisco five years ago reopened the unsolved slaying of Mei Leung, who in 1984 was sexually assaulted and killed in the basement of a residential hotel. Earlier that day, Mei and her 8-year-old brother were seen home from a friend’s house. They took a cheek swab of DNA from Ramirez recently, which confirmed the match.

The case was reopened when Police Inspector Holly Pera recalled it from her days as a young patrol officer.

“That’s part of the reason why the case was relooked at,” Pera said during a news conference. “It’s the type of case — as a new officer, a case involving a little girl — that you can’t forget.”

Deputy Police Chief David Shinn said Thursday that the girl’s family has been notified about the possibility that the killer has been found and that they had expressed relief.

“It’s painful,” he said. “Hopefully, this will bring some closure to the family.”

That said, it’s unlikely that Ramirez will be tried for the girl’s murder, writes the LAT in an update this morning.

* One quick observation on the Night Stalker phenomenon, from where we sit. Given the terror he inflicted on California (and it was terrifying, at least to this then teenage kid living in Orange County), it’s strange that Ramirez hasn’t become a household name nationwide. Unlike, say, the Son of Sam, whom the whole country knows about thanks to widespread media attention and a Spike Lee movie, we still get blank stares whenever we mention Ramirez to our east-coast based colleagues and friends. Weird.

** Finally, check out this El Paso Times story from last April on Ramirez’s lawyer, Manuel Barraza. The story reports that Barraza, who went on to become a judge in El Paso, was arrested for allegedly swapping favorable rulings for sex. Weird.

Photo: Los Angeles Times

It’s said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. We’d like, however, to add one more.

It is an absolute certainty that for as long as college football keeps its Bowl Championship Series in place, there will be howls of protest every year, howls that become particularly loud from mid-December through mid-January.

We don’t know where it’s all headed, frankly. We can’t see the folks who run the BCS changing thier minds or willingly relinquishing their authority and power. Nor can we see legions of college football fans being satisfied by too many more seasons in which a team with one loss takes the national championship crown over an undefeated team. Such was the case last year, when the undefeated Utes from the University of Utah lost out to the one-loss Gators from the University of Florida. Click here and here for previous LB posts on legal issues concerning the BCS.

But movement could be afoot. The AP has reported that Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has sent a 10-page letter to President Obama, calling for an antitrust probe of the BCS. Shortly after he was elected, Obama voiced a desire to revamp the system.

Hatch, who held a hearing on the BCS in July, told Obama that a “strong case” can be made that the BCS violates antitrust laws.

Under the BCS system, some athletic conferences get automatic bids to participate in top-tier bowl games while others don’t, and the automatic bid conferences also get far more of the revenue. Hatch’s home state school, the University of Utah, is from the Mountain West Conference, which does not get an automatic bid. The school qualified for a bid last season but was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated.

The system “has been designed to limit the number of teams from non-privileged conferences that will play in BCS games,” Hatch wrote.

Hatch said the BCS arrangement likely violates the Sherman Antitrust Act because, he argued, it constitutes a “contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce,” quoting from the law.

For more on the potential issues concerning antitrust and the BCS, refer back to our post (linked above), from earlier this year. Martin Edel, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, didn’t rule out the possibility of a successful civil suit, but said that the hurdles were significant.

The Justice Department said it would review the letter and respond as appropriate. The White House declined to comment, and BCS officials had no immediate comment.

A report out of Colorado on Wednesday provides even further evidence to support what we all know to be true: it’s a terrifically bad time to be in law school.

According to this story in Colorado Law Week, only about 35 percent of the University of Colorado School of Law’s class of 2009 had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before. The law school at Denver University didn’t provide Law Week statistics, but Misae Nishkura, the assistant dean for the school’s Career Development Center, confirmed that “there are definitely fewer students who had a job lined up at graduation this year compared to last year.”

Oh how we wish this trend were limited to Denver, or Colorado, or even the western half of the U.S. But it’s not. It’s a trend that’s playing out again and again at just about every law school in the country.

