Posts on ‘October 20th, 2009’

The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning granted review in the first Guantanamo detainee case to face the Obama Administration at the high court level. The detainee case, Kiyemba v. Obama, asks whether federal courts, as part of their habeas powers, have the authority to order detainees released into the United States. Also on the list was the denial of review in a Virginia drunk driving case, which drew a sharp dissent from Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.

Texting is becoming a means for angry people to harass or threaten others, especially estranged spouses, girlfriends or boyfriends. “I definitely have seen more e-mail and texting harassment cases in the last five years,” says a Connecticut victim advocate who experienced it herself.

Did Bank of America and its lawyers at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton make a mistake in the recent order waiving attorney-client privilege in the bank’s case against the Securities and Exchange Commission? At least one expert thinks so. Gregory Joseph, a lawyer who studies evidence and attorney-client privilege, thinks the bank’s waiver could result in many more lawyers getting access to privileged documents than the bank intended.

Companies that choose to outsource work to save money may be buying themselves more legal trouble than it’s worth. That’s one conclusion from Kroll Inc.’s annual global corporate fraud survey, released Monday. Asking if outsourcing is really worth the risk, the survey says companies often make the decision “without a thorough assessment of the risks involved in determining what is to be outsourced, and to whom.”

A California woman and her husband sued drugmaker Bayer in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, saying she suffered a debilitating stroke after taking the company’s popular birth control pill Yaz for a month. Hundreds of such suits have been filed around the country in the past month and are just “the tip of the iceberg,” says the woman’s lawyer. The suits were triggered by the publication of two recent studies in a British medical journal.

The “Twitter arrest” of a New York social worker who allegedly used the popular microblogging site to help protesters evade the police at last month’s G-20 summit in Pennsylvania comes just as a new survey reports that Web-based social networks are becoming the favored forums of political engagement. Attorney Harry A. Valetk examines the legal backdrop to the case and the public policy concerns raised by the arrest.