I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
For the second time in a year, a legal malpractice suit brought by Blackwater against their former attorneys in an earlier wrongful death case has been dismissed.
On Dec. 29, Judge Jennifer Anderson of D.C. Superior Court dismissed the $30 million malpractice suit brought against the firm by Blackwater Security Consulting on summary judgment. She’s the second judge to throw out the case since it was filed last January.
“They have the right to ask more judges to look at it,” says Zuckerman Spaeder partner Mark Foster, who represents Wiley Rein in the matter. But if Blackwater’s lawyer, Barry Nace of Paulson & Nace, chooses to do so, Foster says, “I think he’d be wasting his time.”
Ironically, it was asking the wrong judge to look at a case was the core of their argument against the Wiley Rein law firm. Blackwater was sued in 2004 by the families of four former employees who were killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, their bodies paraded before the world on television after being beheaded and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates river.
Blackwater filed the suit against their own attorneys after losing that case, arguing that Wiley Rein should have filed papers to have the case removed from state court in North Carolina to federal court, where the company says they had a better chance of winning. Wiley Rein did, in fact, ask for the case to be moved to federal court, but Blackwater says they did not invoke the right statute in doing so, thus costing them a chance to have the case heard in a venue where they claim they would have had a better chance of winning.
The statute in question is one that requires all suits against “federal officers” to be heard in federal court rather than state court. Two judges have now dismissed the case, concluding that Blackwater’s argument that a federal court would have ruled differently than the state court is purely speculative because the federal court might well have ruled that the private security company’s employees were not federal officers.
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