Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
During oral arguments before the Texas Supreme Court Wednesday, Justice Jimmy Blacklock expressed some hesitation about the ramifications of adopting an argument from Walmart that it is a third-party beneficiary of a contract between the government and Xerox over the administration of a food-assistance program for low-income individuals.
In his four-page judgment, Judge Juan Renteria stated that the plaintiffs “voluntarily remitted a substantial amount of the exemplary damages.”
Texas Supreme Court justices give no hint whether the universities' implied-powers argument can justify their efforts to rescind doctoral degrees awarded to former graduates for "academic misconduct." In Texas, such revocation power has never been determined by reported appellate decisions and only a few revocations have been noted nationwide. The grads argue the universities have no express authority to do so. The AG says the power is implied from an express power to grant degrees. Behind that argument, due-process concerns linger in both cases.
A whopping 320 lawyers worked on deals reported during the last week. Among them was Justin Stolte who, along with other Latham lawyers has been on a roll of late. The CDT Roundup features a couple of his recent deals, along with a cinematic sweep of lawyers who advised during what turned out to be a very busy week.
University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck filed an amicus brief Monday calling out Texas for undermining “core principles” of Article III standing with “transparent judge-shopping tactics” in its challenges to various Biden administration directives. He told the justices Texas shouldn’t be allowed to “so transparently manipulate the legal system in order to obtain injunctive relief against any party — including the federal government.”
In this week’s edition of Litigation Roundup, a team from Vinson & Elkins gets a win for the Sabine-Neches Navigation District in a case of first impression involving the Water Resources Development Act, a bus manufacturer is hit with a wrongful death lawsuit over the death of a 6-year-old girl and a Taiwanese pipe maker escapes a wrongful death suit.
At the 8th annual Government Enforcement Institute in Dallas, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the criminal division says new guidelines favor companies with vigorous compliance practices.
Lawyers for Houston-based Apache Corp. failed to convince a federal judge to toss out a proposed securities class action claiming that company leaders misled investors about an announcement in 2016 of “transformational discovery” of a West Texas shale play called Alpine High. A magistrate in Houston has recommended that the case move forward because the plaintiffs’ complaint is sufficiently detailed and specific in its allegations that company officials knew the information they made public in 2016 was “materially false.”
A federal appeals court panel, in a 2-1 decision Friday, upheld the Texas law that prohibited large social media companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, from deleting a user’s comments and content even if the media platforms believe the content is harmful or extreme. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled the 2021 law, known as HB 20, "chills no speech whatsoever. To the extent it chills anything, it chills censorship.” The dissent said the U.S. Supreme Court will have the last word.
A Harris County jury recently determined that Matthew Smith, former general counsel to Microvast, had breached his fiduciary duty to his client, and owed it the cost of a laptop computer it purchased for him. The jurors rejected Smith’s argument that he was entitled to $3.4 million based on an oral agreement for stock options.
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