So who’s to blame? Of course, one needn’t be a Nobel Prize winning economist — or even a loyal reader of this blog — to understand that the credit crunch and recession have much to do with the lack of lawyer demand around the country. That said, might the law schools themselves be to blame, at least in part?

Yes, says Rick Bales, a law professor at the University of Northern Kentucky. Writing over at Prawfsblog, Bales says law schools have been “absolutely wretched” at responding to the shifting marketplace.

Writes Bales:

How good are law schools at responding to the legal marketplace?

In one sense, we are absolutely wretched. As law firms this year have shed lawyers like a dog sheds hair in summer, law schools continue to admit the same – or more – students into their programs.
. . .

In other respects, law schools are merely bad at responding to the legal marketplace. How many schools, for example, for the spring 2009 semester, dropped some M&A course offerings and beefed up their bankruptcy offerings? How many schools have beefed up their public-sector offerings in response to the demand materializing now for lawyers who can help guide stimulus funds?

Ask any law firm hiring partner whether law schools are doing a good job of educating lawyers and you are likely to get an earful. Neither law firm clients nor cash-strapped government employers are willing or able to subsidize lawyer training the way they were in the past. Legal employers want to hire graduates who can take a deposition or draft a merger agreement now. But law schools are not delivering. The law schools that figure out how to do so – while still teaching the doctrine necessary for bar passage and the critical-thinking skills necessary for solving complex legal problems – will find themselves at a substantial competitive advantage over other law schools.

LBers, any thoughts? On the one hand, we hear what Bales is saying. It’s been a complaint of managing partners nearly since the dawn of time: young law grads come out of law school totally ill-equipped to practice. At the same time, we’re not sure that market-driven changes to the curriculum are the way to go. (How would a school know, for instance, when the time is right to scotch the bankruptcy clinic in favor of a real-estate transactions clinic?)

Perception is reality.

In the legal world, that old saw gets bandied about every time a law firm starts to struggle. A single defection, which may or may not have to do with anything, leads to whispers that a firm’s in trouble, which leads to more defections, which leads to actual trouble.

We were reminded of this dynamic while reading this NYT profile this afternoon on White House counsel and Williams & Connolly alum Greg Craig.

According to the article, which cites “colleagues and Democrats close to the White House,” Craig is expected to leave his post by the end of the year.

What’s strange about this is that very few, if anyone, can point to any major gaffes made by Craig during his short tenure as the lawyer to the White House. Craig’s crime, according to the NYT: he’s alleged to have jumped headlong into a handful of thorny issues — and perhaps overpromised on how fast he and the administration could effect President Obama’s decision to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

The case against Craig is made out thusly by the NYT:

Mr. Craig was handed one of the most difficult portfolios at the White House. He drafted executive orders banning torture and ordering Guantánamo closed within a year. Over the objections of the Central Intelligence Agency, he recommended the release of Justice Department memos describing harsh interrogations. . . .

Mr. Craig took flak for those decisions, criticized for not doing more to build consensus within the administration or prepare the political ground in Congress. And the prospect of closing Guantánamo by the one-year deadline he helped set has proved more difficult than anticipated and now appears unlikely to be met.

Click here for a story from August on the Craig situation, by the WSJ’s Evan Perez.

Of course, one might disagree with the tack taken by the Obama administration on any of these issues. But, from where we sit, we wonder why Craig’s the guy to take the blame. It’s almost like he was set up to fail: Either he jumps in with decisiveness and alienates some or he works for months to build consensus and gets assailed for foot-dragging.

Indeed, the NYT’s Peter Baker hints at the fact that the criticism might be unwarranted:

It is a classic and not particularly savory Washington story. When an administration stumbles, whispers begin and fingers point in search of someone to blame. At a certain point, assumptions can become self-fulfilling, and an official in the cross hairs finds it harder to do the job. In Mr. Craig’s case, friends said he was unfairly being made a scapegoat for decisions supported across the administration.

According to Baker’s piece, many in the White House are angry at the treatment Craig’s gotten. It’s not like Craig was the only one pushing for a one-year deadline to close Guantanamo (Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed for it too).

