A former Nixon Peabody lawyer was charged with insider trading in D.C. federal court in a lawsuit filed last week. The Thursday complaint, filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Melissa Mahler, now a solo practitioner in New York, used information about a pending merger given to her by a client in 2004 ... MORE

A Wal-Mart employee handed over pictures from a couple's family vacation after suspecting the photos constituted child pornography. After the family was cleared by authorities, the family sued Wal-Mart and the state of Arizona.... MORE

The criminal trial of Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, and lawyer Francis Morrissey, is expected to get sent to the jury on Tuesday after 19 weeks of courtroom testimony and lawyer talk.... MORE

A federal grand jury charged Hassan Nemazee, a New York businessman who has ties to prominent politicians, with defrauding banks of $292 million in part to benefit the Democratic Party.... MORE

Hell hath no fury like a leading computer-chip maker scorned. That's the conclusion meant to be derived by a report released on Monday outlining the European Union's antitrust case against chip-maker Intel. In May, the EU levied a record €1.06 billion ($1.56 billion) against Intel, alleging Intel abused its dominant position in the microprocessor market.... MORE

Ron Kuby's back at it. The lawyer, who repped the first World Trade Center bombers and Long Island Railroad Shooter Colin Ferguson, among other notables, appeared in court for a new client, Ahmand Wais Afzali, an imam in Queens, and stated that his client is innocent and being made a scapegoat by federal authorities.... MORE

Before the shadows have gotten too long on this day, let us blog Sunday's story in the NYT about John Edwards. It's largely a political story, granted, but one woven through with a handful of interesting legal threads.... MORE

So, here's the way the global recession seems to be playing out at big law firms, at least in the UK: The priciest law firms, in the hunt for more work, are going downmarket. They're increasingly competing with lower-priced outfits to get lower-margin work.... MORE

A line from Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew inspired a federal judge in Philadelphia, Gene E.K. Pratter, to rule recently that, as part of a lesson in civility, two opposing lawyers must sit down and have a meal together.... MORE

Plaintiffs' groups are fighting back against the Supreme Court's Iqbal decision from last spring. They've begun taking their pleas to Congress and the rulemaking process for the federal courts.... MORE

Over the weekend, the parties to the Google Books suit said they were hashing out what changes they are willing to make to the agreement following the Justice Department's objections, formally articulated on Friday.... MORE

The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Friday told Bank of America that it has questions concerning disclosures made surrounding the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch. The panel's chairman, Edolphus Towns (D-NY), told the bank it can't use the attorney-client privilege when dealing with Congress.... MORE

Noted Business Week columnist Michael Orey, in the wake of Judge Rakoff's ruling in the Bank of America/SEC situation, asks about the logic behind shareholder class-action suits.... MORE

Here's the deal: On Thursday, a group called Apportionment.us filed suit in federal district court for the Northern District of Mississippi on behalf of five people, one resident from each of the following states: Montana, Delaware, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah. The quintet's complaint: that their votes carry far less weight in the House of Representatives than do those ... MORE

American Needle takes its dispute over NFL apparel licensing to the Supreme Court, in a case that could have implications beyond game paraphernalia.... MORE

Federal prosecutors on Thursday asked a federal judge in Manhattan, Frederic Block, to hold off on making a ruling over whether certain evidence can be admitted until they can provide the judge with a few more facts. But the gist of what the prosecutors want is this: to be able to put on evidence at trial that former Bear Stearns fund manager Ralph Cioffi pledged all of his ... MORE

Whether health-care legislation is constitutional: a topic so nice, we blogged it twice . . . in one week!... MORE

According to a Houston Chron story out Friday, the lawyers recently handed to Allen Stanford and who will work free of charge could actually be about the best Stanford could have hoped for, with or without a lofty price tag.... MORE

The Interior Department's inspector general has asked the Justice Department to look into whether former Interior Secretary Gale Norton broke the law by talking to Royal Dutch Shell about a job when she was still in office and overseeing the nation's oil and natural-gas deposits.... MORE

