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The Florida Supreme Court said state voters will have the chance on Nov. 5 to decide whether to amend the state’s constitution to establish a right to abortion, our colleague Brendan Pierson and Tom Hals write. The decision was a setback to the state’s Republican attorney general, Ashley Moody, who sought to keep the measure off the ballot.
Abortion is illegal after 15 weeks in Florida under a law signed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, which the state supreme court upheld in a separate ruling that was issued at the same time as the ballot order. That decision allowed a stricter six-week ban to take effect. Abortion access is now almost non-existent in Southern U.S. states, with most having imposed sweeping Republican-backed restrictions.
>>> Read the Florida court’s ballot ruling and its decision on the state’s 15-week ban
Backers of the ballot measure in January secured the required number of signatures to put the measure before voters. Moody sued Floridians Protecting Freedom, the abortion rights group sponsoring the measure, and had argued that the proposal was impermissibly vague and misleading, Pierson writes.
The state high court rejected Moody’s arguments, finding that “the broad sweep of this proposed amendment is obvious in the language of the summary. Denying this requires a flight from reality.” Across the country, abortion rights advocates have sought to put the matter directly to the voters. Abortion rights measures have prevailed everywhere they have been on the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 striking down the national right to abortion.
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- Racial diversity among law students declined by as much as 17% in the wake of state affirmative action bans over the past 28 years, a new study found, with a reduction of up to 47% at top law schools. The findings in the study by three law professors from Yale, New York University and Northwestern University suggest that a similar reduction could follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year blocking schools from considering race in admissions.
- Fennemore will bring on about 50 lawyers and 30 business professionals from Denver business law firm Moye White. Fennemore, a Phoenix-founded firm that has focused on expanding in the western U.S., has grown in recent years through a series of combinations with smaller law firms.
- Nelson Mullins opened a new office in Houston, becoming the latest U.S. law firm to expand its presence in the Texas legal market. The Columbia, South Carolina-founded law firm said its new office will be staffed by 10 partners from other law firms, including Foley & Lardner, Frost Brown Todd and King & Spalding.
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That’s how many data files that named plaintiffs obtained from Google in their lawsuit accusing the tech company of deceiving consumers over the collection of information from users even while they browsed in the private mode Incognito. The 76 gigabytes of data helped shape obligations imposed on Google as part of a settlement in the lawsuit, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers at Boies Schiller, Susman Godfrey and Morgan & Morgan. Google, which denied any wrongdoing, will destroy some browsing data in the deal. The plaintiffs’ valued the settlement as worth at least $5 billion.
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Six right-leaning nonprofits — including a group that has recently sued several prominent law firms over their diversity-boosting programs — filed briefs last week calling on the 2nd Circuit to reconsider its decision that organizations must name their affected members in lawsuits seeking to block alleged discrimination. Ed Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights, the Manhattan Institute, Speech First and other conservative groups told the appeals court that its new rule, adopted last month in a lawsuit challenging a Pfizer diversity fellowship, will chill civil rights litigation because plaintiffs fear harassment and retaliation if their identities are revealed. Alison Frankel unpacks the groups’ brief.
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“I sense that the history-and-tradition method is consistent with, and indeed will thrive, with advances in AI.“
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—6th U.S. Circuit Judge John Bush in a speech delivered to the University of Chicago’s Federalist Society chapter, according to prepared remarks. Bush, a conservative judge appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump, said future developments in artificial intelligence could revolutionize how judges like himself tie their rulings to the past by interpreting the U.S. Constitution based on the nation’s history and traditions, Nate Raymond reports.
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- U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick in Boston will consider whether to issue a preliminary injunction barring former DraftKings executive Michael Hermalyn from using the company’s trade secrets or soliciting its clients or employees after he joined sports betting rival Fanatics days before the Super Bowl. DraftKings also wants to ban Hermalyn’s employment at Fanatics. Kobick previously issued a temporary order that allowed Hermalyn to work for Fanatics but set some restrictions on his employment.
