Free Republic

The House Oversight investigation into President Joe Biden and his family's influence-peddling schemes digs all the way back to ties to the late-’90s big tobacco settlement, including James Biden's deal-working caught on FBI tapes in an unrelated 2008 bribery scheme. James Biden's deal-making getting picked up on FBI tapes in 2008, as The Washington Post reported Sunday, are resurfacing amid the House Oversight investigation and the official impeachment inquiry. Mississippi trial attorney Richard Scruggs admitted to paying James and Sara Biden's "consulting firm" $100,000 to help grease the wheels for the Senate to pass a 1997 big tobacco law that...

The Biden administration has quietly authorized damages to be settled with coerced vaccine takers if they suffer serious side effects under the still-unissued federal vaccine mandate. The clause was buried deep in documents in a Division of Federal Employees’ Compensation bulletin issued earlier in October. “On September 9, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order mandating COVID-19 vaccination for most Federal employees,” the document states, although the pertinent OSHA regulation has still not been formally issued. “The order directed each agency to implement a program to require COVID-19 vaccination for all of its employees, with exceptions only as required by...

A Joe Biden presidency would be a bonanza for plaintiff's lawyers. After his strong performance in the South Carolina Democratic primary and on Super Tuesday, Biden has been consolidating support among a wide range of key Democratic constituencies. But the trial lawyers have been backing him since before it became trendy. Four Biden fundraising events tell the story. On May 21, 2019, Biden had a fundraiser at a home of Orlando, Fla., lawyer John Morgan. Orlando magazine reported the event raised $1.7 million and reports that Morgan owns, with his wife, the plaintiff's law firm Morgan & Morgan, and also...

For trial lawyers, Big Pharma, and assorted other profiteers off American misery, the Supreme Court case Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank is like holy water thrown in the face of a vampire. They cannot abide exposure to it and will shrink away into the darkness with a variety of imprecations and hissing sounds. Also like vampires, the anti-Alice crowd constantly seeks to be invited into the house to rid themselves of this nuisance. Well, actually, in the anti-Alice case, it’s both the House and Senate. Which brings me to the case of Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.),...

Multiple lawsuits have been filed for more than $500 billion against elite universities and those implicated in the college admissions scandal that helped wealthy Americans cheat their children's way into school. Two Stanford students filed a $5 million class action suit on Wednesday claiming they were denied opportunities to get admitted to Yale and USC and have now had their degrees devalued in the wake of the recent charges.

DENVER — He won his six-year legal battle over his refusal to create a gay wedding cake, but Christian baker Jack Phillips is now facing what could be a lengthy courtroom sequel on the issue of transgender birthday cakes. Any hope of a speedy resolution was dashed Tuesday when a federal judge indicated he plans to reject the effort to dismiss the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s latest complaint against Masterpiece Cakeshop involving a birthday cake for a gender transition. “I’m inclined to deny the motion to dismiss,” said senior U.S. District Court Judge Wiley Y. Daniel. He also advised Mr....

The boutique Avanti Hotel is known for its poolside, dog-friendly rooms. Yet its website uses the valuable opening page not to highlight the Palm Springs inn’s amenities, but to explain, in stark black letters on a plain white background, that the Avanti violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Motel 6 will pay up to $7.6 million to Hispanic guests to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that it violated their privacy by regularly providing guest lists to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) filed the lawsuit after the Phoenix New Times said ICE agents had arrested 20 people over six months at Motel 6s in Arizona, using guest lists to target people by national origin. “Motel 6 fully recognizes the seriousness of the situation and accepts full responsibility for both compensating those who were harmed and taking the...

Last weekend, President Donald Trump argued that those foreigners who enter the United States unlawfully should simply be taken to the border, escorted across it and let go. According to the president, this would save precious government resources, avoid the business of separating children from their parents and free up the Border Patrol and other federal assets to do their jobs. He is undoubtedly correct on the beneficial consequences to the government of forced deportation without due process. Yet deportation without a trial is profoundly unconstitutional. Here is the back story. The nation has been torn apart by the images...

Trial lawyers hoping to take a big bite out of food producer Monsanto’s bottom line with a lawsuit over its most popular weed-killer have run into a problem – the judge who they need to convince their arguments are valid is not buying it.In 2015, the International Agency for Research and Cancer, based in Lyon, France, declared glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most popular weed-killer, a “probably human carcinogen.”No other scientific body has reached that conclusion. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency says glyphosate is safe for humans when used in accordance with label directions, the National Institute...

