There is a split of authority as to whether a federal court possesses the authority to entertain a request for an order pendente lite sought by a party to an international arbitration when the arbitral tribunal has the power to grant similar relief. The disparate authorities are collected and analyzed in District Judge Mark R. Kravitz’s thoughtful opinio ...

Does a foreign sovereign’s agreement to arbitrate outside the United States waive sovereign immunity to an action brought here to enforce the resulting award rendered against that sovereign? No — at least, that is the answer if the foreign sovereign is not a signatory to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, 9 U ...

The issue of first impression in Neuberger Berman Real Estate Income Fund, Inc. v. Lola Brown Trust No. 1B, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34054 (D. Md. May 8, 2007), was whether a closed end investment company was precluded from issuing a series of shareholder rights plans (poison pills) — each under 120 days in duration — by Section 18(d) of the Investment Com ...

Our May 3, 2007, posting discusses United States v. Culberson, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31044 (E.D. Mich. April 27, 2007), a drug conspiracy prosecution in which the Court admitted a DEA agent’s transcript of emails on a cell phone after the messages had been automatically purged while the phone was in government custody. The April 27th opinion dealt with aut ...

The plaintiff’s damages expert in Loveless v. John’s Ford, Inc., 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 11001 (4th Cir. May 9, 2007), testified as to the plaintiff’s loss of income in this ADEA action. After the expert gathered earnings information by hand from the corporate defendant’s records, he transferred the data to his computer and discarded the notes. The ...

When parties include in their contract a choice of law provision selecting foreign law to govern ‛formation, validity and enforcement“ of contract, does that law — or does some U.S. law — govern interpretation of the contract’s forum selection clause? Deciding this issue of first impression in the Sixth Circuit, District Judge George Caram Steeh ruled in ...

There was no love lost between the parties to Novak v. Capital Mgmt. & Devel. Corp., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29788 (D.D.C. April 24, 2007). When the plaintiff filed a supplemental response to defendants’ interrogatories that identified eleven new witnesses, and later a second supplement with eight more — all well prior to the close of discovery — th ...

The New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, 9 U.S.C. § 201, et. seq. requires an ‛agreement in writing“ before arbitration may be compelled. The plaintiff in Interested Underwriters at Lloyd's v. M/T San Sebastian, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24817 (N.D. Ga. April 3, 2007) was the subrogated insurance carri ...

To satisfy a judgment against the nation of Iran, the plaintiffs in Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24376 (N.D. Ill. March 19, 2007), sought to attach Persian artifacts in the United States. Section 1609 of the FSIA, 28 U.S.C. § 1609, provides that ‛the property in the United States of a foreign state shall be immune from att ...

In United States v. Evans, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 11344 (7th Cir. May 15, 2007), the Seventh Circuit upheld the insider trading conviction of a tippee despite the fact that his alleged tipper was acquitted and the tippee was himself acquitted of conspiring with the alleged tipper (relying on Standefer v. United States, 447 U.S. 10 (1980), in which the Su ...