Sandusky Appeals to State Supreme Court

Convicted serial child sex-abuser Jerry Sandusky has petitioned the state Supreme Court in a bid to overturn his prison sentence.

Ill. Supreme Court ends challenge to abortion law

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) - The Illinois Supreme Court ended a lengthy and emotionally charged legal appeal over an abortion notification law Thursday, clearing the way for the state to begin enforcing a 1995 measure that requires doctors to notify a girl's parents 48 hours before the procedure.

Supreme Court Lets Regulators Sue Over Generic Drug Deals

In a 5-to-3 vote, the justices effectively said that the Federal Trade Commission can sue pharmaceutical companies for potential antitrust violations, a decision that is likely to increase the number of generic drugs in the marketplace and benefit consumers.

Specifically, the justices threw out lower-court rulings that said the agreements were legal, provided that a deal did not keep a generic drug off the market beyond the term of the brand-name drug’s patent.

The decision is likely to create considerable uncertainty in the drug business and shift an important balance of power to the generic companies, industry analysts said. Drug developers may now find it harder to ward off generics, which typically cost about 15 percent of the brand-name’s price and cause the original to quickly lose up to 90 percent of its market share.

Consumer groups, drug retailers, wholesalers and insurance companies, which all benefit from the lower prices of generic drugs, could also step up their challenges to the agreements under antitrust laws.

The court did not address whether the agreements, called pay-for-delay or reverse payments, were unlawful on their face. In a standard patent infringement lawsuit, a settlement payment would be made by an infringer to the patent holder.

In the case, Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, No. 12-416, the agency said that a payment to Actavis by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, the holder of a patent on a testosterone gel known as AndroGel, represented an unlawful restraint of trade because it was intended to keep Actavis from producing its generic version of AndroGel for a certain number of years.

Solvay’s deal with Actavis is known as a reverse-payment agreement because payment flows from the brand-name drug company to the generic competitor that is challenging the patent.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said that “a court, by examining the size of the payment, may well be able to assess its likely anticompetitive effects along with its potential justifications without litigating the validity of the patent.”

The stakes in the case are significant. Pharmaceutical sales in the United States totaled roughly $320 billion in 2011, according to IMS Health, a research company whose statistics the trade commission cited in its arguments. Brand-name drugs accounted for 18 percent of the total prescriptions written by doctors in 2011 but 73 percent of consumer spending, IMS reported.

“No other decision this term will have as much impact on consumers’ pocketbooks,” said David A. Balto, an antitrust lawyer and a former Federal Trade Commission policy director.

“It clearly maps out how the F.T.C. can use the law to stop these anticompetitive schemes and make sure consumers receive the full benefits of a competitive marketplace,” Mr. Balto added. “At the same time it permits the broad range of settlements that pose few competitive concerns.”

Officials at the trade commission, which has fought against the pay-for-delay agreements for several years, were predictably enthusiastic.

“The Supreme Court’s decision is a significant victory for American consumers, American taxpayers and free markets,” said Edith Ramirez, chairwoman of the F.T.C. “With this finding, the court has taken a big step toward addressing a problem that has cost Americans $3.5 billion a year in higher drug prices.”

Executives at Actavis played down the decision’s significance. “The F.T.C. did not win anything with this decision,” said Paul M. Bisaro, president and chief executive of Actavis. “We think these settlements will continue, and we will continue to enter into these kinds of settlements. We believe all of our agreements were pro-competitive.”

Justice Breyer’s decision, which was joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, reversed a decision of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had thrown out the F.T.C.’s case. The appeals court said that because the exclusion of the generic drug did not extend beyond the term of the brand-name drug’s patent, a “quick look” could determine that there was no anticompetitive effect.

The Supreme Court’s decision adopted a different standard, known as the “rule of reason,” which states that the agreements must be considered in the context of their possible benefits for consumers.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. recused himself from the case.

