Free Republic

The preliminary injunction affects 20 states that sued to stop the sharing of Medicaid enrollees' personal information with immigration officials A federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to stop providing access to Medicaid enrollees' personal data, including their home addresses, to immigration officials. District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointee, granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using Medicaid data obtained from 20 states that filed a lawsuit to stop the data sharing. The order, handed down Tuesday, blocks HHS from sharing data on Medicaid enrollees in these states with Immigration and...

A federal judge on Monday sentenced the undocumented man acquitted of murder in the 2015 shooting death of a woman on a San Francisco pier to the seven years he's already spent in jail -- bringing to a legal close the case that ignited a national firestorm over immigration, crime and sanctuary cities.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Trump Administration rule that opponents said would have harmed the bargaining rights of more than 500,000 home healthcare workers in California and several hundred thousand additional workers across the nation. San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rule changing Medicaid state payment requirements would have made it tougher for states to deduct employee benefits and union dues from workers’ paychecks... ...The agency had said it was required to make the change because the old system was barred by federal...

A federal judge cast doubt on Bayer AG ’s proposal to neatly resolve all future lawsuits over the safety of its Roundup weedkiller, potentially snagging the German company’s attempts to move past the massive liability. Bayer said recently it would pay up to $10.9 billion to settle tens of thousands of current Roundup cases and create a system for handling future cases. The deal came after three juries in recent years awarded large verdicts to plaintiffs alleging Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma, spooking investors. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, who must approve the class action, said Monday he...

Yvette Felarca, a leader of the Antifa group By Any Means Necessary, has been ordered by a judge to pay $20,000 in attorneys fees to Judicial Watch. Berkeleyside reports the judge determined the case brought by Felarca was frivolous: In his order, Judge Vince Chhabria called Felarca and her colleagues’ lawsuit against Berkeley Unified, in which conservative organization Judicial Watch was named a party, “frivolous” and “unreasonable.”… The case stems from a 2017 records request filed by Judicial Watch. The group asked Berkeley Unified for all emails sent among district and King Middle School staff related to Felarca and her...

The vagaries of American tort law were on display in San Francisco last week as six jurors decided that Bayer AG is liable for $80.3 million in damages for allegedly causing a Sonoma man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The scientific consensus is that Bayer’s Roundup herbicide is safe, but the company is now open for looting as it faces lawsuits from some 11,200 similar plaintiffs. Yet there’s overwhelming evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is unlikely to have caused Mr. Hardeman’s illness. His lawyers emphasized 2015 findings from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which concluded...

A California jury recently awarded $289 million in damages (later reduced to $78 million) to a former groundskeeper, who claimed the weed killer glyphosate caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Monsanto deliberately or negligently failed to warn him adequately about the chemical’s cancer risks.The case is on appeal, and a second trial will soon begin before U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria, who himself has 620 more glyphosate cases on his docket. Overall, more than 9,300 additional cases are in the works against Monsanto and its new owner, Bayer – and personal injury mass-tort law firms are trolling for more alleged...