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NEW YORK, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked a U.S. court on Monday for a new trial after losing her defamation case against the New York Times (NYT.N) earlier this month, and requested that the judge overseeing the case be disqualified. Palin's attorneys said last week they would take those steps because several jurors received push notifications on their cellphones before deliberations were over about U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's decision to dismiss the case regardless of their verdict.

NEW YORK, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate, plans to seek a new trial and have the judge disqualified after losing her defamation case against the New York Times. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan discussed Palin's plan at a hearing on Wednesday, and said he will issue a written opinion by March 1 explaining why he dismissed her case while jurors were deliberating. He said he would speed up the opinion because of the "fracas" surrounding the dismissal. The unusual hearing came eight days after jurors rejected...

Legal experts have slammed the Clinton-appointed New York judge who tossed Sarah Palin's libel lawsuit against The New York Times while jurors are still deliberating the case and say he's effectively hobbled the jury. 'I would have expected the judge to wait for the jury to return its verdict before ruling on the motion for judgment as a matter of law, because there was no urgency to issuing that ruling,' attorney Mitchell Epner, of Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, told Law & Crime on Monday. 'Nothing would have changed if he had waited for the verdict to have been announced, or...

A federal judge said on Monday that he will dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times, concluding that Palin’s lawyers had failed to show the publication acted with actual malice.

Judge Jed Rakoff has rejected the SEC’s proposed wrist slap of Citibank for selling mortgage-backed securities it knew to be of poor qualify. Effectively, what he did was join this complaint with SEC’s complaint–filed at the same time as they filed the proposed Citi settlement–against a Citi employee, Brian Stoker, in which the SEC explicitly alleged that Citi knew what it was doing when it dealt shitty securities it intended to short. By doing so, Rakoff imposed the same trial process on this complaint as on Stoker. Effectively, he’s saying, “If you’re prepared to prove that Stoker knew what he...

NEW YORK - A federal judge Monday rejected a government argument that he was interfering with the president's constitutional authority to wage war by insisting that Guantanamo Bay detainees be asked if they want their names to be made public. The government raised the objection after U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff last month ordered the Defense Department to pose the question to detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base. The judge wrote that the argument was without merit, and that it was offered improperly after he had already rejected the government's other reasons for insisting that the...