In their dissent, the justices pointed out that the agreement between Solvay and Actavis allowed for the generic drug to come to market five years before the scheduled expiration of Solvay’s patent. The majority’s decision will discourage the settlement of patent litigation, the justices said.

Congress has encouraged generic drug makers to challenge the patents protecting lucrative brand-name drugs through the 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, also known as the Hatch-Waxman Act.

Pro-Business Decisions Are Defining This Supreme Court

Almost no one in the courtroom paid attention, despite Justice Scalia’s characteristically animated delivery, and the next day’s news coverage was dominated by accounts of the arguments on same-sex marriage. That was no surprise: the Supreme Court’s business decisions are almost always overshadowed by cases on controversial social issues.

But the business docket reflects something truly distinctive about the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While the current court’s decisions, over all, are only slightly more conservative than those from the courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, according to political scientists who study the court, its business rulings are another matter. They have been, a new study finds, far friendlier to business than those of any court since at least World War II.

In the eight years since Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, it has allowed corporations to spend freely in elections in the Citizens United case, has shielded them from class actions and human rights suits, and has made arbitration the favored way to resolve many disputes. Business groups say the Roberts court’s decisions have helped combat frivolous lawsuits, while plaintiffs’ lawyers say the rulings have destroyed legitimate claims for harm from faulty products, discriminatory practices and fraud.

Whether the Roberts court is unusually friendly to business has been the subject of repeated discussion, much of it based on anecdotes and studies based on small slices of empirical evidence. The new study, by contrast, takes a careful and comprehensive look at some 2,000 decisions from 1946 to 2011.

Published last month in The Minnesota Law Review, the study ranked the 36 justices who served on the court over those 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes; all five of the current court’s more conservative members were in the top 10. But the study’s most striking finding was that the two justices most likely to vote in favor of business interests since 1946 are the most recent conservative additions to the court, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush.

The study was prepared by Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California; William M. Landes, an economist at the University of Chicago; and Judge Richard A. Posner, of the federal appeals court in Chicago, who teaches law at the University of Chicago.

In the Comcast case, subscribers seeking $875 million in damages charged that the company had swapped territory with other cable companies to gain market power and raise prices. But the legal issue before the court was technical. It concerned the sort of evidence needed to allow two million subscribers in the Philadelphia area to band together as a class.

Justice Scalia said the plaintiffs’ evidence was not enough to allow them to proceed as a class. They could still, he said, pursue their complaints individually. But the difficulty of mounting such suits over insignificant sums would not make them very attractive to most lawyers.

The decision, however, went far beyond the Comcast subscribers. By reaffirming Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a 2011 blockbuster case in which the court threw out a large employment sex discrimination class, the Comcast case limited class actions more broadly.

The question of whether plaintiffs have enough in common to sue as a class is different from whether they deserve to win. The first question is generally resolved early in the case. The second one may await trial.

But the Wal-Mart and Comcast decisions said the two questions often overlap and may call for an early answer. The decisions essentially required early scrutiny — by a judge, not a jury — of the ultimate legal question in high-stakes cases, sometimes before all the relevant evidence has been gathered. This delighted business groups, which have pushed to limit class actions.

“The court is telling lower courts across the country they really do have to fulfill their gate-keeping function and keep these meritless classes out of the courts,” said Kate Comerford Todd, a lawyer with the litigation unit of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Justices deeply unhappy with a decision sometimes read their dissents from the bench. It happens perhaps three times a year. Justice Scalia, in remarks at George Washington University in February, said such oral dissents were a way to call attention to a grave misstep.

“I only do it in really significant cases,” he said, “where I think the court’s decision is going to have a really bad effect upon the law and upon society, a really, really big case.”

By that standard, the dissenters thought the Comcast decision was very bad indeed. It gave rise to two oral dissents, from the two senior members of the court’s liberal wing, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Your Money: A Supreme Court Victory Won’t Flatten Same-Sex Hurdles

But a victory for gay rights in either of the two monumental cases being presented to the justices next week will not necessarily resolve all the complicated financial and legal issues that now confront same-sex couples. Gay couples would probably still need to contend with a patchwork of state laws, many of which don’t recognize their unions and, perhaps even more important, their legal relationship to their children.

