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ATLANTA — The 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Jan. 6 mostly affirmed summary judgment for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a dispute over alleged deceptive advertising and unfair practices with a company that offers credit cards for fuel purchases and its CEO, finding that the district court did not err in granting summary judgment to the FTC and granting injunctive relief because requiring the company “not to hide disclosures behind a hyperlink prevents” the company from making the link harder to find.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two days before a scheduled U.S. Supreme Court conference on a certiorari petition that the U.S. government recently filed a consequential amicus curiae brief urging the high court to grant, the parties on Jan. 7 filed a one-paragraph dismissal motion, saying they agreed to each bear their own costs; the petition concerns an issue the high court has passed on several times and asks whether “burden-shifting applies to the element of causation under” part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
LAS VEGAS — Addressing “an issue of first impression” regarding the Multiemployer Pension Plan Amendments Act (MPPAA), the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Jan. 6 reversed and remanded a grant of summary judgment that was in favor of a multiemployer pension plan, holding in part “that there is no minimum amount of entertainment work required for an individual to be an ‘employee[] in the entertainment industry’ under the MPPAA.”
BOSTON — Concluding that physicians’ professional groups have sufficiently pleaded that they have been required to “devote significant time and resources” to counseling their members in response to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women so as to confer standing, a Massachusetts federal judge on Jan. 6 denied the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the groups and three Jane Does seeking to set aside both the CDC’s vaccine recommendation changes and the appointment of new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 7 denied the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s emergency application for a stay of two Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rulings in favor of a National Labor Relations Board’s decision finding that the newspaper bargained in bad faith, unlawfully declared an impasse and unlawfully surveilled union activities during a long-running labor dispute.
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, has spent the last 20 years studying mass torts, class actions and civil procedure. She has published more than 40 articles and essays in law journals and regularly speaks on legal topics at research institutions across the United States.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Citing “the uncertainty of the appellate relief and operation of the agreement,” a Kansas federal judge on Jan. 6 denied without prejudice the parties’ joint stipulation that “upon affirmance of the District Court’s decision that does not reduce the amount of the judgment” the defendants would pay $7,108,254.82 in attorney fees and $449,437.86 in costs plus interest in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act class action where labor union members whose early retirement benefits were stopped or denied because of non-boilermaker work largely prevailed following a bench trial.
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge dismissed with prejudice a suit against Universal Music Group (UMG) and Universal City Studios alleging breach of contract and “reverse domain hijacking in violation of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (‘ACPA’)” related to the defendants’ purported efforts to divest an alleged former UMG intern of a domain name, finding that “[t]here is clear and convincing evidence” that the alleged former intern committed fraud upon the court.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A California federal judge was correct to find that two claims in a patent describing systems for decoding wireless transmissions are invalid as abstract, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held Jan. 6, holding that the claims point only to abstract ideas without the necessary inventive element to make them patent eligible.
SAN FRANCISCO — Resolving several motions, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted voluntary dismissal of an appeal where former Twitter Inc. employees had initially tried to revive their putative class action for more than $500 million in severance benefits, saying in part that “[i]t appears that the interests of any members of the putative class . . . can be protected adequately in” a similar suit filed Nov. 4.
SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge on Jan. 5 stayed a class action against Tesla Inc. and its affiliates for violating California’s unfair competition law (UCL) and other laws by misrepresenting the capabilities of Tesla vehicles’ “self-driving” technology after the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted the Tesla parties permission to file an interlocutory appeal of the court’s order granting the driver’s motion for class certification.