Tag: law

This is interesting, to be sure.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Monday ordered DoorDash to individually arbitrate employment misclassification claims brought by more than 5,000 couriers, denying its request to pause the proceedings and slamming the company’s “hypocrisy” in requiring workers to sign arbitration and then seeking classwide litigation.

Perhaps someone should send this article to Patreon:

Rejecting claims that the legal process it forced on workers is unfair, a federal judge Monday ordered food-delivery service DoorDash to pay $9.5 million in arbitration fees for 5,010 delivery drivers’ labor demands against the company.

“You’re going to pay that money,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in court. “You don’t want to pay millions of dollars, but that’s what you bargained to do and you’re going to do it.”

Barred from filing labor suits in court under the terms of a required arbitration contract, 6,250 DoorDash drivers brought their claims to an arbitrator. Last fall, the American Arbitration Association found each worker met the minimum requirements for filing a claim and ordered DoorDash to pay $12 million in fees. The workers paid $1.2 million in filing fees, or $300 per case.

DoorDash refused to pay its share of fees, arguing the workers failed to specify how much money they were seeking or prove they had a valid arbitration deal with the company.

Another informative article on the subject can be found here. Notice how all of the companies that force arbitration on their employees and consumers in order to avoid class action lawsuits are desperate to avoid actually entering arbitration with them. They’re trying to have their legal cake and eat it too.

I was alerted by several readers about some recent changes at a certain social technology company. After review by some of the LLoE members, a consensus conclusion was reached.

Item One: Patreon has new terms of use. But the effective date is more than a little… odd. I’ve never seen anything like it. Neither had anyone else.

Effective immediately for users joining Patreon on or after December 20th, 2019. Effective for existing users on, and applicable to claims not yet asserted by, January 1st, 2020.

Item Two: Patreon follows the JAMS policy on Consumer Arbitrations, which, as a California corporation, it is required to do.

For creators and patrons who are consumers, we also follow the JAMS Policy on Consumer Arbitrations Pursuant to Pre-Dispute Clauses Minimum Standards of Procedural Fairness for consumer arbitrations done under these terms. For the purpose of an arbitration subject to the consumer standards, if any portion of these terms do not follow that standard, that portion is severed from these terms.

Item Three: Patreon doesn’t understand how California law applies to consumer arbitrations or the JAMS policy it claims to follow. That, or they’re hoping against hope that no one else does.

You may not bring a claim against us for suspending or terminating another person’s account, and you agree you will not bring such a claim. If you try to bring such a claim, you are responsible for the damages caused, including attorneys fees and costs.

Item Four: JAMS, however, does.

In California, the arbitration provision may not require the consumer to pay the fees and costs incurred by the opposing party if the consumer does not prevail.

Conclusion: Patreon already has a pretty good idea they are going to lose. Badly.

The verdict is in:

Republican operative Roger Stone was found guilty Friday of all seven counts against him, including witness tampering and making false statements.

Prosecutors portrayed Stone, 67, as a serial liar who tried to bully witnesses into not cooperating with authorities. They charged Stone, a confidant of President Donald Trump, with making false statements, obstruction and witness tampering in a case that was an offshoot of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Stone is the sixth Trump aide or adviser to be convicted of charges brought as part of Mueller’s probe.

President Trump had better start handing out presidential pardons soon or no one will stand by him.

One of the reasons why the converged media companies have been running roughshod over those they’ve targeted for deplatforming is that their victims are afraid to fight back. But if you have, or are, or can find, a competent lawyer who doesn’t play the usual lawyer’s game of waiting until the last possible minute to submit some boilerplate that he plans to revise later, you’ll likely be well ahead of the opposition.

Law firm mistakes number of days in the month, so lawyer files notice of appeal one day after actual deadline. Court dismisses appeal and awards fees.

They even have cute professional jargon for it: calendar the deadline. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve personally witnessed it and something similar happened in the Vic Mignogna case. Most lawyers, even very highly credentialed lawyers from very expensive law firms, take a disturbingly blase approach to deadlines, mostly because the established case law permits them to redefine clearly fixed time frames as indefinite periods that are entirely at the judge’s discretion.

Of course, the fact that it is reprehensibly stupid to proactively rely upon the judge being lax about deadlines never occurs to them. We are always careful to prepare our filings as soon as possible, and to file them several days ahead of time, in order to not provide a potentially adversarial judge an excuse to rule against us. Never wait until the last minute!

And on a not-unrelated note, the VFM, the Rubble-bouncers, and the Reprehensibles should be prepared to act very quickly when the Legion’s next campaign is announced tonight around 6:30 PM Eastern. I’ll send out emails, put up a post, and do a Darkstream once the link is live. The amount is irrelevant, as the objective is to establish standing for as many of you as possible. Now, don’t play Smart Boy and demonstrate how much you know about what’s going on here in the comments, but do feel free to indicate if you’re in on this one.

It’s remarkable that it has taken this long for a court to find it unconstitutional:

Civil asset forfeiture has been in the crosshairs across the country for years now because it allows police and prosecutors to declare that any money or property owned by a suspect is “connected” to a crime, seize it, and then ultimately keep it for themselves. And because this is a civil process, police and prosecutors can do this without having to convict anybody. It’s the assets that are considered the defendants (in this case, the respondent is actually the $20,771 that Horry County wants to seize from a man charged with trafficking cocaine), prosecutors typically have a lower threshold to make their case than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and people who are pulled into these forfeiture cases don’t have access to public defenders and have to fund their own lawyers.

The end result: Police trying to keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities, and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized. Local newspapers in South Carolina teamed up to investigate the extent of abuses and discovered police agencies across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.

