As expected, the Justice Department this afternoon announced that it was filing an antitrust lawsuit to block the Oracle Corporation‘s $9.4 billion bid to acquire PeopleSoft Inc., its competitor in the business software market. Here is the Justice Department’s Complaint.
Update: Here is the Wall Street Journal’s ($) better article on Justice’s complaint against the merger.
Comedian Argus Hamilton is offering a strategy that would give Al Gore sweet revenge for Ralph Nader‘s costing him the 2000 Presidential election while guaranteeing that Mr. Nader wouldn’t collect enough Democratic votes to alter this year’s election outcome. “There’s only one way Al Gore can get even with Ralph Nader,” Mr. Hamilton advises. “He’s got to wait for the crucial moment in the campaign and then endorse him.”
Bankruptcy filings in the federal courts remained high in calendar year 2003, according to data released today by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Total bankruptcies filed in the twelve-month period ending December 31, 2003, totaled 1,660,245, up 5.2 percent from the 1,577,651 bankruptcies filed in the prior year. The majority of bankruptcy filings are non-business filings, 1,625,208 in 2003 as compare to 1,539,111 in 2002. The number of business bankruptcy filings continued to decline, totaling 35,037 in 2003 as compared to 38,540 in 2002. Chapter 11 reorganization filings — the most important bankruptcy statistic in terms of job preservation — fell 16.6 percent to 9,404 in 2003 from the 11,270 filings in calendar year 2002. Thanks to my friend Joe Epstein for advising me of the publication of this annual report.
The Daubert trilogy of Untied States Supreme Court decisions -? Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho Tire, codified in Federal Rule of Evidence 702 — has established new rules for the admissibility of expert witness evidence in federal court. However, the standards for admissibility of expert witness evidence in state courts is far more unsettled. George Mason University Law Professor David Bernstein and Jeffrey D. Jackson have published this handy law review article that analyzes the degree to which the holdings of the Daubert trilogy have been adopted by state courts. Surprisingly, there remains a wide diversity of tests within the states that, contrary to most lawyers’ popular belief, the Daubert trilogy is not yet the majority standard. A good article to review for lawyers who commonly deal with expert witness issues.
Baylor University announced today that Dave Bliss, its former basketball coach, made improper payments to students, allowed major NCAA infractions to occur in his program and then tried to cover up the improprieties. A school-appointed committee made the findings in a report that was made public today. The committee was appointed last fall to study the university’s basketball program after player Patrick Dennehy was killed last summer and another player was charged with his murder. The major infractions will result in either self or NCAA imposed penalties on the Baylor basketball program, which is another severe blow to an athletic department that has struggled to compete in the major sports of football and basketball ever since the creation of the Big 12 Conference in the mid-1990’s.
We all recall the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001, but few of us remember that today is the anniversary of this earlier attack on the WTC.
This NY Times article reports on the consortium of international oil and gas companies that have formally agreed to proceed with a $29 billion development of the Kashagan oil field in Kazakhstan, the largest oil discovery since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska more than 30 years ago.
ENI of Italy leads the consortium, which includes Royal Dutch/Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total of France, ConocoPhillips and Inpex of Japan.
Total oil reserves in the Kashagan field are now estimated to be 13 billion barrels, several billion barrels higher than original estimates. One major production hurdle is the field’s location under the Caspian Sea, which freezes over in winter. Initial production is expected to be 75,000 barrels a day, Shell said in a statement. Mr. Idrissov said production was expected to rise to more than 400,000 barrels a day by 2013.By 2015, the field is expected to yield more than a million barrels a day, about a third of Kazakhstan’s target for oil production.
The announcement is a major step forward for oil and gas production in Kazakhstan, which is considered one of the United States’ most promising alternatives to the Middle East for energy supplies. However, development has slowed in recent years because of the risk of investment in the region and the Kazakh government’s desire to renegotiate contracts with foreign oil companies that had been entered into during the early 1990’s.
Virginia Postrel writes about free trade in this NY Times piece. Inasmuch as you will be hearing much from the demagogues about this issue in the upcoming political campaigns, Ms. Postrel’s article is timely reading.
On the heels of this announcement regarding Methodist Hospital‘s expansion, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston’s Texas Medical Center announced a $200 million expansion project that will involve razing the original St. Luke’s Hospital building and the construction of a 10 story patient care center. St. Luke’s is the home of the famous Texas Heart Institute.
As noted in earlier posts here and here, a political action committee ? Texans for a Republican Majority ? that House majority leader Tom DeLay of Houston created is the subject of a grand jury investigation in Austin. Yesterday, the Travis County District Attorney’s office released information on over 50 subpoenas that it has issued in the investigation over possible criminal misuse of corporate funds in the 2002 legislative campaign. Here is the Chronicle article on this development.