Backertop Licensing LLC v. Canary Connect, Inc., Appeal Nos. 2023-2367, -2368, 2024-1016, -1017 (Fed. Cir. July 16, 2024) Our case of the week focuses on the inherent power of the district courts to investigate fraud and...more
Because bankruptcy courts were created by Congress rather than under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, there is a disagreement over whether bankruptcy courts, like other federal courts, have "inherent authority" to impose...more
Last week, the once and potentially future President of the United States was threatened with ejection from a courtroom because he could not control his verbal and non-verbal responses to the proceedings. As reported in the...more
Addressing an issue of first impression, the Second Circuit held recently that bankruptcy courts have inherent authority to impose non-nominal civil contempt sanctions, including per diem sanctions and attorneys’ fees,...more
Until the Covid pandemic throttled the judicial system the Pennsylvania Superior Court could bank on disposing of 7,500-8,000 filings a year. The vast majority of these are appeals from trial court rulings where one or both...more
Addressing the boundaries of a permanent injunction awarded to a major software developer, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit largely agreed that the defending developer was in contempt for violating the order but...more
Bankruptcy Judge James J. Tancredi appeared to give a chapter 7 debtor one last chance to avoid being incarcerated. In adversary proceedings arising out of the bankruptcy of a thrice-convicted former stockbroker, In re...more
Our insight into a recent judgment of the Court of Appeal: the judgment provides valuable analysis from the Court of Appeal as to the legal principles and the policy considerations around what constitutes an abuse of process...more
Last week, in The Seaview at Amagansett, Ltd. v. Town of East Hampton Justice Paul J. Baisely, Jr. found the Town of East Hampton and several of its officials in civil and criminal contempt of the Appellate Division, Second...more
A split panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s contempt order and sanctions award, finding that there was a fair ground of doubt regarding whether the defendant’s counsel’s...more
Last year, we offered a lesson and a moral from a North Carolina district court decision reversing a $115,000 sanctions order by a North Carolina bankruptcy court. The lesson from the case was that the bankruptcy court...more
“Messrs. Woods and Wu are fraudsters,” Judge Christopher S. Sontchi declared in the opening salvo of his scathing opinion. According to the former Chief Judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Woods...more
The parties in the case of Daneshgari v. Patriot Towing Services, LLC, No. A21A0887 (Ga.App. Oct. 21, 2021), had entered into a four-year non-compete agreement in June of 2016 that Daneshgari and his partner began to violate...more
A. Introduction - In Paramount Fine Foods v Johnston, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (the “Court”) sentenced the defendant, Kevin J. Johnston (“Johnston”), to 18 months in prison for six acts of contempt arising from...more
This is a story about contempt and clarity - It comes to us from a July 2021 North Carolina district court decision reversing a $115,000 sanctions order by a North Carolina bankruptcy court. The story offers a lesson and...more
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina recently reversed an order of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The bankruptcy court order held mortgage servicer Newrez,...more
In a decision of first impression issued last week, the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee held, in Gus’s Franchisor, LLC v. Terrapin Restaurant Partners, LLC, that the COVID-19 pandemic did...more
In Taggart v. Lorenzen, 139 S. Ct. 1795 (June 3, 2019), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a bankruptcy court may hold a creditor in civil contempt for attempting to collect on a debt that has been discharged in bankruptcy "if...more
The world is rapidly changing. Some states have already enacted shelter-in-place orders. I am frequently being asked what does this mean for Arizona co-parenting agreements? Each parent still has a court-ordered RIGHT to see...more
So you (allegedly) violated a bankruptcy court order. Whether the debtor alleges you violated the terms of a confirmed plan, failed to provide certain notices required by the bankruptcy rules, violated the discharge...more
Recently, the United States Supreme Court in Taggart v. Lorenzen set the legal standard that should be followed by bankruptcy courts when determining whether to hold a creditor in civil contempt for attempting to collect a...more
The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed a district court’s finding of civil contempt against a corporate defendant and its two individual shareholders for failing to make all reasonable efforts to comply with an...more
Two weeks ago, a federal court of appeals sided with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ruling that a district court could not require the testimony of three commissioners and various staff to assess whether the agency...more
On October 23, 2019, Judge John Robert Blakey of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois vacated the $16 million settlement consent order between the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission...more