Much rides on how the opinions are ultimately written, something we probably won’t know until June (and that assumes the court decides to issue opinions on the merits in both cases). But even if the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that denies federal benefits to same-sex couples were overturned, many gay people would still need to travel to another state to get married, whereas opposite-sex couples can just run down to their local county clerk’s office.

And even then, some legal experts say, more work will most likely need to be done — either through the courts or Congress — to ensure that the marriages of people living in states hostile to gay marriage are recognized for federal purposes.

“There is this delusion that once DOMA is gone, all same-sex couples will have access to all of these federal rights and benefits, but that is just not true,” said Emily Hecht-McGowan, director of public policy at the Family Equality Council. “We only have a handful of states that allow for marriage equality. You would have to travel to one of those states to get married.”

The second issue being presented before the Supreme Court addresses a more expansive question, about who has the right to marry. It challenges Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. “The Prop 8 case is a broader case than the DOMA case because the remedy in the Prop 8 case would be, at a minimum, to allow same-sex couples in California to marry,” said James D. Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s project dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, “and it might also be that every state in the country has to allow same-sex couples to marry.”

The court, of course, could keep the laws as they are now, or go in any of several other directions. But let’s look at how life would change for same-sex couples if they woke up one June morning to learn that, at the very least, the Defense of Marriage Act had been dismantled.

I turned to a same-sex couple I interviewed more than four years ago, Jeff Friedman and Andrew Zwerin, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., to see how they would fare. Back then, they told me about a slightly torn manila folder stuffed with documents — their marriage license, their son’s adoption decree, among other things — that proved they were a family. They didn’t travel far without it.

The couple, both 44, still have the folder, which is now showing even more signs of wear. Mr. Friedman said they would continue to carry it around even if DOMA were overturned because they wanted to be sure their family was recognized wherever they may go. That’s especially important, they said, because they have had to prove their family status to hospital staff members on more than one occasion. And unfortunately, they’ve had to make more than a dozen trips to the emergency room because their 9-year-old son, Joshua, battles allergies and asthma. On one occasion, when Josh was barely breathing because of a severe asthma attack, a nurse wouldn’t admit the family to the pediatric unit even after the couple provided a birth certificate that named them as the parents. The nurse was waiting for a mother.

Then there was the time, about six years ago, when Mr. Friedman was hospitalized after a heart attack. A staff member told Mr. Zwerin, in front of their son, that he couldn’t sign his husband’s medical papers because they weren’t family. “Josh came to me each morning as I lay in cardiac intensive care asking if we are a family now,” Mr. Friedman said. Josh was 3 at the time.

“Unless they completely get rid of DOMA and mandate all states to treat people equally, I am going to have that issue again sometime, somewhere,” Mr. Friedman added. (In 2011, the Obama administration asked the Department of Health and Human Services to enforce rules that allow gay partners to visit and to be sure that medical decision-making rights were respected, too.)

The eradication of DOMA would, however, help the couple financially. If their union were recognized by the federal government — they’re one of the 18,000 or so couples who married in California before the state stopped issuing marriage licenses there — they would also save about $7,000 a year in federal income taxes. Couples with a stay-at-home parent like Mr. Friedman, or where one member earns significantly less, typically owe less in federal taxes when they can file jointly — though other couples, including those who earn about the same amount, would probably end up paying more.

Living in New York, where gay marriage is legal, further complicates their tax situation. They need to file multiple sets of returns — they are single filers for federal purposes, but joint filers for state purposes, which means they need to fill out a dummy federal form, as if they were filing a joint federal return, so they can properly fill out the state return.

