Welcome to the tenth issue of the 2021 edition of Unprecedented. The big news from the past two weeks was the Center for Disease Control’s announcement of new guidance allowing fully vaccinated individuals to go unmasked in nearly all circumstances. The announcement was unexpected and sent governments and businesses scrambling to respond. Some governments, like my home state of Pennsylvania, reacted the same day to conforming their own requirements to the new CDC guidance ...
On 20 June 2012, the Court of First Instance (in proceedings brought by the Securities and Futures Commission ("SFC")) ordered Hontex International Holdings Company Ltd ("Hontex") to make a repurchase offer to about 7,700 investors who had subscribed for Hontex shares in the initial public offering in December 2009 or purchased them in the secondary market during the 3 months after its shares were listed (by then the present action was taken by the SFC) ...
September 28, 2021 By: Joshua M. Robbins When harmed or in heated disputes, companies sometimes think about bringing the “big guns”—law enforcement agencies—into the fight. Often acting through counsel, a business may seek to refer a matter to the government for potential investigation and prosecution of competitors, business counterparties, former employers or employees, or entirely unrelated persons who have victimized the company ...
When a debtor, natural or legal person, is constituted in serious circumstances of insolvency in the face of a plurality of creditors, the legislator has foreseen as a mechanism to solve said problem three alternatives of action, depending on the qualities of the insolvent person: the insolvency creditors, bankruptcy and suspension of payments ...
After spending over 10 years in court, the Google vs. Oracle copyright saga has finally come to an end. The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling 6-2 in Google’s favor, found that when Google used pieces of Java software developed by Oracle to build the Android operating system, it was within the parameters of the fair use doctrine that permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances ...
In Facebook v. Duguid, (Case No. 19-511) on April 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that equipment without the capacity to randomly or sequentially store or produce numbers is not an autodialer for TCPA purposes. The Facebook ruling focuses on text messages, which many institutions are using as a primary method of customer contact, but it is also a victory for those using predictive dialers and preview dialers without random and sequential source codes ...
Commercial disputes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are generally resolved through litigation in the courts or arbitration. Arbitration is becoming an increasingly popular way to resolve disputes. The UAE recently signed the UN Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards 1958 (New York Convention). General overview and court structure The UAE is a federation of seven Emirates established in 1971 ...
Commercial disputes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are generally resolved through litigation in the courts or arbitration. Arbitration is becoming an increasingly popular way to resolve disputes. The UAE recently signed the UN Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards 1958 (New York Convention). General overview and court structure The UAE is a federation of seven Emirates established in 1971 ...
In a recent case, a unilateral termination clause in the relevant contract had no bearing on whether termination via agreement between the parties was available, and the court held that novation of the contract by the conduct of the parties was valid ...
The Commission for the Unification of Federal and Local Judicial Principles (the “Commission”) recently issued a number of decisions aimed at harmonising certain “judicial principles”. Since the doctrine of stare decisis is not followed in the UAE, there have been instances of incongruities in the application of law by the UAE courts ...
The Public Service Vehicles (Accessible Information) Regulations 2023 (the “Regulations”) implement certain basic informational requirements that bus operators of local services need to implement in their vehicles in order to improve the accessibility of information for passengers on local bus services ...
Understanding the Employer's Entitlement to Liquidated Damages When there is Sectional Completion - ǼLEX Legal .avada-select-parent .select-arrow{background-color:#ffffff}.select-arrow{background-color:#ffffff} It is common for parties in commercial construction projects to include sectional completion provisions in their contracts where they have agreed to complete works in sections or phases ...
Key Points A discharge of pollutants to groundwater may require a permit under the Clean Water Act. The new “functional equivalent of a direct discharge” test will be difficult to apply. It will be a long and arduous process to reach uniformity as agencies, courts, and the regulated community try to figure out how to proceed on a case-by-case basis. On April 23, 2020, the Supreme Court published its much-awaited opinion in County of Maui v ...
On 30 March 2020, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted the Law "On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts Aimed to Ensure Additional Social and Economic Guarantees Due to the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-2019) Spread" (the Law), which introduces to the Ukrainian legislative environment new complex rules aimed at minimizing the negative impact of the spread of the COVID-19 in Ukraine. The below summary focuses on key changes introduced by the Law ...
Ukraine is an EU candidate: Can we soon file patent applications for Ukraine at the European Patent Office? The European Council granted Ukraine EU candidate status on 23 June 2022. Will patents granted by the European Patent Office soon also apply in Ukraine? Not immediately, because on the one hand the candidate status legally creates neither rights nor obligations ...
A recent UK Supreme Court Judgment, the Financial Conduct Authority v Arch Insurance (UK Ltd) & Ors [2021] UKSC 1, clarified whether a variety of insurance policy wordings cover business interruption losses resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and public health measures taken by UK authorities in response to the pandemic from March 2020 ...
The recent judgment from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on Halliburton Company v Chubb Bermuda Insurance Ltd [2020] UKSC 48, raised important questions about the requirement that there can not only be no actual bias, but also no apparent bias on the part of arbitrators in favour of or against any party in arbitration and also about the obligation of arbitrators in international arbitrations to make disclosure of multiple appointments concerning the same or overlapping subje
The UK now has one publicly accessible charge point for every 11.2 Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) on the road, having seen a remarkable 70% jump in charge points over the past year. The figures, utilised in the calculation of the Electric Vehicle Country Attractiveness (EVCA) Index developed by Cornwall Insight and law firm Shoosmiths, demonstrate the substantial impact of the government's ongoing efforts to expand the charging infrastructure network ...
March 16, 2022 By Braeden Mansouri and Alicia Guerra On February 15, California’s preeminent institution of higher education, UC Berkeley (“UCB”), began emailing student applicants that UCB may be forced to withdraw admissions offers as a result of a recent California Court of Appeal decision ...
According to the advocate general’s opinions in C-434/15 Elite Taxi and C-320/16 Uber France, Uber does not provide information society services, but local transport services which may be regulated by EU member states. It has been more than ayear since we signalled that the Court of Justice of the European Union would need to resolve the legal classification of the services provided by Uber ...
On May 21, 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, No. 16-285; Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris, No. 16-300; and NLRB v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc., No. 16-307 holding that an employer may require its employees to sign a dispute resolution arbitration agreement that includes an employee’s waiving the right to bring a claim on a class or collective action basis ...
On Monday, for the first time in history, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments via teleconference and live-streamed the conference call to the public. And, if that was not exciting enough, to kick off a planned two-week session of tele-arguments, the Court chose a case whose subject is relatable to the general public – domain names ...
