The current Medicare statute simply ensures that Medi­care is reimbursed for the medical benefits it pays when a third party is legally responsible for a Medi­care beneficiary’s injuries. However, critics argue that a new amendment to the health care reform bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would modify this system by...

It has now been more than seven months since Dukes v. Wal-Mart was argued en banc in the Ninth Circuit, five years since the district court entered its class certification order, and eight years since the underlying litigation was filed. At issue in the appeal is whether the district court properly certified the largest employment class action in history, by approximately 1.5 million female workers at Wal-Mart stores nationwide. The Ninth Circuit issued two opinions at the panel level before the case was ordered for a hearing en banc. (The setting of an en banc hearing vacates prior appellate rulings.) That no opinion has yet issued suggests continuing debate within the appellate court. It remains to be seen what path the Ninth Circuit ultimately will take, and if the path will end there or continue to the U.S. Supreme Court...

Many states have tried to make it easier for plaintiffs to bring consumer fraud claims by passing consumer protection statutes that eliminate or otherwise weaken the reliance requirement inherent in common law fraud. Still, these statutes generally do not untether liability from actual causation, for to award money damages without causation would potentially make a statute overly punitive. Thus, for nearly all state consumer protection statutes that allow damages, even where reliance is not an element of the statutory claim per se, the plaintiff still must prove that she suffered a loss that was caused by the allegedly deceptive conduct. Some have called this “reliance lite.” ...

More than twenty years ago, in Pennsylvania v. Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air (“Delaware Valley I”), the Supreme Court opined that the federal fee-shifting statutes “were not designed as a form of economic relief to improve the financial lot of attorneys.” In Kenny A. v. Perdue, the Court has the opportunity to revisit this earlier pronouncement by deciding when, if ever, a trial court is permitted to grant a successful plaintiff’s attorney a discretionary multiplier of the standard attorney’s fees award. Typically, a plaintiff’s attorney who wins a case that is subject to a federal fee-shifting statute receives a “lodestar” fee award, which is calculated by multiplying the attorney’s reasonable hourly rate by the number of hours the attorney reasonably expended on the case. The prevailing attorneys, of course, would like to receive more fees if they could, and every once in a while they succeed in talking a duly impressed or otherwise sympathetic court into increasing the fee award, usually by employing a “lodestar multiplier.” ...