Still, for whatever reason, the damage may be done. “In the White House, in particular, power is the perception of power,” said Sidley Austin’s Brad Berenson, a former associate White House counsel under George W. Bush. “And if people perceive you to be under attack and on the way out, it limits your effectiveness.”

We’ve had a few days to let the mammoth insider trading case against six hedge-fund and business executives sink in. Now comes the parsing and analysis.

The criminal complaints don’t give us all the evidence, of course, especially the information that might help the defendants, most of whom have publicly stated their innocence. And many former prosecutors have told other news outlets that criminal insider-trading cases can be tough to win because the line between buying legitimate research and illegally buying market-moving information can be complicated.

Steven Feldman, a former prosecutor who is now at Herrick Feinstein, told the Law Blog that the government may have a weaker case against individuals who didn’t have direct contact with the main cooperating witness in the case. “Even with recorded conversations, you want a narrator” who can explain the context surrounding the calls, he says.

In addition, he says, prosecutors don’t reference the recorded calls that may hurt their case. “Maybe someone said, ‘Look, I’ll give you this in confidence but you have to promise me you won’t trade on this.’”

However, several former prosecutors the Law Blog has spoken to, including Anthony Barkow, say, at least until we learn more, the case against the main defendants, including hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam (pictured), founder of the Galleon Group, looks strong.

“This is a very powerful case” with “extremely incriminating” evidence, Barkow told the Law Blog. “The prosecutors have a combination of very strong types of evidence, like cooperator testimony involving a cooperator who has agreed to plead guilty and testify about conversations, both recorded and not recorded. There is also powerful timing evidence, meaning that the trading by the defendants came after phone calls.”

The complaint also establishes what Barkow, who is executive director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University’s law school, calls evidence of the defendants’ “consciousness of guilt,” or knowledge that they understood what they were doing was illegal.

Examples:

• “I don’t like talking over cell phone on this.” — defendant Rajiv Goel to defendant Rajaratnam.
• Defendant Danielle Chiesi told Rajaratnam she was afraid that if a certain stock rose too high, she “would make so much money that [her] trading might attract the attention of regulators.”
• “You put me in jail if you talk,” and “I’ll be like Martha…Stewart.” — Chiesi to an alleged co-conspirator.

Barkow says some of the defendants made “powerful, unambiguous statements that don’t need to be spun by the government” to prove their allegation. “They’re simply incriminating statements,” he says.

Examples:

• Rajaratnam allegedly told Chiesi he wouldn’t have touched a particular stock “with a…10-foot pole” it not for the two of them being, as Chiesi put it, “close to the company.”
• “Unless you were on the phone with [the AMD Executive] and had [Robert Moffat, the IBM executive who is also a defendant] at your house last night, who…would be buying it, honestly?” — defendant Chiesi to defendant Mark Kurland

Some of these defendants clearly “sought out” the inside information and that it “didn’t fall in their lap,” Barkow says. “They’re explicit about how information is money, and that they’re reaching out to people for information in order to trade on that information.”

Prosecutors also won’t have trouble proving that the hedge-fund managers knew the sources of inside information were “breaching” their duty to the companies, he says.

Chiesi and Rajaratnam, through their attorneys, have denied wrongdoing.

It was only a matter of time, it seems, before the world was granted this, before the law firm and reality television worlds came together in one magical union. But it seems the merger could happen soon — giving you, LBers, one fewer night during the week in which to just curl up in front of the old Wurlitzer and bemoan the sorry state of television.

According to this story, from the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Sternberg Productions is partnering with Weinberger Media to produce “Legal Ease,” slated to feature a New York firm called Tacopina Siegel & Turano.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that:

[T]he daily reality show will revolve around lawyers giving advice to everyday people. Stories will be shot on location, and advice will be dished out in-studio by Joseph Tacopina, head of the firm (pictured), and a panel of legal eagles.

“Joseph Tacopina is unquestionably one of the premier defense attorneys in the land,” Scott Sternberg said. “More than ever before, people are in need of legal expertise, and we are partnering with Tacopina Law to help share his wealth of knowledge.”

