Hearing: Which court should hear coastal lawsuit?

A legal tug-of-war continues in a state levee board's lawsuit against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies over the erosion of wetlands. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East wants U.S. District Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown to send the case back to Orleans Parish Civil District Court, where the board filed it in July. Attorneys for Chevron USA Inc. got the lawsuit moved to federal court in August, arguing that federal laws govern many of its claims. Since then, lawyers have filed hundreds of pages of arguments and exhibits just on the question of which court should hear the case. Brown scheduled arguments Wednesday. The lawsuit says oil and gas canal and pipeline work has contributed to the erosion of wetlands that protect New Orleans when hurricanes move ashore. Corrosive saltwater from a network of oil and gas access and pipeline canals has killed plants that anchored the wetlands, letting waves sweep away hundreds of thousands of coastal land, it says. Gov. Bobby Jindal has blasted the lawsuit as a windfall for trial lawyers and his coastal protection chief, Garret Graves, said the suit would undermine Louisiana's work with the industry to rebuild wetlands. An association of state levee districts voted to oppose the suit. Since then, however, two coastal parishes heavily dependent on the industry have filed lawsuits of their own raising similar issues. Earlier this month, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association sued the state's attorney general, accusing him of illegally approving the Southeast Louisiana board's contract with lawyers who filed its lawsuit. The association contends that Buddy Caldwell had no authority to approve the contract and that the suit will have "a chilling effect on the exploration, production, development and transportation" of Louisiana's oil and gas.

Planned Parenthood Asks Supreme Court's Help In Texas

Planned Parenthood is asking the Supreme Court to place Texas' new abortion restrictions on hold. The group says in a filing with the high court Monday that more than a third of the clinics in Texas have been forced to stop providing abortions since a court order allowed the new restrictions to take effect Friday. Planned Parenthood says that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went too far in overruling a trial judge who blocked the law's provision that requires doctors who perform abortions in clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The filing was addressed to Justice Antonin Scalia, who oversees emergency matters from Texas.

Appeals court moves BP forward in settlement dispute

The April 2010 blowout of BP's Macondo well off the Louisiana coast triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and led to millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf. Shortly after the disaster, BP agreed to create a $20 billion compensation fund that was administered at first by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, led by attorney Kenneth Feinberg. BP argued that Barbier and court-appointed claims administrator Patrick Juneau misinterpreted terms of the settlement. Plaintiffs' lawyers countered that BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated how many claimants would qualify for payments. In the panel's majority opinion, Judge Edith Brown Clement said BP has consistently argued that the settlement's complex formula for compensating businesses was intended to cover "real economic losses, not artificial losses that appear only from the timing of cash flows." "The interests of individuals who may be reaping windfall recoveries because of an inappropriate interpretation of the Settlement Agreement and those who could never have recovered in individual suits for failure to show causation are not outweighed by the potential loss to a company and its public shareholders of hundreds of millions of dollars of unrecoverable awards," Clement wrote. Judge Leslie Southwick wrote a concurring opinion. Judge James Dennis wrote a partial dissent, largely disagreeing with the other two. "Because BP has not satisfied its heavy burden of showing that a change in circumstances or law warranted the modifications it sought, the district court correctly affirmed the Administrator's decision rejecting BP's argument and actions to modify the agreement," Dennis wrote.

Custody dispute goes to Okla. Supreme Court

An Oklahoma man who is seeking custody of his Cherokee daughter has appealed a lower court decision to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Dusten Brown filed a writ of prohibition Friday in Oklahoma Supreme Court. The filing is appealing a decision from Nowata County District Court. Brown for years has been fighting Matt and Melanie Capobianco of South Carolina over the custody of 3-year-old Veronica. Veronica's birth mother put her up for adoption. Brown is Veronica's birth father and a member of the Cherokee Nation. He fought the Capobiancos' adoption of Veronica under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Brown and the Capobiancos were in a Nowata County court Friday, but a gag order meant neither side would comment.

