Analysis

3 Defenses The IRS Can Fall Back On After Chevron's Demise

By Kat Lucero

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to eliminate federal agencies' ability to rely on the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine to defend their interpretations of ambiguous laws will likely trigger more litigation against the IRS. But that doesn't mean the agency is completely defenseless against such suits. Here, Law360 explores three defense options for the IRS following Chevron's demise.

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Analysis

4 Big Gender-Affirming Care Decisions From 2024's 1st Half

By Kellie Mejdrich

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed an Idaho law banning gender-affirming care for minors to become effective, the Eleventh Circuit upheld a trial court win for a transgender public safety employee in a healthcare discrimination suit and a Florida federal judge blocked as unconstitutional a state law restricting gender-affirming care for minors and adults.

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House Fails To Pass Inherent Contempt Resolution For AG

By Courtney Bublé

The House on Thursday failed to pass a Republican-led inherent contempt resolution for Attorney General Merrick Garland in hopes of obtaining audiotapes of President Joe Biden's interviews with special counsel Robert Hur in the classified documents investigation, but the measure's sponsor promised to try again.

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Ga. Dem Helps Block NY Judge's Nomination From Advancing

By Courtney Bublé

President Joe Biden's nomination of U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn for the Southern District of New York failed to advance out the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, after a key Democrat joined Republicans in opposition over her recommendation in a case that an inmate be transferred to a female facility.

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2 Of Alaska's 3 District Judge Seats Listed As 'Emergencies'

By Courtney Bublé

Two of the three district judgeships on the District of Alaska have been listed as "judicial emergencies" following the recent resignation of Judge Joshua Kindred over findings of sexual misconduct.

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Texas AG Claims He's About To Be Impeached Again

By Tom Lotshaw

In a social media post about an upcoming Texas House committee meeting, Attorney General Ken Paxton said "weak-kneed" establishment Republicans and Democrats are conspiring on a second impeachment effort to try to remove him from office — a claim the committee chair called "farfetched fantasy."

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Top NC Legal Industry Legislation Of 2024: A Midyear Report

By Travis Bland

North Carolina lawmakers have instituted a streamlined process for state business court filings and are eying controls on attorney fees for debt collection lawsuits. Another closely watched measure eases the discipline process for attorneys with the expansion of records access and the ability to expunge certain ethics transgressions.

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Federal Home Booze Ban Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules

By Spencer Brewer

The federal laws banning making liquor at home are unconstitutional, a Texas federal judge said Wednesday, granting a permanent injunction to a home distilling group and saying the ban goes beyond Congress' enumerated powers.

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Trump Says Immunity Ruling Means Conviction Must Be Axed

By Hailey Konnath

Donald Trump has officially lodged his request for his conviction to be vacated in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision, arguing that prosecutors' evidence in the hush money case rests on official acts he took as president, according to a redacted motion made public Thursday.

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Florida Slams Racial Gerrymandering Suit

By Carolina Bolado

Florida's secretary of state and House of Representatives have asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging four congressional districts and seven House districts as racially gerrymandered, arguing that the challengers failed to show that race was the predominant factor in how the districts were drawn.

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Biden's FDIC Pick Hangs Tough Amid GOP Doubts On Record

By Jon Hill

President Joe Biden's candidate for Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair faced scrutiny Thursday as Republican senators at her nomination hearing expressed their skepticism about her readiness to lead the agency, but her critics nevertheless appeared unlikely to derail her prospects for confirmation outright.

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Biden Taps Warren Protege, Ex-CFPB Atty For CFTC Seat

By Sydney Price

President Joe Biden on Thursday nominated a senior Office of Management and Budget official and former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau attorney to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to replace one of two current CFTC members who themselves have been nominated for other offices.

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House Vote Fails To Quash Veto Of SEC Crypto Accounting Bill

By Aislinn Keely

The U.S. House on Thursday failed to override President Joe Biden's veto of a bill that sought to roll back controversial crypto accounting guidance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after Democrats urged members to stick by the president.

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Paxos Says SEC Won't Bring Case Over Binance Stablecoin

By Aislinn Keely

Crypto trust company Paxos said Thursday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has told the firm it won't face an enforcement action over its issuance of crypto exchange Binance's stablecoin, BUSD.

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SF Fed Sues Troubled PPP Lender, Founder For Nearly $67M

By Katryna Perera

The San Francisco arm of the Federal Reserve has sued one of the largest Paycheck Protection Program lenders in Puerto Rico federal court seeking to recover nearly $67 million, alleging the lender has defaulted on the terms of roughly $4.3 billion in credit it advanced for PPP loans.

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Broker Says FINRA Owes Him Jury Trial After Jarkesy Ruling

By Katryna Perera

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has been hit with a suit from a member who says the regulator's allegations in an internal proceeding to sanction and expel him are assertions of common law fraud and therefore must be brought before a court and jury under the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Jarkesy decision.