Sternberg, Tacopina and Scott Weinberger, an investigative reporter and head of Weinberger Media, will serve as executive producers on “Legal Ease.” It’s unclear whether the project will be pitched to nonfiction-oriented cablers or taken out as a syndicated first-run strip, reports the story.

Our suggestion: Because nothing says ‘drama’ like waiver of the attorney-client privilege, we suggest that he show open every week, alongside the opening credits, with each client verbally acknowledging such waiver. Lookout, Neilsen!

If there’s one piece of litigation bouncing around out there that seems to have it all — it just might be the litigation involving Dole Food and Central American workers. The case involves just about everything an onlooker would want: allegations of corporate malfeasance, allegations of lawyer fraud, fascinating international-law issues and big money at stake. Someday, they’re going to make a movie about the case. (Oh wait, they already have).

In any event, a big development in the case erupted on Tuesday when a federal judge in Miami said that Dole can’t be forced in the U.S. to pay a $97-million judgment ordered by a Nicaraguan court. Click here and here for stories from the LA Times and Bloomberg, respectively. Click here, here, here and here and here for previous LB coverage of the Dole situation; here for a very nice front-page story from the WSJ’s Steve Stecklow on the case from August.

The award, won four years ago by 150 Nicaraguans who said they suffered injuries from pesticides used at Dole’s banana farms in the 1970s, can’t be enforced because it was based on a law that violates international legal standards, said Judge Paul Huck in Miami said in a ruling Tuesday. (Click here for the ruling.)

“The law under which this case was tried stripped defendants of their basic right in any adversarial proceeding to produce evidence in their favor and rebut the plaintiffs’ claims,” Huck said.

According to the LAT, Dole argued at a four-day hearing before Huck that the 2001 Nicaraguan law is biased against defendants like itself. The statute was enacted to litigate injury claims against foreign corporations by banana workers and presumes the pesticide dibromochloropropane causes sterility and other injuries.

Writes Judge Huck:

For each of the 150 plaintiffs who recovered, the Judgment contains a conclusory statement that in the opinion of Dr. Umaña “[the plaintiff] is infertile” and states there is a “possible link” between DBCP exposure and various psychological problems or, in a few cases, physical problems. The Judgment does not explain how the sperm samples were evaluated to determine the causes of individual plaintiffs’ sperm impairments, it does not indicate that the doctors obtained or considered the plaintiffs’ medical histories, and it does not explain how DBCP is linked to the plaintiffs’ infertility or psychological damage.

Nicaraguan courts since 2002 have issued judgments in 32 such suits for a total of $2.05 billion against Dole and pesticide makers, Dole said. The company said that if the plaintiffs had won in Miami, their lawyers would try in U.S. courts to collect the other judgments that the companies have refused to pay.

“This is a powerful ruling,” said Ted Boutros, a lawyer for Dole. “It will be a major deterrent to bringing other verdicts to the U.S.”

Steven Marks, a Miami-based lawyer for the Nicaraguan workers, didn’t immediately comment to the LAT.

We’ve spilled only-the-heavens-know how many pixels on what we’ve deemed the BacMerSaga — the situation surrounding New York federal judge Jed Rakoff’s rejection of the proposed settlement between the SEC and Bank of America over the payment of bonuses to Merrill Lynch employees. (Click here for all our coverage).

Well lo and behold, just as we were starting to get used to not seeing Rakoff’s picture on the LB every day, he’s landed himself back in the thick of another high-profile case — the one involving allegations of insider trading against Galleon hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. And it could lead to another showdown between the regulators and the ever unpredictable jurist. The WSJ’s SEC reporter Kara Scannell sent along the following on what could become SEC v. Rakoff, Part II.

The spin of the wheel in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading case against Galleon Management founder Raj Rajaratnam landed on Judge Jed Rakoff, spelling possible trouble for the SEC’s case.

Rajaratnam and five others were also charged criminally by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. In parallel cases, judges often stay, or postpone, the SEC case until the completion of the criminal case. The problem for the SEC is Rakoff generally doesn’t like to grant them.

