August 3, 2016
A recent ruling shows how easy it can be for a company that markets its services via a website to find itself a defendant in a United States federal court. In a trademark infringement case brought over competing claims to the “LifeAlert” trademark, a federal judge ruled on December 29, 2008, that the Canadian defendant…
July 21, 2016
The Senate Judiciary Committee has rejected Attorney General Mukasey’s call to advance legislation undoing the Sentencing Commission’s reform of federal sentencing guidelines around crack cocaine, the Los Angeles Times reports. Not only that, the LAT notes that Senator Patrick Leahy actually had the political cojones to call the AG’s tactics what they really are: fear-mongering….
June 2, 2016
An article in the Dallas Morning News on teen steroid use caught my eye because of a quote from an athletic trainer who says: It’s easy for someone to cheat and win. With steroids, you’re tricking your body. You’re creating something that’s not you, and that’s why you’re cheating. It’s odd on the idea that…
May 10, 2016
Philip Morris will get another crack at reducing the punitive damages award in a long-running case brought by a cigarette smoker, as the Second District Court of Appeal found there had been improper rejection of the cigarette company’s proposed instruction on those damages. The case is Bullock v. Philip Morris, B164398. The original punitive damage…
May 2, 2016
Cigarette sales in Indiana have dropped almost 18 percent in the nine months following the imposition of a 44 cent-per-pack tax, the Chicago Tribune reports. To my mind, this fairly dramatic behavior modification based on a small economic tweak says some interesting things about our ability to control drug use through regulated markets as opposed…
April 8, 2016
British programmer Joshua Browder is helping people save a lot of money on legal fees with his latest project – the world’s first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old developed a free service that allows users to ask any kind of legal question and receive relevant answers autogenerated by bots. Browder first started the project last summer…
March 29, 2016
Tests intended to determine whether the drug tenofovir can prevent HIV from entering the body have hit a wave of global opposition, the Washington Post reports. Trials in Cambodia, have all been cancelled because of protests. The interesting thing, as the article makes clear, is that the tests might very well have helped the individuals who…
March 19, 2016
March 17, 2016
Every day this blog gets hits from people interested in Suboxone, which is a drug made from buprenorphine and naloxone that is used to treat opioid dependence. It’s ridiculous in a way, because I’ve previously only posted *one* item on Suboxone and it was nothing but a link to a news story about the difficulties…