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Brief

Biden Taps Cohen Weiss Atty As PBGC Director

By Benjamin Morse

President Joe Biden on Thursday tapped an attorney who most recently served as of counsel at Cohen Weiss & Simon LLP to head the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

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Biden Floats $2B To Drive US Auto Industry's EV Pivot

By Linda Chiem

The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled its latest initiative to bolster domestic automotive production by offering nearly $2 billion in grants to convert 11 auto manufacturing and assembly facilities that have been shuttered or are at risk of closing to build electric vehicles and related components.

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FERC 'Waiting For Me To Die' With Late Order, Utility Atty Says

By Spencer Brewer

Counsel for the Louisiana Public Service Commission told the Fifth Circuit on Thursday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is "waiting for me to die" as it delays issuing a compliance order to System Energy Resources Inc., saying the agency was doing irreparable harm to consumers.

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9th Circ. Signals Dr.'s Vax-Refusal Case Deserves New Chance

By Greg Lamm

Ninth Circuit judges signaled Thursday that they were likely to revive a doctor's case claiming he was wrongfully fired from his Washington State University residency for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccination, with two judges questioning if the school went far enough to accommodate his religious beliefs.

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Judge Won't Permit Florida's Trans Care Ban Pending Appeal

By Grace Elletson

A federal judge denied Florida's request Thursday to pause a court order blocking a state law that bans or restricts gender-affirming care for transgender minors and adults while it challenges the ruling at the Eleventh Circuit, finding the state hasn't shown it would be harmed by the law's stagnation.

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Sens. Say Medical Debt Acute 'Symptom' Of Chronic Issues

By Mark Payne

A Senate health committee panel said that medical debt is a "symptom" of high costs in the healthcare system in a hearing on Thursday, with lawmakers and federal agencies proposing solutions to stabilize the issue that impacts consumers and providers.

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Sens. Pitch COPIED Act To Fight AI-Content, Empower Artists

By Gina Kim

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced legislation dubbed the COPIED Act on Thursday to fight the growth of AI-generated "deepfakes," proposing a framework that would give journalists and artists control over their work via a watermarking process and allow them to sue those who use their work without permission.

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Media Matters Fights Texas AG's Bid To Revive X Probe

By Ali Sullivan

Media Matters for America is urging the D.C. Circuit to keep intact a court order prohibiting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from investigating the media watchdog over its reporting about the social media platform X, asserting that the D.C. courts are the correct place to litigate the "retaliatory" probe.

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Fire Fee Reversal Risks 'Chaos' For Cities, Detroit Says

By Danielle Ferguson

The city of Detroit urged Michigan Supreme Court justices to leave in place a decision that said its fire inspection fees are not a disguised unlawful tax because reversing it could send municipalities into "chaos" over their permit and license fee practices.

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DOL Wants ERISA Investment Advice Regs Kept Afloat

By Emmy Freedman

The U.S. Department of Labor is urging a Texas federal court to reject a bid from insurance industry groups to block its new regulations that broaden who qualifies as a fiduciary under federal benefits law, saying the groups are "grasping for a reason" to evade the law.

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Calif. Nabs $50M Deal With Oil Traders In Gas Price-Rigging Suit

By Rae Ann Varona

California secured a $50 million settlement with oil trading companies Vitol and SK Energy, resolving allegations that the companies schemed to artificially inflate gas prices in the Golden State after an Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery exploded in 2015, California's attorney general announced Wednesday.

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Kroger Asks To Delay At Least Part Of FTC Challenge

By Jared Foretek

Kroger and Albertsons are asking an administrative law judge from the Federal Trade Commission to pause the evidentiary portion of the agency's in-house case against the supermarket giants' merger, saying the companies are facing too many overlapping cases in different venues to adequately prepare and present their case.

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Tempur Sealy, Mattress Firm Blast FTC's Merger Challenge

By Ali Sullivan

Tempur Sealy and Mattress Firm fired back at the Federal Trade Commission's bid to block a proposed merger between the mattress companies, contending in separate filings that the FTC's ambiguous allegations require tossing the agency's administrative complaint.

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Sens. Say AI Fuels Need For Data Privacy Law But Fail To Act

By Allison Grande

Members of a key U.S. Senate committee Thursday largely agreed that companies' growing efforts to amass private information to fuel artificial intelligence technologies are accelerating the need for a federal data privacy framework, but they failed to make progress on a bipartisan proposal opposed by the committee's top Republican.

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Senate Confirms Judge To Federal Claims Court

By Courtney Bublé

The Senate voted 52-39 Thursday to confirm U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin M. Meriweather to the Court of Federal Claims for a term of 15 years.