In a docket-shaking 1998 court case, Rakoff refused to grant a stay in the SEC’s case against Oakford Corp., a brokerage firm it sued alleging illegal profit-sharing between the firm and eight brokers who worked on the floor of the NYSE. In his decision, Rakoff wrote: “The SEC never had any intention of providing discovery in this case but nonetheless permitted the case to proceed, thereby seeking the advantage of filing its charges without having to support them.” He said filing “serious civil accusations that one has no intention of pursuing until a parallel criminal case is completed” is “a misuse of the processes of these courts.”

If Rakoff refuses to stay the SEC Galleon case, it presents an issue for the SEC.

Defense lawyers hope to capitalize on the more generous litigation rules for civil cases, which unlike the criminal process, allows defense teams access to transcripts of witness depositions, to take depositions, and obtain the SEC’s investigative files. Federal prosecutors often seek a stay of the SEC case to prevent showing too much of their hand to defense lawyers until they’re heading to trial. In the Rajaratnam case, that could mean handing over depositions and testimony from some of the cooperating witnesses.

To avoid showing its hand and possibly jeopardizing the criminal case, the SEC could dismiss their complaint and re-file later once the criminal case is completed.

It’s another run-in for the SEC. Rakoff recently slapped down a tentative $33 million settlement the SEC struck with Bank of America over disclosures the bank made about bonuses it agreed to pay Merrill Lynch employees. The judge called the settlement unfair and suggested the SEC was looking to make a quick deal. That case is on track to go to trial early next year.

It might be too soon to pass judgment on the reign of U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preetinder Bharara (he prefers to be called Preet), except to say that he’s a really good public speaker. But in 10 short weeks his office has made some news. Here’s a WSJ mini-profile of the India-born prosecutor, and click here for a WSJ piece on the rise of South Asians in the U.S.

The 41-year-old Bharara (pictured, right) last week filed insider-trading charges against six hedge-fund and business executives, including Raj Rajaratnam, who co-founded Galleon Group, and two India natives, though the case actually began at least about two years before he started the job. Galleon news flash: District Judge Jed Rakoff (pictured, below) was just assigned the SEC’s parallel civil-fraud case against the executives.

Two weeks after taking office, Bharara brought another case that underscored his office’s tradition of independence. He charged Hassan Nemazee, a prominent Democratic Party fund-raiser with ties to Mr. Bharara’s recent former boss, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, with defrauding several banks out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Nemazee has pleaded not guilty.

On Monday, Bharara announced the formation of a new unit to handle large-scale cases involving bank and mortgage fraud, as well as cybercrimes. Prosecutors in the unit will employ such tools as wiretaps, which are more typically used in narcotics and organized-crime investigations. The new unit will complement the work of the office’s well-known securities and commodities fraud unit, headed by Ray Lohier.

Previously, Bharara (Harvard ‘90, Columbia Law ‘93) was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan for five years, where he brought criminal cases against Italian-American mobsters and Asian gangs in New York City. He also worked at Gibson Dunn in the 1990s.

Though he is a registered Democrat, Bharara has friends on both sides of the political spectrum, including Viet Dinh, a former classmate of his at Harvard College who later became assistant U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush. “Preet has impeccable judgment, a keen sense of prosecutorial responsibility…but I don’t think I’ve found a political topic on which we agree yet,” says Dinh.



Here’s one thing most people don’t know about Bharara: He has taken stances that aren’t necessarily popular among prosecutors. In 2007, he wrote a law-review article in which he said U.S. courts have given federal prosecutors too much leverage over companies that are facing potential criminal charges, echoing a stance taken by several prominent former prosecutors and defense lawyers in recent years.

The clothes make the justice, or so the White House seems to think.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whom we’ve learned likes to talk, gave a speech Saturday night saying her nomination process was so tightly scripted that the White House picked out her dress. Here’s the story from the New Haven Register, which reported on her speech, made privately at Yale University during her 30th law school reunion.

Media representatives were not welcome, at the Justice’s request, so the report was based on interviews with people who were there. “She gave the most astounding account of how the president selected her,” State Sen. Ed Meyer said after attending the event.