- The Oklahoma Supreme Court will take up a dispute over the Catholic Church’s application to create the first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in the U.S. An Oklahoma school board last year unanimously rejected the church’s effort, taking a first step toward a long legal battle testing the concept of separation of church and state. Roman Catholic organizers propose creating the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to offer an online education for kindergarten through high school initially for 500 students and eventually 1,500.
- A 9th Circuit panel will take up disputes over whether the Oregon State Bar is entitled to immunity as a component of the state. Holland & Knight, representing the bar in one of the cases, asked the court to shield it from liability as an arm of the state. The firm points to the bar’s various functions, including recommending admission and attorney conduct rules to the Oregon Supreme Court for adoption. Attorneys from the Goldwater Institute contend the bar is not immune, because it has “sufficient autonomy from the state.”
- The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit will take up Tesla’s case accusing Louisiana of an unlawful scheme to bar direct-to-consumer sales of the company’s electric vehicles. Tesla in the lower court sued the Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association, members of the Louisiana Motor Vehicle Commission and a group of dealers. The company appealed the dismissal of its case in June. The DOJ is backing legal arguments in support of Tesla.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- Donald Trump must stop verbal attacks on family members of the New York judge and others in his upcoming trial on charges stemming from a hush money payment to a porn star, a court ruled, after the former U.S. president disparaged the judge’s daughter. New York prosecutors argued Trump is trying to scare potential witnesses and urged Justice Juan Merchan to make clear that his existing gag order, which bars Trump from publicly commenting about witnesses and court staff, also applies to family members.
- Teva and Viatris convinced the Federal Circuit to revive their challenges to a patent covering a blockbuster Johnson & Johnson schizophrenia drug, giving them a new chance to clear a path to launch cheaper generic versions of the medicine. The appeals court said in the decision that the last remaining J&J patent covering its Invega Sustenna may be invalid, and it sent the case back for a New Jersey federal court to reconsider.
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and its Michigan affiliate must face a lawsuit from Ford Motor accusing them of artificially inflating the automaker’s costs for health insurance, a U.S. judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in a ruling said that Ford adequately alleged for now that it was overcharged for commercial health insurance products.
- PayPal won its lawsuit against a rule requiring it to disclose fees associated with digital wallets, after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in D.C. ruled the CFPB had no basis for treating the accounts the same as prepaid cards.
- Apple, Google and other major tech companies failed to convince a California federal court that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office unlawfully implemented a rule that reduced the number of patent-validity reviews the office considers. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose said in an order that the USPTO was not required to hold a notice-and-comment period before creating the rule, rejecting the lawsuit for a second time.
- Some California landowners must face an agriculture land buyer’s claims of a price-fixing conspiracy over the purchase prices of their property. Flannery Associates, represented by Skadden, is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from alleged real estate overcharges or lost profits. The landowners denied any conspiracy to artificially inflate the cost of their land.
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- Orrick hired Laura Bagarella, an executive compensation and benefits partner, in New York. She most recently was at Cleary Gottlieb. (Orrick)
- Boies Schiller added partner Nili Moghaddam, who will focus on corporate litigation, white-collar defense and trial matters, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She most recently was chief legal officer at property technology company Bungalow. (Boies Schiller)
- Moses & Singer brought back Liberty McAteer as a partner in its IP and AI and data law groups in New York. McAteer previously was deputy counsel at electric vehicle charging company FreeWire Technologies. (Moses & Singer)
- Skadden brought on James Fredricks as a D.C.-based antitrust partner from the DOJ, where he was a chief in a criminal section of the antitrust division. (Skadden)
- Akin added Scott Colton in New York as a partner in its special situations and private credit practice. He arrives from Paul Hastings. (Akin)
- Proskauer hired antitrust litigator Mark Rosman as a partner in D.C. from Wilson Sonsini. (Proskauer)
- Husch Blackwell added a four-lawyer team in Denver from Lewis Roca, including partners Scott Browning, Jessica Fuller and Stephen Steele. The team joins the firm’s commercial litigation and nonprofit organizations and religious institutions practices. (Husch Blackwell)
- Foley & Lardner added D.C.-based antitrust partner Mark Grundvig from the DOJ, where he was recently serving as assistant chief of a criminal section in the antitrust division. (Foley)
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