Legal News

Former GOP Rep. Sues Carlyle; Is Sotomayor Like Kennedy?; More

By Amir Efrati

It’s day two of the Sotomayor confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, but believe it or not, there’s other legal news worth glancing at, if only for a moment. Here’s the AM round-up.

Former Congressman Dishes In Suit: It’s not every day current or former members of Congress flex their muscles as plaintiffs. New to the club is Michael Huffington — ex-husband of Arianna – who lost his entire $20 million investment in a fund run by private-equity giant Carlyle Group.

Huffington, a former California Republican, alleged in a Massachusetts state-court suit that in 2007 Carlyle deceived him into thinking the mortgage-securities fund was “conservative.” By 2008 the fund, much like other mortgage-related investment products, had blown up.

What’s more interesting than the allegations, says WSJ’s Peter Lattman, is that the suit sheds light on the “oft-hidden world of priate-equity fund-raising, in which the wealthy and well-connected do business with one another.” (Hint: introductions by George H.W. Bush, a dinner in Iceland.) After the fund blew up, Carlyle founder David Rubenstein allegedly told Huffington he would "guarantee that you will get your money back." Click here to read the suit.

Twitter Hires a GC. This should come as no surprise. Twitter, the micro-blogging site, has hired away a Google lawyer to be its first general counsel. Here’s the Recorder story, which credits NYT for breaking the news. The move comes after the site’s first brush with high-profile litigation–a lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa regarding a fake La Russa profile on the site. (He eventually dropped the suit.) The new Twitter hire, Alexander Macgillivray, deputy GC for products and IP at Google, has been busy of late. He helped settle legal challenges to Google’s controversial book scanning efforts, a settlement that is now being probed by antitrust regulators in the Department of Justice.

Is Sotomayor the next Justice Kennedy? OK, we’re sorry, but we can’t get Judge Sotomayor off our minds. Neither can Collin Levy, who penned an opinion piece in today’s WSJ that says we have much to fear from Sotomayor’s embrace of a “broader consideration of foreign and international law in U.S. judicial opinions.”

Citing a speech to the ACLU in Puerto Rico earlier this year in which Sotomayor said “ideas have no boundaries” and that “foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system,” Levy says Sotomayor seems to be taking a page from Justice Kennedy, who cited such law.

“Such inspiration” is “inherently subjective and arbitrary,” Levy writes. She (yes, Levy is a she) fears that such “[c]herrypicking…introduces the very kind of legal chaos our Constitution was designed to prevent.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 14, 2009 (boomark / email).