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If you’ve committed a crime for which you were never charged and you’re considering doing a documentary about said crime, you might want to think again.

Thirty-four years ago, Robert A. Durst’s wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, disappeared from her home in Westchester County. Since then, Mr. Durst has spent his time traveling between New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, funded by his estranged family’s real estate empire.

Ms. Durst’s family members have long suspected Mr. Durst of killing her, but they never had enough evidence to charge him for the crime. Three decades later, Mr. Durst sounds pretty confident that he got away with murder. Continue reading ›

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Erin Brockovich wasn’t the only one to take on a big company that had harmed thousands of people with poisoned water. Rob Bilott took on DuPont for dumping PFOAs into a local creek, when it knew the chemical had adverse health effects, but Bilott’s background was very different from Brockovich’s.

Bilott spent eight years defending large corporations from allegations of violating environmental protection laws. He ended up on the plaintiff’s side by accident.

Some neighbors of Bilott’s grandmother had referred him to a local farmer whose cattle were getting sick and dying. The farmer had linked it to a landfill next to his property owned by DuPont. The company was dumping perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) into the creek that ran through the landfill and the farmer’s land. Because the landfill was upstream from the farm, the cows were drinking poisoned water. Not only did this destroy the farmer’s livelihood, but it was inhumane because the cattle were clearly suffering. Continue reading ›

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For most of us, once we’ve sold our property, it’s gone and we never have to think about it again. Unfortunately for Mark Oberholzer, a plumber in Galveston County, Texas, the used truck he sold to AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway in Houston continues to haunt him. The name of his company, which he painted on the side of the truck to grow his business, has turned on him and now instead of helping him gain customers, it costs him business.

Mr. Oberholtzer sold his truck to the car dealership as part of a trade-in deal for a newer model. His son started to peel off the name and phone number of the company, but the salesman told him to stop because it would mess up the paint job and that the decal would be removed later.

But it never was removed. The lawsuit alleges the dealership sold the truck at auction in November 2013, the month after they bought it from Mr. Oberholtzer. From the auction, the truck went to Turkey and apparently made its way to Syria where ISIS converted the flatbed to carry an antiaircraft gun. Continue reading ›

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With steroids running rampant in the world of professional athletes, many people just assume that most, if not all, prominent athletes are using some sort of drug (or drugs) to artificially enhance their performance. At the same time, many people who idolize certain athletes and look up to them as role models are crushed when they find out these athletes have been taking drugs to gain an unfair advantage. The field of professional athletes is extremely competitive, and when millions of dollars are on the line, the temptation to do whatever it takes to be the best can sometimes be too much to resist.

But all artificial performance enhancers are banned from professional sports. As a result, when an athlete is caught using illegal drugs, it usually means the end of their career. Because using the drugs is both immoral and illegal, any accusation of drug use must be taken very seriously. Continue reading ›

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When a plaintiff files a class action lawsuit (usually against a large corporation), she does not have to include a list of every single potential class member along with her complaint. In many class action lawsuits, the plaintiffs are easily identifiable, but not always and it’s the cases in which the class members are harder to identify that defendants have been attacking the plaintiffs.

Consumer class actions are usually pretty straightforward and easy to manage. If a product is defective or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, most retailers can track the consumers who purchased that particular product and notify them of the class action lawsuit.

The process becomes significantly more difficult when the product in question is a small, inexpensive item. Consumers are less likely to keep their receipts of those purchases and the companies making the product often claim that they don’t have a direct list of customers because they sell through various retailers. They can always alert the public to these class action lawsuits and ask anyone who thinks they may fit the criteria for participating in the class to file a claim, but that’s according to corporate defendants who want to defeat class not always reliable. Defendants have been arguing that these types of class action lawsuits should be dismissed unless the plaintiffs prove they have a reliable method of identifying class members and always find holes in any reasonably reliable plan suggested. Continue reading ›

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Although the courts are intended to be accessible to all citizens with grievances, the sad fact is they come with an increasingly large entry fee. Citizens can choose to represent themselves when filing or defending a lawsuit, but most citizens don’t have the knowledge or training to effectively represent their own interests in a court of law. On the other hand, the costs of hiring an attorney are prohibitively high for a lot of people.

In order to help people overcome this hurdle, certain lending institutions have arisen that lend plaintiffs the money they need to file a lawsuit, but the plaintiff only needs to repay the loan if they win their case.

The state of Colorado recently filed a lawsuit against one such lawsuit lender, Oasis Legal Finance, for allegedly extending credit in the state without a license under the state’s Uniform Consumer Credit Code (UCCC). Oasis countered that it was not extending credit, it was purchasing an investment. Continue reading ›

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An injunction against speech harms not just the speakers but also the listeners (in this case the viewers and readers). “[T]he First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the pub-lic may draw.” First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, 783 (1978); see also Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367, 390 (1969); Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969) (“the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas”). The injunction in this case is so broad and vague that it threatens to silence Fuller and Hartman completely.

The issue of whether an injunction can ever issue to forbid even defamatory speech from being published, even after a court has determined such speech to be defamatory, has never been decided by the Supreme Court.  Without deciding this issue, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals discussed it in detail in a recent opinion, McCarthy v Fuller.  You can view the opinion here. Continue reading ›

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Despite the schoolyard saying, words can hurt you. Negative information that gets spread through the public can affect both your personal and professional lives, which is why legislators have taken steps to protect citizens from language that has the potential to be harmful.

But the U.S. Constitution promises all its citizens the right to free speech. This is because the founders of our country wanted the people to feel safe to criticize public figures, including politicians. The idea is that, if people feel free to criticize public figures, it allows public discussion of those figures. The law asserts the people’s right to free and open discussion of the people they are voting to govern them because uninhibited discussion allows the people to make the most informed decisions when they go to the voting polls. Continue reading ›

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The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) defines overtime as any time spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week. For most people, that means working eight hours a day, five days a week, but employees in some industries have odd shifts and their employers need to take this into account when calculating overtime.

In industries that need to be open during weekends, such as retail and healthcare, employees often take turns working weekends, leaving them with odd weeks. It is the employers’ responsibility to accurately calculate how much time employees spend working in a given week and compensate them accordingly.

According to a recent wage and hour class action lawsuit against CVS Pharmacy, the employer allegedly failed to properly define its workweek. The lawsuit alleges this resulted in employees getting paid straight time for their sixth consecutive day of work, when they should have been paid the premium overtime compensation of one and one half times their normal hourly rate for the whole day. Continue reading ›

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Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., better known as PacSun, is the most recent retailer to face a class action lawsuit alleging the employer used on-call shifts to avoid paying employees for shifts.

On-call shifts are when an employee is required to keep their schedule free in case their employer needs them to come in to work. They have to call the day of the shift to see if they have to come in to work. If they don’t have to go in to work, they don’t get paid, but chances are they’ve already lost out on other opportunities they could have taken advantage of during that time, like attending class or working another job. Continue reading ›

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