North Dakota overturns abortion ban, ex-Alaska judge faces potential impeachment, Clearview AI's unusual settlement, and more ??
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?? Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today's top legal news:
?? North Dakota judge overturns state abortion ban
Judge Bruce Romanick in Bismarck, North Dakota overturned the state's near-total abortion ban, clearing the way for abortion to become legal in the Midwestern state for the first time in more than a year.
Romanick found that the state constitution protects women's right to an abortion before the fetus is viable, siding with abortion providers challenging the ban. The order is expected to take effect within 14 days.
"This is a win for reproductive freedom, and means it is now much safer to be pregnant in North Dakota," Meetra Mehdizadeh, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents the plaintiffs, said.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed the law in April 2023, making it a felony for doctors to perform abortions.
The law includes an exception for saving the life of the mother or in cases where her health is at serious risk, but the providers in the lawsuit said that exception was not clear enough for doctors to know when an abortion was allowed.
The ban also makes an exception for rape and incest victims, but only during the first six weeks of pregnancy, which is before many women know they are pregnant.
North Dakota is one of more than 20 Republican-led states that have banned or restricted abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling. Some of those laws have since been blocked in court or overturned by ballot measures.
More on Abortion Rights:
?? Judiciary refers ex-Alaska judge to US House for potential impeachment
The U.S. Judicial Conference has made a referral to the U.S. House of Representatives for lawmakers to consider potentially impeaching now-former U.S. District Judge Joshua Kindred in Alaska, who resigned after being accused of sexual misconduct.
The referral was a rarity for the Judicial Conference, which U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts heads. It last made such a referral in 2015. Only 15 judges have ever been impeached, and only eight have been convicted by the Senate.
It was unclear what the House would do with the referral. While Kindred is no longer in office, he could be barred from holding any federal office in the future if he was impeached in the Republican-controlled House and convicted in the Democratic-led Senate.
Kindred, who was appointed to the bench by Republican former President Donald Trump in 2020, resigned in July after a judicial misconduct inquiry found he fostered an inappropriate sexualized relationship with one of his law clerks and created a hostile work environment for court employees.
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?? Legal Fee Tracker: Clearview AI's choose-your-own-adventure privacy settlement
Most requests for class action legal fees have something in common: a settlement agreement or judgment with a concrete dollar figure from which the plaintiffs' lawyers can attempt to claim their reward.
Not so for Chicago-based law firm Loevy & Loevy, which reached an agreement with facial recognition company Clearview AI in June to resolve claims that Clearview violated the privacy rights of millions of Americans.
Instead, the lawyers agreed to drop their case in a complex deal that would grant the law firm a 39.1% share of a theoretical future settlement amount, based on Clearview's value if the beleaguered company goes public through an IPO or is liquidated through a merger or sale.
The Loevy firm estimated in a fee petition filed on Sept. 6 that the settlement fund in such a scenario could exceed $51 million. Based on that estimate, the Loevy firm's fee request would amount to $19.9 million.
"To the best of our awareness, this settlement is trailblazing, with no other class action lawyers having found a way to achieve significant value for their clients under such challenging circumstances," the firm said.
There have been other settlements granting plaintiffs some kind of equity stake or stock in the defendants, legal experts said. Adam Pritchard, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, noted that the ongoing fight over the plaintiffs' fee request in the $56 billion Elon Musk pay package case is about Tesla stock.
?? Law firms Quinn Emanuel, Cohen Milstein get $102 mln from stock lending settlement
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in New York awarded $102 million in legal fees to law firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll for their work on a $580 million settlement for investors who accused major banks of conspiring to curb competition in the stock lending market.
In an order on Sept. 11, Failla called the legal fee amount “fair and reasonable,” amounting to 17.06% of the settlement funds so far in the case.
The institutional investors that filed the lawsuit in 2017 claimed a group of big banks had conspired to prevent modernization in the trillion-dollar market for stock lending, boycotting startup firms.
The investors alleged they had been charged excessive fees for such lending, which involves the temporary transfer of stock between investors.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Credit Suisse agreed collectively to pay $580 million to settle the antitrust lawsuit. Bank of America is the lone remaining defendant.
Failla in her order said the $102 million was “appropriate to the specific circumstances of this action, and consistent with awards in similar cases.”
?? That's all for today, thank you for reading?The Legal File, and have a great weekend!
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