The employee’s supervisor allegedly frequently used the terms “pow-wow” and “Indian giver” and repeatedly told the employee he was “off the reservation.” The City of Topeka, Kansas, must defend at trial the state-law disparate treatment and hostile work environment claims of a Native American employee who alleged his supervisor made remarks about Native Americans so often that he could not remember them all, including referring to him as an “Indian giver” and telling him “this isn’t the…

The proposal would generally focus reporting on two executive officers and raise the aggregate perquisites reporting threshold to $150,000 for each named executive officer. The SEC Nov. 13 proposed executive and director compensation disclosure changes, which would amend Item 402 of Regulation S-K, reducing the number of named executive officers and consolidating the required primary executive compensation tables (Executive Compensation Disclosure Reform , Release Nos. 33-11455; 34-106873).…

A resolution calling on Congress to take steps to shore up the cyber defenses of water utilities was adopted yesterday by the board of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). The resolution was adopted at NARUC’s annual meeting and was largely unchanged from the version introduced by New Jersey Board of Public Utilities Commissioner Michael Bange (CPR, Nov. 6). It asks Congress to “remedy the funding shortfall” facing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security…

Administering narcotics, inserting intravenous lines, and removing catheters without nursing qualifications created a sufficiently serious patient-safety risk. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a 75-month prison sentence imposed on a woman who used another nurse’s identity to obtain employment at Michigan healthcare facilities. The appeals court held that the district court did not clearly err in applying a two-level sentencing enhancement because her performance of…

The merchants said OCC and NCUA overstepped their legal authority and violated procedure in adopting interim rules standing for the proposition that federal law preempted Illinois’ law banning credit and debit card swipe fees on sales tax and tips. A group of national and Illinois merchant trade associations has filed a pair of lawsuits challenging Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) actions in connection with the Illinois Interchange…

The district court ruled that judgment on the pleadings was inappropriate because the Federal Circuit’s decisions on patent law are binding on its resolution of the dispute. In a patent infringement dispute regarding cardiac/medical device technology and related patents, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin denied the defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings because they made the same argument the Federal Circuit rejected in Aristocrat Technologies v.…

Independent real estate agents brought suit alleging that the online real estate portal leverages its “digital real estate dominance to restrain competition, tie separate products, and coerce real estate professionals.” The federal district court in Seattle, Washington declined to reconsider a prior order declining to dismiss a suit alleging that Zillow Group, Inc. leveraged its digital real estate dominance to restrain competition, tie separate products, and coerce real estate professionals.…

The court found that following GM specifications was not a defense to strict liability. A California appellate court reversed and remanded summary judgment for a car seat manufacturer in a case brought by a woman who was paralyzed in a crash while driving a General Motors vehicle. The injured driver alleged the car seat company was strictly liable for design defect because the driver’s seat’s “open perimeter” made her injury foreseeable. The court rejected the driver’s consumer expectations…

By alleging SpaceX retaliated against them for opposing conduct that they asserted amounts to sexual harassment—Elon Musk’s Twitter posts—the employees alleged conduct constituting a sexual harassment dispute. Rejecting SpaceX’s contention that the EFAA requires that sexual harassment allegations must state a claim that would survive a motion to dismiss under the federal pleading standard, a divided Ninth Circuit held that, in deciding whether the statute’s definition of “sexual harassment…