Dating to about five minutes after the billable hour was born, folks have been predicting its death. But throughout it all, no other billing method has come close to knocking the billable model from atop its lofty perch. Until now, it seems.... MORE

The Law Blog recently chatted with Jim Mutchnik, a lawyer who helped prosecute a huge price-fixing case against Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s, and Bob Herndon, an FBI agent with whom Mutchnik worked closely on the case. Each are portrayed in the movie, The Informant!, which opens Friday.... MORE

A federal judge in California, Stephen G. Larson, announced earlier this week that he was stepping down from the bench because he could no longer afford to stay on.... MORE

An odd situation is brewing in Ohio. On Tuesday, the state tried to execute a man named Romell Broom, who was convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. But those attempting to administer the lethal IV failed to find a suitable vein in Broom's arm.... MORE

New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo on Thursday issued subpoenas to five Bank of America board members -- all of whom were on the audit committee at the time the BofA/Merrill deal went down last fall.... MORE

Did Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a singular remark during her first Supreme Court appearance last week, signal the direction she might want to take the court if left to her own devices? Jess Bravin, writing for the WSJ's Law Journal column on Thursday, raises the question.... MORE

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals -- the Lone Star State's supreme court on criminal matters -- has ruled that a man facing the death penalty for murder will not get a new trial despite the fact that the prosecutor on the case and the judge who tried the case were at the time involved in a romantic affair.... MORE

The Law Blog rounds up the afternoon's legal news.... MORE

In a medical malpractice case heard Tuesday, the Georgia Supreme Court considered whether the state's damage caps violate Georgia's constitution.... MORE

The Fifth Circuit on Wednesday ruled that a Texas woman who alleges she was gang-raped by co-workers while working for military contractor KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, in Iraq will go to court instead of arbitration.... MORE

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, upheld a state anti-obscenity law which bans the sale of marital aids within a certain distance of homes, churches, schools and day-care centers. In its ruling, the court said public morality was a legal reason to regulate sales.... MORE

This just in: the Bank of New York Mellon has reached an agreement to settle a $22.5 billion lawsuit by the Russian government for $14 million. The deal was reportedly reached after the two sides made a separate deal for a trade-financing pact.... MORE

Is Obama's health-care reform proposal unconstitutional? We don't claim to know the answer to the question posed by this post's title, but Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey judge and current senior legal analyst for the Fox News channel (pictured), thinks the answer is yes.... MORE

The big law-n-business story of the summer (and possibly the year?) continues to get ample coverage from our own WSJ, as well as other pubs. Wednesday's Journal contains two articles on Judge Jed Rakoff's decision to shoot down the proposed $33 million settlement between the SEC and Bank of America. Let's briefly take you through both of them.... MORE

A federal judge in Houston on Tuesday allowed high-flying lawyer Dick DeGuerin to withdraw as Stanford's lawyer and appointed him an attorney from the federal public defenders office.... MORE

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on Monday spoke to a group at the Seattle University School of Law, in which she ventured into a hot-button area: whether state judges should be elected.... MORE

Since Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's departure, as the court has moved sharply to the right, the question for liberals with cases before the Supreme Court often is not whether the left will lose but how it will lose. It turns out that some ways of losing are worse than others. Loyola Law School's Rick Hasen examines the situation in Slate.... MORE

An article in the Christian Science Monitor tells tale of a fascinating libel lawsuit playing out in Moscow. The trial, which started Tuesday, pits Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's grandson, against Russia's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Dzugashvili alleges that the newspaper libeled his grandfather by accusing Stalin of signing "death lists" and "committing ... MORE

President Obama really really doesn't want the world to see certain photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last month, the government appealed a lower court ruling to the Supreme Court, asking the court to block their release.... MORE

Manhattan federal judge Jed Rakoff excoriated the SEC and Bank of America in his opinion issued Monday, in which he refused to sign off on the parties' proposed $33 million settlement. That, for us media types, was a lot of fun. But what happens now?... MORE

Bank of New York Mellon is nearing an agreement to settle a $22.5 billion lawsuit brought by the Russian government after the bank offered to restart trade-finance lending to Moscow after the suit is resolved, according to people close to the discussions.... MORE