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Navy Can't Get Out Of Ex-Marine's PTSD Discrimination Suit

By Mike Curley

A Washington federal judge won't let the U.S. Navy out of a suit from a former Marine alleging that he was discriminated against and terminated over his post-traumatic stress disorder, saying there is enough evidence that a fact-finder could determine his boss retaliated against him.

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Trade Court Backs Nonevasion Finding For Aluminum Tariffs

By Alyssa Aquino

The U.S. Court of International Trade blessed U.S. Customs and Border Protection's remand determination that aluminum extrusion importers weren't evading tariffs, saying CBP explained it couldn't maintain its original evasion finding after reviewing data it had initially disregarded.

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Commerce Aims To Codify Duty Probe Practices For NMEs

By Jennifer Doherty

The U.S. Department of Commerce proposed regulations on Thursday to formalize practices developed since the 1990s to assess duties on imports from nonmarket economies, including denying lower tariff rates to businesses determined to be heavily controlled by their governments.

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Brief

Feds Say Chinese, Turkish Importers Skirting Refrigerant Duty

By Alyssa Aquino

The U.S. Department of Commerce on Thursday found that refrigerants imported from China and Turkey are skirting an antidumping duty order on Chinese hydrofluorocarbon, exposing the imports to duties exceeding 200%.

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Low-Speed EV Maker Sues Treasury Over Blocked Tax Credits

By Anna Scott Farrell

The U.S. Department of the Treasury violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it passed final regulations excluding low-speed vehicles from qualifying for clean vehicle tax credits, a maker of low-speed electric cars told a D.C. federal court.

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2nd Circ. Says Unreported Violence Doesn't Doom Asylum Bid

By Bonnie Eslinger

The Second Circuit on Thursday said the Board of Immigration Appeals must reconsider an asylum bid from a Honduran woman claiming family abuse and rape by a criminal, finding that evidence of the difficulties women face in reporting violence and the government's ineffective response to such reports was ignored.

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DACA Recipient, Credit Union Settle Home Loan Bias Suit

By Katherine Smith

A beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has reached a settlement with an Oregon credit union to end claims that he was unlawfully denied a home equity loan based on his immigration status.

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Whispers, Curses As Menendez Trial Inches Toward Jury

By Cara Salvatore

Federal corruption prosecutors wound down their bribery case against Sen. Robert Menendez Thursday with a mixture of dramatic into-the-mic whispering and reliance on the adjective "damn" as they argued that nothing in the tale would make sense without the alchemizing element of crime.

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Calif. Tribe Seeks $8.2M For Cultural Site Destruction

By Crystal Owens

The Quechan Indian Tribe is asking a California federal judge to award it $8.2 million after the court found that a federal government construction project to replace poles for 9 miles of transmission lines damaged 10 cultural and sacred archaeological sites on the tribe's reservation.

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Frontier Communications Fined $2.5M Over Quality Standards

By Brian Steele

Connecticut's utility regulator has ordered Frontier Communications to pay nearly $2.5 million in penalties after finding that the company repeatedly violated mandates for maintenance, repair of service problems and filing reports with the state dating back to 2015.

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ISP Group Says FCC Remote Learning Plan On Shaky Ground

By Christopher Cole

Internet service providers say the Federal Communications Commision needs to revisit a proposal to fund Wi-Fi hot spots for students after the U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned the Chevron doctrine, which gave wide judicial deference to agencies.

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Brief

Feds Seek Input On 37 GHz Sharing Plans

By Christopher Cole

Federal regulators intend to ask for the public's input in August about a possible revamp of the lower 37 gigahertz airwaves, the U.S. Department of Commerce said.

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Brief

Wash. Justices Agree To Review State's Pot Co. Wage Suit

By Jonathan Capriel

The Washington Supreme Court has agreed to review whether the state labor agency jumped the gun by suing a cannabis company to collect back pay for employees before the agency knew how much money the workers were owed.

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California Adds A Novel Twist To State Suits Against Big Oil

California’s suit against Exxon Mobil Corp., one of several state suits that seek to hold oil and gas companies accountable for climate-related harms, is unique both in the magnitude of the alleged claims and its use of a consumer protection statute to seek disgorgement of industry profits, says Julia Stein at UCLA School of Law.

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Recent Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions and a proposed rulemaking indicate the board’s intention to continue to take a tougher stance on multiple inter partes review petitions challenging the same patent, presenting key factors for petitioners to consider, like the necessity of parallel filings and serial petitions, say Yinan Liu and Cory Bell at Finnegan.

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New La. Managing Agent Law May Portend Growing Scrutiny

Recent amendments to Louisiana’s managing general agent regulations impose expansive new obligations on such agents and their insurer partners, which may be a sign of heightened regulatory, commercial and rating agency scrutiny, say attorneys at McDermott.

