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Finding the city's attitude "deeply troubling," a judge granted class action status Wednesday to a 2008 lawsuit accusing the New York Police Department of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk policies aimed at reducing crime. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that there was "overwhelming evidence" that a centralized stop-and-frisk program has led to thousands of unlawful stops. She noted that the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never file a lawsuit in response, and she said class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases.

Gannett Newspaper - Link Only: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120429/NEWS0201/304290083/TN-GOP-targets-frivolous-lawsuits-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

A group of six Knoxville residents are suing the Tennessee Valley Authority , claiming it violated their free speech rights by refusing them entry into a TVA board of directors meeting. The six people were dressed in zombie costumes when they were denied entry. Knoxville News Sentinel writes that they are also seeking an injunction stopping TVA from barring costumed citizens from attending meetings. Protestors in Chattanooga last July dressed up as zombies to urge TVA not to complete a plant in Bellefonte, where work has been idled since 1988. The protestors called Bellefonte a “corpse” of a power plant,...

Employers can't require workers to sign arbitration agreements that prevent them from pursuing group claims in court, the National Labor Relations Board said Friday, in a decision that some experts say could have wide repercussions. The NLRB said agreements that required private sector workers to make claims only as individuals and only to an arbitrator violated their right to join together in "concerted action" under the National Labor Relations Act. . . . The board voted 2-0, with one recusal, in favor of the ruling against the Fort Worth, Tx.-based company. The NLRB said Brian Hayes, the board's only Republican,...

Environmentalists filed notices Tuesday warning they would sue to force the owners of four existing and planned East Contra Costa power plants to protect rare plants and a butterfly and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the endangered species notice, the environmental groups said emissions from four Antioch-area power plants -- two of which are not operational -- will increase nitrogen in the soil at Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge, a preserve near the waterfront industrial area. The increased nitrogen helps weeds that crowd out native plants, including a plant needed by the Lange's metalmark butterfly, of which about 35 survive,...

One of the recurring scourges facing small-business owners in the Bay Area is the often frivolous lawsuits filed under provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Chronicle has done a number of stories about the problem, relating the travails of bookstore, restaurant and retail store owners in San Francisco who have either been put out of business or essentially extorted to cough up thousands of dollars - which go into the plaintiffs' and lawyers' pockets - to settle the complaints out of court. Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is getting into the act, initially on behalf of Latino...

Cash-strapped Oakland has spent nearly $1 million and counting on outside lawyers to defend the city's decision to fire former City Administrator Deborah Edgerly and her top assistant, Cheryl Thompson. Edgerly and Thompson were both fired in 2008 by then-Mayor Ron Dellums after Edgerly was accused of warning her nephew William Lovan, a convicted felon who worked for the city as a parking meter repairman, of a planned police gang sweep. Lovan resigned from the city last September after his arrest for drug possession. At the time, he was on home detention for a gun conviction - and soon after...

Here’s a tip for you: Listening to really, really loud sounds over long periods of time can damage your hearing. Perhaps you already knew that. But a few years back, a group of clever trial lawyers decided they could make some serious money by arguing in court that you are too stupid to know it yourself. They filed 26 consumer-fraud lawsuits in multiple states against Motorola and other manufacturers of Bluetooth headsets. They alleged that consumers were not warned sufficiently about the dangers, and that they “would not have purchased their Bluetooth headsets but for defendants’ false advertising.” That led...

The state Supreme Court handed insurers and business groups a major legal victory – and personal injury lawyers an equally big setback – on Thursday by imposing limits on medical damages in one of the era's most closely watched civil cases. The issue in the case, Howell v. Hamilton Meats & Provisions, was whether an injured party could collect the full medical care costs billed by doctors and hospitals, or the lesser amount that the medical providers accepted from an insurance company.

COSTA MESA -- California prosecutors filed a major lawsuit against several lawyers and call center operators for allegedly running a nationwide scam to dupe desperate homeowners into paying thousands of dollars to join dubious lawsuits against some of the country's largest banks. The complaint unsealed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court accuses prominent foreclosure attorneys Philip Kramer and Mitchell Stein and at least 17 other individuals and businesses of luring borrowers into a scheme that falsely promised a cut of future settlements. The lawsuit portrays the defendants as the most recent in the chain of mortgage-related scammers who helped...