Judge John notes all of these problems in a decisive ruling that smacks down the practice of civil asset forfeiture. In his 15-page opinion, he writes that South Carolina’s forfeiture practice violate both the U.S. Constitution and the state’s because the statutes “(1) place the burden on the property owner to prove their innocence, (2) unconstitutionally institutionally incentivizes forfeiture officials to prosecute forfeiture actions, and (3) do not mandate judicial review or judicial authorization prior to or subsequent to the seizure.” He also notes that the statutes violate citizens’ Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines.

It’s a good start. Now let’s get a conclusive Supreme Court decision setting precedent on the topic. And a federal law banning it.

Russia is the latest nation-state to remind the large multinationals that we are not living in a post-national cyberpunk world. National sovereignty, militaries, and nuclear weapons trump money and media power every time.

Russia’s state communications watchdog has asked Google to stop advertising “illegal mass events” on its YouTube video platform, it said on Sunday.

Tens of thousands of Russians staged what observers called the country’s biggest political protest for eight years on Saturday, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow’s city legislature. Multiple YouTube channels broadcast the event live.

The watchdog, Roscomnadzor, said some entities had been buying advertising tools from YouTube, such as push notifications, in order to spread information about illegal mass protests, including those aimed at disrupting elections.

It said Russia would consider a failure by Google to respond to the request as “interference in its sovereign affairs” and “hostile influence (over) and obstruction of democratic elections in Russia”.

If the company does not take measures to prevent events from being promoted on its platforms, Russia reserves the right to respond accordingly, Roscomnadzor said, without giving details.

More and more states are learning that it’s not worth permitting these soulless artificial creatures to operate freely and as they see fit in violation of national laws.

Surprisingly, no serious evidence against Bill Clinton has yet surfaced from the unsealed documents. But, as expected, the connection to Trump, far from being damning, is almost exculpatory.

The first trove of documents has been unsealed in the 2015 defamation case brought against Ghislaine Maxwell by Virginia Roberts. The documents were made public Friday morning just moments after the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the decision to make public over 2000 pages of court filings that had previously been under seal.

Those documents reveal in great detail the three-year period in which Roberts claims she was Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell’s sex slave.

Roberts has said that in that role she was ‘forced to have sex with …numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister.’

Those men do not include Bill Clinton and Donald Trump though, Roberts revealed in an unsealed deposition. Roberts said in a 2016 deposition that Trump ‘didn’t partake in any sex with us … and never flirted with me.’

She also stated that despite Epstein talking about how the two were friends, she did not recall ever seeing him at the Palm Beach mansion.

There will almost certainly be a good deal more information forthcoming soon. The documents can be downloaded here courtesy of Mike Cernovich. As for the first names to be divulged, they are as follows:

Virginia Giuffre, who says that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to powerful people for erotic massages and sex, claimed in a 2016 deposition that Maxwell directed her to have sex with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Britain’s Prince Andrew (whom she has accused before), wealthy financier Glenn Dubin, former senator George Mitchell, now-deceased MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, as well as “another prince,” a “foreign president,” and the owner of a “large hotel chain” in France.

How would this young woman even know the names of Dubin and Minsky, one wonders….

It’s going to be very difficult for prosecutors to plea-bargain away (((Jeffrey Epstein)))’s many crimes now that the evidence from the recent search of his home is being publicly reported.

An ‘extraordinary volume of photographs of nude and partially-nude young women or girls’ was discovered by agents over the weekend during their search of the Manhattan mansion owned by Jeffrey Epstein.

This was revealed in a press conference about the case on Monday, held just before the billionaire is due to be arraigned on counts of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.

Federal prosecutors also detailed some of the other evidence discovered inside the home in the bail memorandum, which asks that Epstein remain in prison ahead of trial.

That listed ‘documents and other materials, such as contemporaneous notes, messages recovered from the defendant’s residence that include names and contact information for certain victims, and call records that confirm the defendant and his agents were repeatedly in contact with various victims during the charged period.’

Blackpillers who are crying about TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP and how Epstein will never see any jail are completely missing what is taking place right in front of their eyes. The federal prosecutors aren’t making this sort of information public in order to get a conviction, but in order to make it clear that the game is over and his only hope for a reasonably comfortable prison stay is to sing like an opera star.

As more details surface, it has become clear that the recent arrest of Jeffrey Epstein is NOT dependent upon the undoing of his ludicrously favorable plea bargain in Florida:

Federal prosecutors appear to have resurrected a federal sex crimes case against the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein by focusing on accusations that he sexually assaulted girls at his mansion in Manhattan — more than a decade after a widely criticized plea deal shielded him from similar charges in Florida.

Federal prosecutors are expected to unseal the new charges on Monday accusing Mr. Epstein, 66, of running a sex-trafficking operation that lured dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14, to his Upper East Side home, according to three law enforcement officials.

However, the fact that (((Epstein))) pled guilty to the Florida charges should make it easier to convict him now, since a clear pattern of behavior has been established.

One hopes that this time there will be a full and proper investigation into the man’s nefarious activities and connections. As well as (((Epstein’s))) island.

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. The arrest, by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force, comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

For more than a decade, Epstein’s alleged abuse of minors has been the subject of lawsuits brought by victims, investigations by local and federal authorities, and exposés in the press. But despite the attention cast on his alleged sex crimes, the hedge-funder has managed to avoid any meaningful jail time, let alone federal charges.

The new indictment—which, according to two sources, will be unsealed Monday in Manhattan federal court—will reportedly allege that Epstein sexually exploited dozens of underage girls in a now-familiar scheme: paying them cash for “massages” and then molesting or sexually abusing them in his Upper East Side mansion or his palatial residence in Palm Beach. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors—which could put him away for a maximum of 45 years. The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district’s human-trafficking officials and the FBI.

Mike Cernovich always gets his man….