San Diego, California - Employment Law Attorney

Sexual harassment in the work environment should never be taken lightly. It is a federal and state offsense and violates the laws. The federal law is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. The FEHA stands for the State law which is the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, which prohibits harassment and discrimination in employment because of sex (gender), sexual orientation, marital status and pregnancy, and retaliation for protesting illegal discrimination related to one of these categories. There are several ways in which sexual harassment can come about. It can be described as someone making another person uncomfortable such as in the form of unwanted advanced. However, it can also exist if someone is subjecting you to sexual comments or other forms of conduct that creates a hostile or uncomfortable work environment. This can be a serious matter and may cause someone to avoid normal activities in the work area. If you believe you have been subject to sexual harassment, call 619 857 9020 to contact a sexual harassment attorney at McDonnell Law.

IMF head Lagarde in court in fraud probe

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde is facing questions at a special Paris court Thursday over her role in the 400 million euro ($520 million) pay-off to a controversial businessman when she was France's finance minister.
The court hearing threatens to sully the reputations of both Lagarde and France. The payment was made to well-connected entrepreneur Bernard Tapie as part of a private arbitration process to settle a dispute with state-owned bank Credit Lyonnais over the botched sale of Adidas in the 1990s. It is seen by many in France as an example of the cozy relationship between big money and big power in France.
Lagarde has earned praise for her negotiating skills as managing director of the IMF through Europe's debt crisis and is seen as a trailblazer for women leaders. Her decision to let the Adidas dispute go to private arbitration rather than be settled in the courts has drawn criticism, and French lawmakers asked magistrates to investigate.
Lagarde, smiling at reporters, left her Paris apartment Thursday morning and appeared at a special court that handles cases involving government ministers. She has denied wrongdoing.
At the time of the payment, Tapie was close to then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was Lagarde's boss. Critics have said the deal was too generous to Tapie at the expense of the French state, and that the case shouldn't have gone to a private arbitration authority because it involved a state-owned bank.

Court: California cities can ban pot shops

Local governments in California's have legal authority to ban storefront pot shops within their borders, California's highest court ruled on Monday in an opinion likely to further diminish the state's once-robust medical marijuana industry.

Nearly 17 years after voters in the state legalized medical marijuana, the court ruled unanimously in a legal challenge to a ban the city of Riverside enacted in 2010.

The advocacy group Americans for Safe Access estimates that another 200 jurisdictions statewide have similar prohibitions on retail pot sales. Many were enacted after the number of retail medical marijuana outlets boomed in Southern California after a 2009 memo from the U.S. Justice Department said prosecuting pot sales would be a low priority.

However, the rush to outlaw pot shops has slowed in the 21 months since the four federal prosecutors in California launched a coordinated crackdown on dispensaries by threatening to seize the property of landlords who lease space to the shops. Hundreds of dispensary operators have since been evicted or closed voluntarily.

Marijuana advocates have argued that allowing local government to bar dispensaries thwarts the intent of the state's medical marijuana law - the nation's first - to make the drug accessible to residents with doctor's recommendations to use it.

Retired Supreme Court Justice O'Connor visits SC

Issues dealing with church and state will always be among the toughest the nation's courts deal with and there's no easy test for deciding them, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Monday.
"Religious pluralism lies at the very heart of the American political tradition and I think it remains a major concern as our country becomes ever more the home of larger and larger communities of people from widely different ethnic and religious backgrounds," the first woman appointed to the high court told a legal symposium focusing on a constitutional test she proposed in a high court ruling almost 30 years ago.
The symposium at the Charleston School of Law was sponsored by the Charleston Law Review and the Riley Institute at Furman University.
O'Connor's endorsement test proposed that a government action can violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state if a reasonable observer sees that action as either endorsing or disapproving religion. But O'Connor, who is 83 and who retired from the court in 2006, said that there is no grand unified theory for applying to such cases. Over the years the Supreme Court has made seemingly contradictory decisions.

China Trademark & Patent Law Office - Trademark and Patent

The process of registering a trademark in China might be quite like what it is in your own country. To have a registered trademark, you should file the trademark with the Chinese government. When it has passed the examination and publication, it becomes a registered trademark protected by the China Trademark Law. But before applying the trademark, there is some knowledge on the trademark that you would like to know.

A patent is a right granted to the owner of an invention to prevent others from making, using, importing or selling the invention without his permission. A patentable invention can be a product or a process that gives a new technical solution to a problem. It can also be a new method of doing things, the composition of a new product, or a technical improvement on how certain objects work. Once it is granted, its term of a patent is 20 years from the Date of Filing, subject to the payment of annual renewal fees.

http://www.ctplo.com/patent.html