Khobragade Indicted on Fraud Charges

Today's post was shared by WSJ Law Blog and comes from blogs.wsj.com

Federal prosecutors in New York on Thursday announced the indictment of the Indian official whose arrest last month set off protests in India and strained relations between the nations.

The charges against Devyani Khobragade, though, were delayed amid uncertainty about whether she had fled the country. The consular worker is accused of submitting false documents to get a work visa for a babysitter and housekeeper in her Manhattan home. She has denied all the charges.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, Manhattan prosecutors said that a federal grand jury had voted to return an indictment against the 39-year-old Ms. Khobragade, charging her with two counts — visa fraud and making false statements.

Prosecutors initially said Ms. Khobragade had left the U.S. on Thursday. But they later learned that she may not have gotten on her flight, according to a person familiar with the matter. Her whereabouts were not immediately clear.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office last month said Ms. Khobragade had been strip-searched after she was arrested and “placed in a cell with other female defendants” as part of standard procedure.

Anger over her treatment prompted demonstrations in India and led the Indian government to revoke diplomatic privileges for American officials and remove security barriers near the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

Attempting to calm the situation, Secretary of State John Kerry last month “expressed his regret, as well as his concern...

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Uncertainty Over Whether N.F.L. Settlement’s Money Will Last

As intriguing football matchups go, Sunday’s Super Bowl has nothing on one looming down the turnpike in federal court in Philadelphia — with Judge Anita B. Brody the ultimate referee.

Brody, considering the N.F.L.'s recent settlement with 4,500 retirees over work-related brain injuries, has asked both sides to demonstrate that their $765 million bargain will fulfill its promise to compensate every currently retired player who has or will develop a neurological condition such as dementia or Parkinson’s disease.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the N.F.L. said independent actuaries and medical experts had endorsed the terms of the settlement. But the lawyers refuse to share any of their data with the public to help substantiate how they arrived at the $765 million figure, and there is growing displeasure among plaintiffs who have not been allowed to see the data, either.

Numbers can speak for themselves, though, and they bring a clear warning: The $765 million could run out faster than either side apparently believes. When one forecasts how many of the roughly 13,500 currently retired players may develop these conditions over the next 65 years, compensating them as the settlement directs could very well require close to $1 billion, and perhaps more.

No one can divine how many players will develop these conditions. But the best data available comes straight from the N.F.L., and it becomes instructive after some basic guidelines.

The settlement essentially...

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Concern Raised Over Opt-Out Terms of NFL Concussion Settlement

Today's post was shared by WSJ Law Blog and comes from blogs.wsj.com

When a federal judge refused to sign off on the NFL’s $764 million concussion settlement with retired players earlier this month, both the league and lead plaintiffs’ lawyers portrayed the development as a mere procedural hiccup.

The deal may appear to be within inches from the goal line, but the family of the late NFL star Junior Seau is putting up resistance, emerging as one of the most vocal critics of the proposed settlement.

An attorney for the Seau family filed a memo on Jan. 24 objecting to the tentative terms. The family may not be alone as lawyers representing dozens of former NFL players pore over the fine print of the 85-page proposed deal.

U.S. District Judge Anita Brody held off on giving her preliminary approval of the deal because she was concerned that the $764 million might not be enough to cover all potential recipients. She instructed both sides to supply the court with more information on how they arrived at their numbers.

The lawsuit by the Seau family, who are potential class members, stands apart from the bulk of claims, most of which do not involve the death of a player. But some of the family’s objections raise broader concerns that could resonate with other plaintiffs, according to Steve Strauss, the attorney representing Mr. Seau’s children.

Speaking to Law Blog, Mr. Strauss said he was especially concerned by the opt-out terms in the deal.

Plaintiffs who do not want to bind themselves to the settlement would have...

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Judge Disqualified over Facebook ‘Friend’ Request

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Back in February, the American Bar Association cautioned judges about their use of social media. While sites like Facebook and Twitter can help judges stay in touch with the wider world, the ABA admonished that they should think twice before “friending,” “liking,” or “following” somebody.

A case in Florida drives home that concern.

The dispute centers around a circuit court judge who presided over a divorce proceeding. Before entering a final judgment, Judge Linda D. Schoonover sent the wife a Facebook “friend” request that the woman didn’t accept, according to court documents. In a complaint, the lawyer for the wife accused the judge of then retaliating against her by allegedly saddling her with “most of the marital debt” and giving the husband “a disproportionately excessive alimony award.”

Last week, an appellate court kicked the judge off the case and assigned the matter to a different judge, concluding that the wife had a “well-founded fear of not receiving a fair and impartial trial.”

The unrequited friend request “placed the litigant between the proverbial rock and a hard place: either engage in improper ex parte communications with the judge presiding over the case or risk offending the judge by not accepting the ‘friend’ request,” the appeals court wrote in its Jan. 24 decision. (Chicago intellectual property attorney Evan Brown, who blogs about...

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Supreme Court Rules for Employers in Two Cases

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The Supreme Court Monday gave airlines a wide berth to report potential security threats, dismissing a pilot’s lawsuit alleging his employer defamed him by telling the Transportation Security Administration he could be armed and mentally unstable.

Separately, the court rejected a claim by steelworkers from Gary, Ind., that they were entitled to pay for time spent putting on safety gear, finding that the task qualified as “changing clothes,” for which their union contract didn’t require compensation.

Finally, Monday, the court sided with a convicted heroin dealer to rule that he couldn’t be punished for the death of one of his customers because of evidence that the man’s health was so poor he might have died even without the narcotic.

All three decisions were unanimous or nearly so, underscoring that despite gulfs in the most charged disputes, justices of different ideological backgrounds agree on a significant number of legal issues. Read the full story here.

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Obama to Raise Minimum Wage for Federal Contractors, Asserting Executive Power

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President Barack Obama plans to act unilaterally to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, a move that asserts his executive powers before his State of the Union address in which he will press Congress to approve a broader increase this year, write Carol E. Lee and Eric Morath. Read the full WSJ story here.

The executive order would raise the minimum wage for workers on new federal contracts to $10.10 an hour, according to a fact sheet from a White House official. It said Mr. Obama would announce the new policy in his speech Tuesday, which is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and hasn’t been raised since July 2009. About 16,000 federal employees were paid at or below minimum wage in 2012, according to the Labor Department. The agency doesn’t specify how many employees were government contractors.

Mr. Obama’s executive policy change is the opening salvo in a broader, election-year push by Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for all eligible workers. The White House has planned for months to make the minimum wage an issue in November’s midterm elections.

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In a First, Northwestern Players Seek Unionization

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The increasingly contentious and complicated relationship between the N.C.A.A. and its top amateur athletes took another step toward a legal showdown on Tuesday when a group of Northwestern football players appealed to the National Labor Relations Board with the first effort by college athletes to join a labor union.

Kain Colter, Northwestern’s starting quarterback last season, was joined by Ramogi Huma, the president of the newly formed College Athletes Players Association, and Leo W. Gerard, the president of United Steelworkers, to announce that a petition had been filed on behalf of Colter and his teammates to seek union representation.

“College athletes need a labor organization that can give them a seat at the table,” Huma said, adding, “This ends a period of 60 years when the N.C.A.A. has knowingly established a pay-for-play system while using terms like ‘student-athlete’ and ‘amateurism’ to skirt labor laws.”

Though payment of players at Football Bowl Subdivision programs and Division I basketball universities has become a thorny issue given the billions of dollars generated by the sports, Colter said medical care, particularly expenses after graduation, was his biggest concern.

“The same medical issues that professional athletes face are...

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