Until recently, the couple also had to pay extra taxes on health insurance: gay employees who add their partners to their health benefits are often taxed on the value of that coverage (if they are lucky enough to be offered domestic partner insurance) because their unions are not federally recognized. Opposite-sex married couples are not subject to the tax, so some employers — including Time Warner, where Mr. Zwerin is manager of information technology at HBO — have tried to level the playing field by covering the extra costs for employees in same-sex relationships.

Federal recognition would allow Mr. Friedman, who used to practice law, to collect Social Security benefits on Mr. Zwerin’s record should Mr. Zwerin die first. He would also be entitled to collect a small death benefit, as well as spousal benefits while they were both alive.

Supreme Court Eases Import and Sale of Copyrighted Products

WASHINGTON — In a pair of decisions issued on Tuesday, the Supreme Court made it easier to import textbooks and other copyrighted products from abroad and made it harder for plaintiffs in class-action suits to stay out of federal court.

The copyright case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, No. 11-697, arose from the activities of a Thai student who attended Cornell University and the University of Southern California. The student, Supap Kirtsaeng, helped pay for his education by selling textbooks that his friends and relatives had bought in Thailand at low prices and shipped to him.

A publisher of some of the textbooks, John Wiley & Sons, sued Mr. Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement, and it won $600,000 in the lower courts. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court threw out that award and ruled that imported copyrighted goods were subject to the same rules as goods bought in the United States: owners of particular copies can do what they like with them.

In legal jargon, the court applied the first-sale doctrine to copyrighted materials from abroad. Under that doctrine, buyers of books, records and other copyrighted goods may lend or sell them as they wish.

The decision will have consequences for all manner of products, including books, records, art and software. Industry groups had told the justices that a decision permitting copyrighted foreign goods to be sold in the United States would limit their ability to sell materials more cheaply in developing markets and result in higher prices overall.

The case turned on a phrase in the Copyright Act, which limits the first-sale doctrine to works “lawfully made under this title.” The lower courts said that textbooks manufactured outside the United States could not have been made under American law and so remained subject to the control of the owner of the copyright.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said the phrase was not concerned with geography. He said he doubted “that Congress would have intended to create the practical copyright-related harms with which a geographical interpretation would threaten ordinary scholarly, artistic, commercial and consumer activities.”

Much of his opinion concerned the potential consequences of a contrary ruling, one that he said “could prevent a buyer from domestically selling or even giving away copies of a video game made in Japan, a film made in Germany or a dress (with a design copyright) made in China.”

He buttressed the point by surveying supporting briefs from libraries, used-book dealers, technology companies and museums, all of which warned that allowing copyright suits over goods imported from abroad would have pernicious consequences. Libraries could be barred from lending foreign books, the briefs said, and museums from displaying foreign art.

In their own briefs, Wiley and its allies discounted this “parade of horribles” as unrealistic. Justice Breyer responded, “We are not so sanguine.” The possible practical problems of ruling the other way, he said, “are too serious, too extensive and too likely to come about for us to dismiss them as insignificant — particularly in light of the ever-growing importance of foreign trade to America.”

An aside in a 1998 decision suggested that the court would rule differently on Tuesday, but Justice Breyer said the court was free to ignore a statement made in passing. “Is the court having once written dicta calling a tomato a vegetable bound to deny that it is a fruit forever after?” he asked.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and, for the most part, Justice Antonin Scalia, dissented, saying the majority’s “bold departure from Congress’s design” was “stunning.” She added that there were many ways to address “the anticipated horribles” that Justice Breyer had outlined.

“It should not be overlooked,” she wrote, “that the ability to prevent importation of foreign-made copies encourages copyright owners such as Wiley to offer copies of their works at reduced prices to consumers in less developed countries who might otherwise be unable to afford them.”

In the class action case, Standard Fire Insurance Company v. Knowles, No. 11-1450, the court unanimously ruled that plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot avoid the requirements of a federal law that allows some kinds of class actions to be moved from state to federal court by promising to accept less money than the class might be owed.

