A federal appeals court ruled that private Mississippi Gulf Coast residents and private landowners can sue an oil company and other defendants for global warming-related damages to their property.

Alleging a chain of causation between the defendants' substantial emissions and injury to their property, they maintain that the companies used their property so as to produce massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, which then injured both plaintiffs and the general public by contributing to global warming, caused the sea level rise and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina.

Man, I would hate to be a prosecutor walking into District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan's courtroom these days. 

Judge Sullivan has already dismissed a high profile corruption case against former Senator Ted Stevens in April of this because of the "mishandling and misconduct" of the prosecutors in the case.  Sullivan also ordered a criminal contempt investigation into the prosecutor and their actions in a withering opinion that would have brought even the most battle-hardened prosecutor close to tears.

Thomas Daniel (inset) the lawyer hired by Alaska's Personnel Board to investigate an ethics complaint involving Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's legal defense fund set up to help pay the cost of defending allegations of misconduct while in office, confirmed to FindLaw that a copy of his confidential report had somehow become public. Daniel said "I suspect the complainant released it, but don't know for sure."

Eagle River, Alaska resident Kim Chapman filed the ethics compalint against Gov. Palin on April 27, 2009, alleging that Palin's Alaska Fund Trust violated two Executive Branch ethics laws that 1) prohibit using an official position for personal gain, and 2) bar public officials from accepting gifts that seek to influence how official duties are performed. 

"It is a copy of my report," Daniel told FindLaw, but emphasized that "the release was not authorized," and that "there was no deadline" to make it public."  The only person capable of waiving the confidentiality provision to which he remained bound, Daniel stated in his report, is Gov. Palin. 

A federal judge in San Jose, California heard arguments today about the constitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (18 U.S.C. § 413), a law used to prosecute violent acts of anti-animal research activists.

The defendants were indicted in March 2009 on charges alleging that they conspired to threaten, harass, and intimidate bio-medical researchers at their homes near Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and at animal research facilities on the University of California at Santa Cruz campus.

You can read the federal grand jury indictment here:

Fantasy football players can send their virtual players to summer training camp to run sprints, lift weights, and sweat gallons.

According to a federal court filing dismissing the case, Yahoo appears to have settled the lawsuit it filed against the NFL Players' Association last month over the use of publicly available player statistics in Yahoo's NFL fantasy football game.

One baseball fan snagged over $10,000 in a legal settlement with New York City after he was ousted from Yankee Stadium last summer for trying to take a potty break while 'God Bless America.' was being sung during the seventh-inning stretch.

"I don't care about God Bless America, I just need to use the bathroom," Bradford Campeau-Laurion said he told New York's finest.  Refusing his request, NYPD officers then reportedly manhandled him out of the stadium.

Bradford Campeau-Laurion filed a federal lawsuit against the New York Yankees, N.Y.P.D., and New York City, charging that police violated his civil rights at the August 26, 2008 game against the Boston Red Sox It was Boston's last visit to the old Yankee Stadium.

The movie "Bananas!" purports to be an intense look at the struggles of Nicaraguan farmers to obtain compensation for sterility resulting of the use of pesticides on banana plantation.

If the Dole Food Co. and a California Supreme Court Judge are right, however, the movie might have to change its ending.

Ted Olson, who argued for George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and later became Solicitor General during the Bush administration, and David Boies, who argued on behalf of the Gore camp in Bush v. Gore, have teamed up to challenge California's Proposition 8 in federal court.  Olson has indicated that he expects the case to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The real story here doesn't involve the complaint itself, which pretty much spells out a standard due process and equal protection suit, but instead centers on the lawyers who have brought it.  Olson has acted as a flag-bearer for the conservative movement within the legal world for decades, and as Solicitor General made the Bush administration's most right-wing arguments before the Supreme Court.