Just after the Memorial Day holiday weekend, Governor Kate Brown signed HB 2027. This essential legislation has been making its way through the legislature since the beginning of the year, and goes a long way toward closing a legal gap I first wrote about last November. As The Oregonian notes,…
A recent article in The Oregonian outlined what has become a depressingly common story: the abrupt disappearance of Saudi Arabian students facing criminal charges here in Oregon. The newspaper reports that it “has found criminal cases involving at least five Saudi nationals who vanished before they faced trial or completed…
I have written on several previous occasions about corporate America’s systematic attacks on the class action system. A recent news item from the Associated Press offers a positive reason to revisit this topic. As the news agency writes, the huge insurance company State Farm reached a settlement earlier this month…
An effort by the Trump administration to roll back an obscure Medicare rule has provoked a loud, and unexpected, backlash according to multiple reports in The Hill, a newspaper that specializes in covering the federal government in general and Congress in particular. The paper reports in June an obscure regulatory…
An important thing to understand about the US Supreme Court is that its rulings can often seem narrow and technical even as they have sweeping repercussions for every American. That was the case with two rulings that were issued late last month, just as the court’s annual term came to…
On Wednesday the US House of Representatives passed the misleadingly-named “Protecting Access to Care Act” on a largely party-line vote of 218-210 (all of the ‘yes’ votes came from Republicans; the noes included 191 Democrats and 19 Republicans). There is no indication yet whether the Senate will take up this…
An Oregon Supreme Court ruling issued last week has received remarkably little coverage outside of the specialized legal press, but it deserves much more attention. In the case of Smith v Providence Health & Services (361 Or 456) the court reversed rulings from both the trial and appellate courts, and…
Last week a jury in St. Louis became the fourth in a year to award substantial damages to a plaintiff who believes that consumer goods giant Johnson & Johnson’s talcum power is linked to ovarian cancer. According to a Bloomberg News report, the Missouri jury awarded the woman $110 million…
The announcement last week that the federal government will bar most nursing homes and other care facilities from forcing clients to sign care contracts requiring them to settle disputes in arbitration is an enormous victory for ordinary Americans – one that deserved more attention than it received in both the…
John Oliver made a big splash last weekend by highlighting the unsettling, and ridiculously lightly-regulated, world of medical debt collection, but a much longer and more serious story published a few days earlier by NPR adds significant depth to reporting on this undercovered issue. The NPR piece (linked below) details…