South Carolina Lawyers Weekly

  Citing judicial immunity, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the dismissal of a multimillion-dollar civil rights lawsuit against a Maryland circuit court judge who ordered a deputy sheriff to use a Taser-like electrical shock to quiet ...

Tagged with: Tazer

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the constitutionality of Maryland’s ban on military assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines that carry more than 10 rounds of ammunition. But it’s highly unlikely that such a ban will ever be ...

Tagged with: assault weapons

Law firms retained to pursue fore­closure against homeowners are “debt collectors” subject to the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, a fed­eral appeals court ruled in a case in­volving law firm Sam­uel I. White PC from Virginia Beach, Virginia. In ...

Tagged with: Foreclosure

BALTIMORE, MD — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must pay nearly $1 million in attorney’s fees for pursuing a race discrimination claim after becoming aware of the “incredibly shoddy work” of its expert witness, a federal judge in Greenbelt ...

Tagged with: EEOC

BALTIMORE, MD – Estate-planning attorneys have taken on increased importance with the rise in blended families over the past generation. Forty percent of marriages are remarriages and, since 1980, the number of people who have married multiple times has nearly ...

BALTIMORE — A lawyer’s premature disclosure of her client’s sealed whistleblower lawsuit does not necessarily doom the litigation, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday in reviving a construction worker’s claim that a Maryland company violated the federal False Claims Act ...

Tagged with: 4th Circuit Construction

An anti-abortion group did not infringe upon the NAACP’s trademark by referring to the venerable Baltimore-based black civil rights group as the “National Association for the Abortion of Colored People” in an online article, a federal appeals court has ruled. ...

Tagged with: Lanham Act NAACP Trademark Infringement

Dolan Media Newswires The confirmation of Pamela Harris to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals marks a giant step in President Barack Obama’s ongoing quest to transform one of the country’s most conservative appellate panels into one of its ...

Tagged with: 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals

The importance of presidential judicial appointments became clear Tuesday when two federal appeals courts reached opposite results on the same question: whether the tax subsidy offered by the Affordable Care Act is available to people who buy health insurance through ...

Tagged with: Obamacare

A federal judge in Maryland has dealt a stinging blow to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s attempt to cast the use of pre-employment background checks as a discriminatory hiring practice. The EEOC maintains that criminal and credit background checks have a disparate impact on minority applicants, who comprise a disproportionate percentage of people with criminal histories or poor-credit records. However, Judge Roger W. Titus faulted the agency’s evidence, saying it would “condemn the use of common sense” to let the case against Dallas-based convention coordinating company Freeman proceed in U.S. District Court.

Tagged with: background checks EEOC