Posts on ‘July 28th, 2009’

The two former Luzerne County, Pa., judges who have pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges effectively controlled the county for years and ruled through fear and intimidation, overseeing widespread corruption, including rampant case-fixing and payoffs. That is the picture that has been painted through hundreds of interviews with dozens of sources and extensive research of court records and prior news accounts conducted by The Legal Intelligencer.

New York state is not obligated to pay for gender reassignment surgery for a Medicaid recipient, even though it provided coverage for individual procedures that are necessary preliminaries to the change, a federal judge has ruled. The judge found that Morgana Ravenwood’s constitutional rights were not violated by the denial of coverage, and refused to order the state health commissioner to rescind a 1998 law prohibiting state Medicaid funding for “care,” “services” or “drugs” related to gender reassignment surgery.

Medtronic said Monday it agreed to pay Abbott Laboratories $400 million to settle patent lawsuits related to the design of artery-opening stents, some of the most lucrative medical devices marketed by either company. The two companies agreed not to sue each other for at least 10 years over matters related to stents, which are mesh metal tubes used to prop open arteries that have been cleared of fatty plaque. Medtronic said the agreement settles all outstanding coronary stent litigation between the companies.

Finding that an appropriate claim was not stated under the Delaware Supreme Court’s recent Lynondell precedent, Delaware Chancellor William Chandler III has dismissed an amended complaint by the Wayne County Employees’ Retirement System, which is seeking to halt a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games. One of Activision’s lawyers, Skadden’s Ed Micheletti, told The Am Law Litigation Daily that this case is the first in which the Lyondell analysis has been applied.