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Criminal Enforcement Considerations For Gov't Contractors

Government contractors increasingly exposed to criminal liability risks should establish programs that enable detection and remediation of employee misconduct, consider voluntary disclosure, and be aware of the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to make a mandatory disclosure where the government concludes it was required, say attorneys at Crowell & Moring.

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Opinion

States Should Loosen Law Firm Ownership Restrictions

Despite growing buzz, normalized nonlawyer ownership of law firms is a distant prospect, so the legal community should focus first on liberalizing state restrictions on attorney and firm purchases of practices, which would bolster succession planning and improve access to justice, says Michael Di Gennaro at The Law Practice Exchange.

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In Case You Missed It: Hottest Firms And Stories On Law360

For those who missed out, here's a look back at the law firms, stories and expert analyses that generated the most buzz on Law360 last week.

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Cuomo Beats Retaliation Claims In NY Trooper's Suit

By Gina Kim

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo defeated retaliation claims in a state trooper's lawsuit alleging she was sexually harassed while serving in Cuomo's security detail, after a federal judge said Friday that no employment relationship existed because Cuomo resigned months before his purported threat to seek prosecution of his alleged victims.

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Whistleblower's Attys Get $5.9M After Losing $11.5M Fee Ask

By Dorothy Atkins

A Massachusetts federal judge on Thursday awarded a whistleblower's counsel $5.9 million in fees plus $651,845 in costs and expenses after slashing their prior "exorbitant" $11.5 million fee request in May in a decade-old False Claims Act lawsuit alleging Fresenius Medical Care billed Medicare for unnecessary hepatitis tests.

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UK Litigation Roundup: Here's What You Missed In London

By Max Austin

This past week in London has seen the owner of the Lambretta scooter brand Innocenti SA embroiled in a trademark dispute with a property developer, a clash between two art dealers over a collection of tapestries, Telecom Italia pursue a debt claim against a competing telecommunications company, and performing arts trade union Equity hit a casting directory for charging unfair subscription fees on actors. Here, Law360 looks at these and other new claims in the U.K.

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Ex-Magellan Execs Waive Conflicts Over Past Shared Counsel

By Julie Manganis

Two former Magellan Diagnostics executives charged with conspiring to hide defects in the company's lead testing devices agreed on Friday to waive any potential conflict created by their prior joint representation by a Donnelly Conroy & Gelhaar LLP attorney.

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Brief

Former Colorado Court Workers Settle Sexism Claims

By Daniel Ducassi

The Colorado State Courts Administrator's Office said in a joint notice that it has settled a lawsuit in Denver District Court with two former workers who said they were laid off as part of a broader pattern of gender discrimination against female employees.

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Conn.'s Child Advocate Departs For Top Role At Nonprofit

By Christine DeRosa

The attorney who led Connecticut's Office of the Child Advocate for more than a decade is stepping down this fall to return to a legal nonprofit as its executive director.

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Analysis

Biggest Colorado Decisions Of 2024: A Midyear Report

By Daniel Ducassi

The U.S. Supreme Court's quick reversal of Colorado justices' decision removing former President Donald Trump from the state's ballots and a Boulder County judge's ruling clearing the way for landmark climate litigation about major oil companies rank among the most important decisions affecting Colorado so far this year.

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Paul Weiss Hopes To Stem Exits With New Partner Structure

By Matt Perez

Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, shared in a podcast published Thursday that the firm has followed a new two-track partnership compensation model as a means to combat retention issues plaguing similar firms.

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Litigation Funding 'Abuses' Targeted By Federal Lawmakers

By Bonnie Eslinger

Federal lawmakers are seeking to put the reins on third-party investors bankrolling litigation, with Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., introducing legislation that would require disclosure of third-party financing deals in civil lawsuits, and Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., asking Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday to have the Judicial Conference review the practice.

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Lin Wood Wants Judge Disqualified In Ga. Defamation Case

By Emily Johnson

Controversial retired Georgia attorney L. Lin Wood has asked that a Georgia federal judge be disqualified from presiding over a defamation case he's facing from his former law partners, arguing that the case involved two witnesses from Alston & Bird LLP, where the judge previously worked.

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GC Cheat Sheet: The Hottest Corporate News Of The Week

By Sue Reisinger

General counsel at companies involved in environmental litigation scored victories and suffered some setbacks this week, including the dismissal of a Baltimore city suit seeking climate damages as well as Marathon Oil's record-setting $241.5 million Clean Air Act settlement.

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Guo Trial Juror Booted For Googling Fugitive Co-Defendant

By Rachel Scharf

The jury in Chinese dissident Miles Guo's $1 billion fraud and racketeering case was forced to restart its verdict deliberations on Friday after a juror was cut loose for Google-searching Guo's fugitive financial adviser and co-defendant William Je.

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