Goldman Sachs will remain qualified as an issuer of securities after settling civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month, the agency ruled.

In a letter to Goldman’s legal counsel at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, the S.E.C. said that the settlement cleared a path for the firm to continue issuing securities under federal regulations.

As one of the world’s largest securities issuers, Goldman would have been placed into a tough spot if the S.E.C. had enjoined the firm from that business.
Under federal securities laws (and specifically Rule 405), the commission can deem a firm an “ineligible issuer” if within the past three years the brokerage had broken S.E.C. regulations.

Goldman’s settlement, announced almost two weeks ago, included the firm’s paying $550 million and admitting to mistakes in its marketing materials. What it didn’t do was require the firm to admit to  wrongdoing alleged by the S.E.C. regarding a mortgage-linked investment.

Conrad Black, the brash former newspaper magnate who lived extravagantly before his 2007 federal conviction for defrauding shareholders, may soon be released from a Florida prison after a federal appeals court granted him bail Monday.

The ruling from the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court kicked Black's fraud conviction back to a lower court.

Black, who renounced his Canadian citizenship to become a member of the British House of Lords, was convicted along with three other former executives from the media empire Hollinger International of swindling the company's shareholders out of $6.1 million. He was acquitted of nine other charges.

It was not immediately clear when Black, 65, would be released from the low-security prison in Coleman, Fla., where he has served more than two years of a 6 1/2-year sentence. The conditions of his release will be determined by U.S. District Court judge in Chicago, according to an order from the three-judge panel.

Last month, the Supreme Court weakened the "honest services" law that was central to Black's fraud conviction. The justices left it up to a lower court to decide whether the conviction should be overturned. That decision has not yet been made.

In a survey released today by the American Bar Association, judges indicated that a lack of representation in civil matters is hurting those individuals’ cases, and is negatively impacting courtrooms.

Approximately 1,000 state trial judges responded to the survey, which posed questions about their dockets, self-representation and the impact on the courts.  More than half of the judges stated that their dockets increased in 2009, with the most common areas of increase involving foreclosures, domestic relations, consumer issues such as debt, and non-foreclosure housing issues such as rental disputes. 

Sixty percent of judges said that fewer parties are being represented by lawyers, with 62 percent saying that parties are negatively impacted by not being represented.  The impact is exemplified, through a failure to present necessary evidence (94 percent), procedural errors (89 percent), ineffective witness examination (85 percent), failure to properly object to evidence (81 percent) and ineffective argument (77 percent).

The ABA has a resource page on its website that can help individuals find legal assistance — www.findlegalhelp.org.  

During a time when state budgets are constrained, agencies as well as courts are being asked to become more efficient.  However, the increase in non-represented parties makes this more difficult for courts.  The lack of representation has a negative impact on the court, said 78 percent of the judges, and 90 percent of judges stated that court procedures are slowed when parties are not represented.

Nearly half of the judges responding believe that there is a middle-class gap with respect to access to justice, stating that the number of people who are not represented and who do not qualify for aid has increased.

Lamm announced the findings during a news conference earlier today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. 

The survey of judges on the impact of the economic downturn on representation in the courts was conducted for the ABA Coalition for Justice.  Respondents came from around the country.

The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that Philip Morris does not have to pay $100 million in punitive damages to the family of a smoker who sued the tobacco giant over its low-tar cigarettes.

The case, however, is going to another jury to decide just how much the death of Michelle Schwarz from lung cancer in 1999 will cost Philip Morris — and legal experts say it could easily be another big award.

A Multnomah County jury in Portland originally awarded the Schwarz family $150 million in March 2002 before the trial judge reduced it to $100 million.

On Thursday, the Oregon Supreme Court vacated the $100 million award and sent the case back to the trial court to reconsider the punitive damages after ruling the judge failed to properly instruct the jury.

The court said the judge should have told the jury it could not punish Philip Morris directly for harm caused to others besides Schwarz.

But the court also supported the trial judge, who had rejected jury instructions the tobacco company had requested.

Congressional approval of one of the largest class action settlements in U.S. history is getting hung up on the issue of legal fees for plaintiffs lawyers.

The $3.4 billion Indian trusts settlement agreed to in December could be scuttled if Congress doesn't approve the terms of the agreement by May 28, according to The Associated Press.

The tentative settlement would close the books on a class action filed in 1996 on behalf of 300,000 American Indians. The plaintiffs in the suit claimed that as trustee for 145 million acres of land under the Dawes Act of 1887, the U.S. Department of the Interior mismanaged trust accounts and allowed the federal government to give the best land to white settlers. The settlement calls for plaintiffs to be paid $1.4 billion -- about $1,500 per class member- -- and for a $2 billion fund to be set up to buy American Indian land.

The potential snag now, as reported by sibling publication The Blog of Legal Times, is a move by Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming to cap attorney fees in the case at $50 million. That has one of the plaintiffs lawyers who spent years litigating the matter crying foul.

Dennis Gingold -- a solo practitioner in Washington, D.C., who serves as lead counsel to the plaintiffs -- told the AP that he will terminate the settlement and resume litigation unless Congress approves the agreement without altering any of its terms. Gingold told The BLT that Barrasso's sentiments fly in the face of a previous fee cap of $100 million agreed to in December, which would give Gingold and his co-counsel at Kilpatrick Stockton fees totaling between $50 million and $100 million.

Were Gingold and Kilpatrick Stockton to split $100 million, they would be taking a total cut of roughly 7 percent of the $1.4 billion settlement figure; the lawyers' share shrinks to about 3 percent if the $2 billion trust called for under the proposed settlement is figured in. Either way, the fees would be well below what has been paid out to plaintiffs lawyers in other major class actions such as the one against Enron, as noted by lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a former treasurer of Montana's Blackfeet Nation, in a story by Legal Newsline.

An anti-abortion protester arrested in 2007 had a First Amendment right to demonstrate on a sidewalk near the entrance the building that houses the Liberty Bell, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The decision overturns lower-court rulings that upheld the arrest of Christian evangelical leader Michael Marcavage. Marcavage, who lives in suburban Lansdowne, had been sentenced to a year's probation for refusing a National Park Service order to move to a nearby designated demonstration area.

The appeals court tossed the two charges on free-speech and procedural grounds. The three-judge panel said Marcavage caused no more of a disturbance than other people near the Liberty Bell entrance, including a cancer-survivors group and the drivers of horse-drawn carriages hawking their services.

Marcavage founded a group, Repent America, that opposes abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution.

He has been arrested repeatedly during protests up and down the East Coast. He successfully challenged a 2004 arrest for picketing at a Philadelphia street festival for gays and lesbians, but a Massachusetts court last year upheld a disorderly conduct conviction based on his refusal to stop using a megaphone at Salem's famed Halloween celebration.

St. James Anglican Church, a theologically conservative breakaway church, has waged a nearly six-year fight to keep the church property instead of returning it to the Diocese of Los Angeles.

St. James is one of several dozen individual parishes and four dioceses nationwide that voted to split from the national church after the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

State courts have sided with the Los Angeles diocese throughout the six-year legal case. The church lost its petition to have the case heard in the U.S. Supreme Court last year.