Reports the Register:

Meyer recalled that Sotomayor grew teary at moments when discussing the nomination process, but kept the crowd laughing. Sotomayor even explained that she’d gone shopping for clothes to wear to her acceptance ceremony, but government officials instead told her to bring five suits, one of which they would recommend for her to wear, Meyer said.

But maybe it’s good that Sotomayor isn’t hesitant to speak up. Former Justice O’Connor recently claimed she had a little trouble getting a word in edgewise. Here’s USA Today in a recent wrap-up of the court’s first month of the session:

Retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor said over the weekend that she tried to ask the first question of each session simply “because I never would get back in if I didn’t.”

“A lot of them are former law professors,” she said of her former colleagues, “and all they do is ask questions. So you have to ask in a hurry or you’re never going to get a question in.” Scalia and Ginsburg are among the former professors on the high court.

Those who follow immigration policy in this country certainly know about Sheriff Joe.

Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County which includes Phoenix, has forged a reputation for being perhaps second only to Lou Dobbs in his zeal for staunching illegal immigration.

A July New Yorker profile of the Sheriff describes how he has transformed his office into a quasi immigration-enforcement agency. Here’s an overview of the profile.

Last week, WSJ reported that Sheriff Joe, who bills himself as “America’s toughest Sheriff,” is defying U.S. government efforts to rein in his tactics. In light of a new offensive by Homeland Security, Arpaio’s deputies no longer have the authority the randomly check the immigration status of people. Yet, the sheriff recently announced that his deputies will continue to round up illegal immigrants in the streets.

Today, meanwhile, Arpaio will face off in court against the American Civil Liberties Union over abortion and inmates’ rights, according to this article in the Arizona Republic.

The ACLU claims Arpaio is creating unconstitutional obstacles to timely abortions by requiring inmates to prepay $300 to $600 for security and transport costs to take take them to abortion clinics.

The ACLU successfully challenged an earlier Arpaio mandating that inmates get court orders authorizing their transport to abortion clinics.

In the dispute over transport fees, the ACLU filed this motion, contending that abortion transport is the only type of transport for which the Sheriff’s Office demand(s) payment. “This is the latest tactic in (Arpaio’s) long history of creating obstacles that delay inmates seeking abortion care, often pushing women further into their pregnancies,” the brief asserts.

Maricopa County Deputy Chief Jack MacIntyre told the Arizona Republic that abortions are not the only medical situations for which the Sheriff’s Office demands prepayment before transport, citing a recent inmate who had to pay before being transported to provide bone marrow for a relative.

“If you took private transportation, I expect they’d want you to pay in advance, too,” MacIntyre said.

Photo: Getty Images

Let’s get you caught up on the latest in what is being hailed as the biggest insider trading case in a long while.

To quickly recap, Raj Rajaratnam (pictured left), the founder of the $3.7 billion hedge fund Galleon Group, was arrested Friday for allegedly trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google, and other big companies. Five other people were also detained.

WSJ today has an interesting profile of Galleon Group, a New York-based fund that pushed its traders so hard to get market-moving information that those who failed frequently were berated or sacked.

The question in this case may become when does such aggressiveness cross the line into illegality?

A Galleon spokesman declined comment but said the firm was “shocked” at the charges and would cooperate with the investigation.

Galleon made its name investing in tech stocks in the 1990s. It remains one of the biggest traders on Wall Street, making about 1,000 trades a day. Getting exclusive information about companies remained a crucial part of its strategy, and the fund aggressively pursued rumors.

“Get an edge or you’re gone,” a former Galleon trader told WSJ of the firm’s ethos.

One former Galleon analyst in 2008 was repeatedly urged to press a company representative for information about a potential acquisition. The analyst, WSJ reports, became so nervous he consulted a lawyer, who said the analyst might be “bending the ethics bar” but perhaps not breaking the law.

One senior trader, Leon Shaulov, who wasn’t named in any federal charges, sometimes berated traders or analysts who couldn’t uncover enough information that could move stocks, WSJ reports.

Through Galleon, Shaulov declined comment.