The Guardian bolstered the proliferation of lawsuits against governments and companies over climate change by portraying them as incredibly significant. The left-wing British newspaper asked in all seriousness on March 20, “Can Climate Litigation Save the World?” In it, environment editor Damian Carrington’s word choice revealed support for these efforts. He called courts the new “front line” against climate change and cited numerous instances where “groups and individuals seek to hold governments and companies accountable for the damage they are causing.”

Attorneys who filed one of the first lawsuits after the Oct. 1 mass shooting that killed 58 concert-goers and left hundreds injured on the Las Vegas Strip filed four new negligence cases Monday on behalf of more than 450 victims. This time, however, Houston-based lawyers Chad Pinkerton and Mo Aziz filed the cases in Los Angeles against companies including MGM Resorts International, the corporate owner of both the Mandalay Bay resort and the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert venue. Pinkerton said the intent was to get the cases before a jury less likely to be influenced by the size and...

A Los Angeles jury awarded a woman a $417 million verdict yesterday. The jury found that Johnson & Johnson failed to adequately warn users of the cancer risks of the talc in its baby powder. The jury's 9-3 vote to hold J&J liable for not warning Eva Echeverria about cancer risks is a huge blow to the company, which is facing thousands of such claims across the country. The verdict consists of $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages, according to Reuters. No clear link connects talcum powder to ovarian cancer. Some case-control studies, based on...

A Senate Judiciary Subcmte. looks into the legal conduct of Justice Dept. lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques. One of the witnesses, fmr. FBI agent Ali Soufan, interrogated Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Fox is suing a San Francisco digital music distribution company because of its name. According to TMZ, Twentieth Century Fox Television filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against EMPIRE Distribution over the name it shares with Fox's popular television series "Empire." Founded in 2010, EMPIRE Distribution releases digital music from urban artists including leading hip-hop stars Snoop Dogg, T.I. and Kendrick Lamar. Fox's fictional Empire Records releases urban music including hip-hop and R&B, but in a real life twist, songs from the series are actually available for sale. Columbia Records released songs from each episode for the duration of the...

A lawsuit is expected to be filed in California today over the amount of arsenic in some of the best-selling wines in the country. CBS News reports laboratory testing by Denver's BeverageGrades found some wines have as much as time times the maximum level of arsenic the Environmental Protection Agency allows for drinking water. The EPA doesn't regulate wine as it does water, and there are no federal labeling requirements to disclose what's in wine.

The biggest mystery that never unraveled in Florida Election 2014 has to be super-uber trial attorney Steve Mostyn. Why would a Houston multimillionaire with no current business in the Sunshine State out-donate billionaire George Soros, giving it to Democrat Charlie Crist's Florida gubernatorial campaign and the Florida Democratic Party? We never did get to the bottom of it. Crist and Mostyn didn't really know each other before the campaign. What did Mostyn want? Soros, founder of the far-left Open Society Institute, who advocates bringing European social democracy to the United States, only gave Crist a smidgen over $1 million. But...

Lawyers have raked in more than $7.5 billion in fees from the federal Disability Insurance program since 2009, according to a Manhattan Institute report issued Friday. And that money has come directly out of the pockets of workers through the Social Security payroll tax.

But Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said that the initial outpouring of negative reaction may be giving way to a more receptive response as the ad continues to air. “I think opinion has shifted over the past couple of days,” he said. “It is a galvanizing ad, and it stops and commands attention.” By referring to his disability in his political campaign, some analysts say, Mr. Abbott effectively opened the door for Ms. Davis’s depiction of the wheelchair in her ad. “Greg Abbott has made the wheelchair a representation of his strength and his...

A Florida jury has slammed the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. with $23.6 billion in punitive damages in a lawsuit filed by the widow of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer in 1996. The case is one of thousands filed in Florida after the state Supreme Court in 2006 tossed out a $145 billion class action verdict. That ruling also said smokers and their families need only prove addiction and that smoking caused their illnesses or deaths. Last year, Florida's highest court re-approved that decision, which made it easier for sick smokers or their survivors to pursue lawsuits against...