Trials

Former President Trump Faces a Chaotic 2024 with Multiple Trials and Civil Verdicts

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New York City, NY – Former President Donald Trump’s legal battles are far from over as he faces a series of trials and civil cases in 2024. The past year has seen Trump on trial twice, indicted four times, and hit with a multimillion-dollar civil verdict. Now, he faces up to five separate trials and verdicts in two civil cases that could potentially cost him and his business hundreds of millions of dollars. The criminal cases alone involve 91 felony counts, some of which carry maximum prison terms of 20 years. While the trial dates … Read more

Antitrust Trials Highlight Persistent Issue of Judicial Activism: Will Judges Make or Break Mergers?

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Boston, MA – Antitrust law and the issue of merger enforcement continue to be plagued by judicial activism, straying from the conservative legal movement’s principles of interpreting the law rather than shaping it. The Clayton Act, enacted in 1914, tasked the Department of Justice with assessing whether a merger would “substantially lessen competition” or create a monopoly in any industry. However, recent antitrust trials have demonstrated that some courts are willing to allow anticompetitive actions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. One such trial in Boston involves JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit … Read more

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Raises Concerns Over Bellwether Trials in Mass Tort Cases

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Washington, D.C. – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has raised concerns about the use of bellwether trials in mass tort cases. Thomas argues that these trials, which are meant to serve as a representative sample for resolving similar cases, often carry significant weight in influencing settlement talks. He believes that this approach can infringe upon defendants’ rights, stating that “individual rights may matter less than judicial convenience” in these cases. Bellwether trials involve selecting a small number of cases from a large pool of similar claims. The outcomes of these trials are then used to … Read more

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Raises Concerns about Legitimacy of Mass-Tort Bellwether Trials

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Washington D.C. – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed his concerns about the binding nature of mass-tort bellwether trials in multidistrict litigation. In a recent dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to deny certiorari in an appeal by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Thomas voiced his “serious doubts” about using bellwether trials to prevent defendants from relitigating issues that have already been decided in lawsuits by different plaintiffs. The issue arose in a class action suit filed by 80,000 residents who sued E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. over the … Read more