Posts on ‘November 21st, 2008’

A man whose cell phone number was previously linked to a fax machine used by an arbitration firm cannot sue the firm under a federal telemarketing statute, a New York judge has ruled. The man had billed Island Arbitration & Mediation for “costs incurred” for the calls, which he claimed totaled more than 100 since June. The judge ruled that the fax attempts constituted calls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, but he held that the firm had not violated the telemarketing statute.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon on Thursday ordered the release of five Algerians held at Guantanamo Bay and the continued detention of a sixth in a major rebuke to the Bush administration’s strategy to keep terror suspects imprisoned without charges. In the first case of its kind, the judge said the evidence linking the five to al-Qaida was not credible as it came from a single, unidentified source. Therefore, they could not be held indefinitely as enemy combatants, and should be released immediately.

A federal jury has ordered AT&T to pay almost $17 million for overcharging customers in California when passing along a federally mandated phone fee. But in the verdict reached late Wednesday, the Kansas City, Kan., jurors determined there wasn’t enough evidence showing the telecommunications giant conspired with Sprint Nextel or then-competitor MCI to overcharge customers nationwide for the Universal Service Fund.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s first case as a visiting judge on the 3rd Circuit presented a cutting-edge question in employment discrimination law: whether workers may pursue a class action to challenge companywide policies allegedly designed to thwart the Americans with Disabilities Act. The central claim in the case is that UPS has an unwritten policy of requiring that injured or ill employees must be “100 percent cured” before they can return to work.

Parents have no right to sue under the federal No Child Left Behind Act because Congress designed the law only to regulate school districts and never included any “rights creating” language that would allow individuals to seek enforcement through lawsuits, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday. The decision marks the first time that a federal appellate court has refused to recognize a private cause of action under the NCLB.

The chief deputy county clerk for Brooklyn Supreme Court has been charged with facilitating a $1.4 million mortgage scam in which the conspirators allegedly used fake identification to sell houses they did not own. According to Queens prosecutors, John D’Emic represented either a fake buyer or a fake seller in each of three fraudulent transactions, receiving $1,800 in each case. D’Emic, a Brooklyn-based solo practitioner at the time of the crimes, allegedly helped close the sales and falsify documents.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey was given a “clean bill of health” and went back to work Friday after his harrowing collapse at a late-night dinner speech. The 67-year-old Mukasey, accompanied by his wife, Susan, told reporters and cameras at midday Friday that he felt “excellent.”

The bidding war is over: Former Solicitor General Paul Clement, one of the most highly prized legal catches coming from the Bush administration, has decided to return to the Washington, D.C., office of Atlanta-based King & Spalding. “It feels great to be back,” said Clement from the firm’s offices on Thursday. A number of other firms were in the running, some of which, according to one competitor, made “eye-popping” bids for Clement’s talent.