The law, the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, allows defendants to move some big class actions out of state courts thought to be hostile to business interests as long as the proposed class has more than 100 members, at least one of them is from a different state than a defendant and the amount at stake is more than $5 million.

The case concerned the Standard Fire Insurance Company, which is based in Connecticut and was accused in a proposed class action filed in Arkansas of failing to make full reimbursements for property damage claims. The plaintiffs’ lawyers stipulated that they would limit to $5 million the amount sought by the lead plaintiff and the class he sought to represent.

Justice Breyer, writing for the court, said the tactic would not work. “Stipulations must be binding,” he wrote. But, he said, “a plaintiff who files a proposed class action cannot legally bind members of the proposed class before the class is certified.”

U.S. Supreme Court Limits SEC's Time to Seek Civil Penalties

In seeking civil penalties for fraud, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must bring an enforcement action within five years of the alleged misconduct, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

Mason City man files Iowa Supreme Court appeal

MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) - A 42-year-old man convicted of killing another Mason City man in 1998 has appealed his case to the Iowa Supreme Court.

State Supreme Court to Expand Public Access to Court Finances

Journalists and interested Pennsylvanians will soon have easier access to more financial information for the state?s trio of appellate courts and their administrative offices, the state Supreme Court ordered Thursday.

Wis. Supreme Court: Newspaper has right to records

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The state Supreme Court says a newspaper has a right to complete copies of Juneau County's legal bills.

PUC Appeals Act 13 Injunction Order to Supreme Court

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has appealed to the state Supreme Court from a Commonwealth Court judge?s order that placed a temporary injunction on the zoning portions of Act 13 as well as from a subsequent order in which the judge refused to modify the terms of the injunction.

Supreme Court Denies Law Firms' Amicus Request in Le-Nature's Suit

The state Supreme Court has denied a group of law firms' request to file an amicus brief in support of K&L Gates' appeal in a $500 million lawsuit against it by the Le-Nature's trustee.

State Supreme Court to Expand Public Access to Court Finances

Journalists and interested Pennsylvanians will soon have easier access to more financial information for the state?s trio of appellate courts and their administrative offices, the state Supreme Court ordered Thursday.

PUC Appeals Act 13 Injunction Order to Supreme Court

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has appealed to the state Supreme Court from a Commonwealth Court judge?s order that placed a temporary injunction on the zoning portions of Act 13 as well as from a subsequent order in which the judge refused to modify the terms of the injunction.

Pa. Supreme Court Adopts Indicting Grand Juries

The state Supreme Court adopted rules today that will provide another avenue for prosecutors to bring charges against criminal defendants. Instead of just filing charges and going through preliminary hearings, prosecutors will now able to indict defendants through indicting grand juries.

Supreme Court Denies Law Firms' Amicus Request in Le-Nature's Suit

The state Supreme Court has denied a group of law firms' request to file an amicus brief in support of K&L Gates' appeal in a $500 million lawsuit against it by the Le-Nature's trustee.

State Supreme Court to Expand Public Access to Court Finances

Journalists and interested Pennsylvanians will soon have easier access to more financial information for the state?s trio of appellate courts and their administrative offices, the state Supreme Court ordered Thursday.

Pa. Supreme Court Retracts Med Mal Remittitur Rule

In the wake of the state Supreme Court rescinding a civil procedural rule under which trial courts could reduce noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases, attorneys said the move would not change this area of law very much because trial judges are reluctant to reduce damages awarded by juries and because so-called runaway jury verdicts are rare.

Pa. Supreme Court Adopts Indicting Grand Juries

The state Supreme Court adopted rules today that will provide another avenue for prosecutors to bring charges against criminal defendants. Instead of just filing charges and going through preliminary hearings, prosecutors will now able to indict defendants through indicting grand juries.

US Supreme Court rejects Okla. personhood appeal

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that said a proposal to grant "personhood" to human embryos would be an improper ban on abortion.