Joseph Sellers is in the hole by about $7 million and does not expect to dig his way out any time soon. As lead counsel to the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart Stores Inc employment discrimination lawsuit tossed out by the United States Supreme Court on Monday, Seller's law firm, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, dedicated about $5 million in attorney hours and spent $2 million on experts and discovery in the decade-long case, he said.The Court found the claims filed by as many as 1.5 million women against the retail giant were too varied to permit class certification. The Court...

An environmental group threatened to sue two of the nation's biggest rail owners Tuesday under a novel legal theory that would classify diesel exhaust as hazardous waste. The Natural Resources Defense Council sent letters to Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, saying it will file a lawsuit within 90 days under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates hazardous solid waste disposal. The notice letter, which is required before proceeding with a lawsuit, cited problems at 16 rail yards across California, from Oakland to San Bernardino.

Each year, the state Chamber of Commerce publishes a list of bills it calls "job killers," saying they will place onerous burdens on employers and discourage hiring -- and has run up a very strong record in killing or neutralizing measures on its list. Last year, for instance, the list contained 43 bills, of which just 12 made it to then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, and he vetoed all but two of them. Republican Schwarzenegger rarely signed "job killer" bills, although his predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis, signed most that reached him. The targeted bills are mostly sponsored by labor unions, environmental...

A federal judge in California said Friday that he will deny another request from Toyota Motor Corp. to dismiss lawsuits filed by car owners who claim sudden-acceleration defects caused the value of their vehicles to drop. U.S. District Judge James Selna said in a 30-page ruling that the lawsuits have enough merit to move forward. "Taking these allegations as true, as the court must at the pleading stage, they establish an economic loss," Selna wrote. "Plaintiffs bargained for safe, defect-free vehicles, but instead received unsafe, defective vehicles. A vehicle with a defect is worth less than one without a defect."...

Berkeley officials say a lawsuit by residents could prevent the demolition and rebuilding of two aging libraries in the poorest areas of town. The officials took their case to Berkeley residents Tuesday night, publicly urging the plaintiffs to drop the suit at a rally before a City Council meeting. The suit, brought by five residents calling themselves Concerned Library Users, contends language in a 2008 ballot measure that secured money for the renovation of the libraries does not contain the word "demolish" and that doing so would be illegal. At issue are plans for demolition and construction of the west...

Even if lawmakers approve a California budget deal in floor votes expected this week, advocates say they've just begun to fight big cuts in the works for redevelopment agencies, developmentally disabled services and other swaths of the state budget. Attorneys are already preparing lawsuits challenging Gov. Jerry Brown's proposals on the grounds that they violate voter-passed constitutional amendments and long-standing state laws. If successful, the legal actions could cost the state – currently trying to fill a $26.6 billion hole – about $2.4 billion. Those areas already under scrutiny for lawsuits include proposals to create standards for serving developmentally disabled...

CHATTANOOGA — The Tennessee Valley Authority won another round in a court fight against lawsuits from the utility’s huge coal ash spill, with a magistrate saying no to plaintiff lawyers who asked to seek damages in a class action. U.S. Magistrate Bruce Guyton recommended denying the class action status sought by attorneys for some of the 457 plaintiffs spread among about 50 current lawsuits, and for any others waiting to sue. Since the Dec. 22, 2008, spill of 5.4 million cubic yards of toxin-laden sludge in the Emory River and on privately held land beside TVA’s’ Kingston Plant, the utility...

San Francisco merchants, concerned about being sued for failing to provide access to disabled customers, met Tuesday with city officials who soon will embark on a campaign to educate business owners about accessibility requirements and help forestall lawsuits that might put them out of business. Since November, several Noe Valley shop owners have received letters from people with disabilities suggesting that their stores may be violating state laws or federal access standards under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those notices coincided with a rash of civil rights lawsuits in the Richmond District in late November that led some businesses to...

LOS ANGELES -- A jury has hit the state with $1.73 million in damages in a suit by the family of an illegal immigrant who died of penile cancer that went untreated during more than a year in state and federal custody. The Los Angeles Superior Court jury found state prison doctors partly to blame Wednesday for the death of Francisco Castaneda in February 2007. A separate suit against the federal government is tentatively scheduled for trial in April, the family's lawyers said Thursday.

More than 60 children and nine school districts across California filed a historic lawsuit Thursday, arguing that elected officials have failed in their constitutional obligation to support public schools. The case has the potential to completely overhaul how, and how much, money flows into schools. In short, the case seeks to force the state Legislature and governor to fix a broken education funding system - one that has failed to take into account what it actually costs to educate a child, plaintiffs' attorneys said. The lawsuit would require Sacramento to fund schools based on what state law requires they offer...